Meetings.io – Visit Face-to-Face With Clients

Meetings.io is a tool that professionals can use to hold face-to-face meetings with clients, colleagues, customers, coworkers, and teammates without ever stepping foot in a conference room or office. The web-based video application works without any downloads, signups, or software purchases.

The idea behind creating Meetings.io was to make hosting virtual meetings as seamless as possible. To host a meeting, click “Get a Meeting Room,” and distribute the URL that Meetings.io generates to anyone you’d like to participate in the meeting. Give your room a more professional feel by giving it a name — like Acme Paper Company or Tuesday Conference Meeting. To encourage even more people to show up at your meetings, you can embed a series of customizable Meetings.io buttons on your business website, intranet portal, or personal blog. You can also embed your Meetings.io room into your website by using the embed code that Meetings.io provides. Each time a new person drops in on your meeting, the Meetings.io screen that each participant is viewing will resize and add a new webcam box automatically, without any work on your part.

Up to five people at a time can drop by your room to hangout, chat, and share business ideas. Meetings.io also provides a screen-sharing tool for professional users. When you launch the screen-sharing tool, everyone in the room can see your computer screen in real time. This feature is especially helpful when giving demos and showing new files to clients online.

Practical Uses:

• Host a weekly conference meeting with colleagues
• Give customers a way to chat face-to-face with a company representative
• Let friends know where they can find you online
• Meet with clients without leaving your home office

Insider Tips:

• Up to five people can be in a Meetings.io room at once
• Meetings.io offers a notepad that people can use to take notes while meetings are in progress
• People can add Meetings.io buttons to their websites or blogs
• Room creators can name their meeting rooms

What we liked:

• People don’t have to sign up to drop in on Meetings.io meetings
• Meeting.io lets people send written messages to each other while meetings are going on
• Participants can play videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion within their rooms
• Registered users can schedule meetings in advance and see a record of all the meetings they’ve attended

What we didn’t like:

• Only five people can participate in a meeting at once

Alternatives:

• Google+ Hangouts – www.google.com/tools/dlpage/res/talkvideo/hangouts
• GoToMeeting – http://www.gotomeeting.com
• Skype – http://www.skype,com

Company Info:

• Launched: April 2012
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Arend Naylor and Denis Mars
• Web site: http://meetings.io

Costs:

• Free