Trees, those deciduous entities you can occasionally see outdoors when not locked down or strapped down at a desktop ruminating on a video call, have long been the inspiration for fresh new ideas. Stories abound of how founders built companies while walking the foothills in Silicon Valley or around parks in San Francisco, and yet, we\u2019ve managed over the past year to take movement mostly out of our remote work lives.<\/p>\n
Chicago-based Spot Meetings<\/a> wants to reinvigorate our meetings \u2014 and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.<\/p>\n The product and company are just a few months old and remain in closed beta (albeit opening up a bit shortly here), and today the company is announcing $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n CEO and co-founder Greg Caplan said that the team is looking to rebuild the meeting from the ground up for an audio-only environment. \u201cOn mobile, it needs to be abundantly simple to be very functional and understood for users so that they can actually use it on the go,\u201d he described. In practice, that requires product development across a wide range of layers.<\/p>\n The product\u2019s most notable feature today is that it has an assistant, aptly named Spot, which listens in on the call and which participants can direct commands to while speaking. For instance, saying \u201cSpot Fetch\u201d will pull the last 40 seconds of conversation, transcribe it, create a note in the meeting and save it for follow-up. That prevents the multi-hand tapping required to save a note or to-do list for follow-up with our current meeting products. You \u201cdon\u2019t even need to take your phone out,\u201d Caplan points out.<\/p>\n Is Zoom the next Android or the next BlackBerry?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n What gets more interesting is the collaboration layer the company has built into the product. Every audio meeting has a text-based scratch pad shared with all participants, allowing users to copy and paste snippets into the meeting as needed. Those notes and any information that Spot pulls in are saved into workspaces that can be referenced later. Spot also sends out emails to participants with follow-ups from these notes. If the same participants join another audio meeting later, Spot will pull in the notes from their last meeting so there is a running timeline of what\u2019s been happening.<\/p>\n Spot\u2019s product design emphasizes collaboration within an audio-focused experience. Image Credits:<\/strong> Spot Meetings<\/p>\n Obviously, transcription features are built-in, but Spot sees opportunities in offering edited transcripts of long calls where only a few minutes of snippets might be worth specifically following up on. So the product is a bit more deliberate in encouraging users to select the parts of a conversation that are relevant for their needs, rather than delivering a whole bolus of text that no one is ever actually going to read.<\/p>\n \u201cCollaboration from now and the future is going to be primarily digital \u2026 in-person is forever going to be the exception and not the rule,\u201d Caplan explained. Longer term, the company wants to add additional voice commands to the product and continue building an audio-first (and really, an audio-only) environment. Audio \u201cvery uniquely helps people focus on the conversation at hand,\u201d he said, noting that video fatigue is a very real phenomenon today for workers. To that end, more audio features like smarter muting are coming. When a participant isn\u2019t talking, their background noise will automatically melt away.<\/p>\n How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Before Spot Meetings, Caplan was the CEO and co-founder of Remote Year, a startup that was designing a service for company employees to take working trips overseas. I first covered it back in 2015<\/a>, and it went on to raise some serious venture dollars<\/a> before the pandemic hit last year and the company laid off 50% of its workforce<\/a>. Caplan left as CEO in April last year, and the company was ultimately sold to Selina<\/a>, which offers co-working spaces to travelers, in October.<\/p>\n Caplan\u2019s co-founder who leads product and engineering at Spot Meetings is Hans Petter \u201cHP\u201d Eikemo. The duo met during the very first Remote Year cohort. \u201cHe has been a software engineer for two decades [and was] literally the first person I called,\u201d Caplan said. The team will grow further with the new funding, and the company hopes to start opening its beta to its 6,000 waitlist users over the next 3-4 weeks.<\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/AfcBOI_iP2I\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trees, those deciduous entities you can occasionally see outdoors when not locked down or strapped down at a desktop ruminating on a video call, have long been the inspiration for <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-24453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
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