yaMLabs

Inefficient meetings are one of the biggest drains on business today. YamLabs (www.yamlabs.com), which recently announced $500,000 in funding from a Moscow-based VC firm, has just updated its meeting collaboration tool, yaM. yaM is designed for the sole purpose of making meetings (online or face to face) more efficient.

The idea of yaM is very simple: to improve meetings by replacing hard copy tools of the past with virtual and cloud based tools. yaM, which stands for Yet Another Meeting, is a collaborative, real-time application designed to improve the efficiency of meetings by providing tools to improve brainstorming, analyze priorities, create pro/con lists, offer real-time voting on ideas, and employ visual aids via an intuitive online whiteboard.

yaM is initially web-based, but over the next few months, they will roll out product integrations with the iPad and other tablets, Google App marketplace, Yammer, and Jive Networks. The tool can be downloaded for review at www.yamlabs.com. People who sign up for the beta before June 1, 2011 will get unlimited access to yaM for free for their first 12 months of use.

Some features in yaM include:
- Agenda/Notes — Keep your meeting on track with a shared agenda and real-time, collaborative note taking.

- Meeting Minutes — Create an easily accessible official record of each meeting’s activities and get it approved right on the meeting.

- Brainstorming — Visually run brainstorming sessions to collect and rate ideas from your team

- Priorities Analysis — Graphically slot your projects based on their importance and urgency to better manage prioritization.

- SWOT Analysis — Quickly generate a collaborative SWOT chart for any item on your agenda.

- Pro/Con — Easily jot down a collaborative list of pros and cons for any agenda item.