Discussion with Lucid Meetings

The other day I had a chance to learn about Lucid Meetings and to hear what they are doing in terms of creating interesting meeting spaces. Plus there is a nice surprise for anyone who reads to the end of the article:)

1) So tell me about Lucid Meetings, what does it do?
We offer a solution for working teams to help improve the quality and effectiveness of their meetings. We help them get more done with less by combining collaboration, web conferencing, and teleconferencing into one seamless solution. Now everything you need to meet with your teams and plan, decide, assign and track is all in one place.

2) How did you develop the idea for the product?
We all ran cross-functional projects with globally dispersed teams and used GoToMeetings, Adobe Connect, or Microsoft Live Meeting. But we found that to run an effective meeting we would have multiple applications going and we were constantly switching between apps: MS Word for the agenda, Evernote for note taking, Web Conferencing for screen sharing, you get the idea. And of course none of those apps helped us prepare for the meeting or follow-through on the discussions, action items, or decisions we made during the meeting. We decided that there had to be a better way and so we started Lucid Meetings.

3) How is Lucid Meetings different from other meeting software such as GoTo Meetings, Saba’s Centra or Adobe Connect?
That’s a great question. Many of the traditional screen sharing applications and services grew out of the need to transition face-to-face sales or training presentations to virtual meetings, and thereby save travel time and money. While they have all added features and capabilities, their DNA is still rooted in screen sharing. We started from the perspective of how can we help teams improve the quality of their meetings; how can we help participants get engaged and ease the burden for facilitators. So this led us to breaking down a meeting into three phases: meeting preparation, holding the meeting, and post-meeting wrap-up and follow-through. And we have features and capabilities for each of those phases, which GoToMeetings or Adobe Connect address very poorly.

Clear support for meeting preparation and follow-up in addition to the real-time meeting

Meeting-specific organization with agenda templates, meeting transcripts, roll-call and minutes

Searchable records that maintain a history of any team’s conversations: it’s not just a meeting or place, but rather a continuum of activity over time – important for long standing groups or projects

Action item/to-do lists and voting support

Screen sharing element of Lucid Meetings

Support for larger groups and tools to help manage the conversation when you’ve got more than 10 people involved.

Role clarity: distinctions between meeting facilitators, note takers, presenters, etc.
and much more…

So yes we have screen sharing, we have document sharing, and we have traditional web conferencing features, but those capabilities are presented within the context of a team collaboration that aims to improve meeting effectiveness.

4) Where do you see the greatest potential for the use of Lucid Meetings?
The potential and reach is very broad as anyone who holds a meeting and wants help in making it successful should think about Lucid Meetings. Having said that, in the for-profit world are customers are seeing the greatest impact in customer-facing projects or deployments as it allows them to present to their customers a professional and well-managed meeting environment as well as the entire meeting records of the project; and of course internal project or cross-functional teams that meet consistently and over a period of time.

We’re also seeing traction with associations and 503(c) organizations as we’re a perfect tool for their committee work.

5) Tell us about the offer you are making to Kapp Note readers.
We are offering you’re readers a 10% discount on a year’s subscription. While we feel our service is a great value to begin with, this makes it even more so. They simply need to enter the coupon code NY2012 when they register for the service.

So give it a try!