The Story of Meeters
Written by Raela Petersons, Marino Todisco and Diego De Simone
It's been awhile since our article on the birth of Meeters (you can find it here in Italian only). We are proud to say that since the platform's launch, Meeters has been successfully used by more and more companies to bring the experience of in person events to the online world.
Our Italian software development Startup, Botika, has seen inspiring success with our newly developed Meeters digital platform. Botika was founded by three accomplished industry experts, Gian Angelo Geminiani, Guido Ricci, and Diego De Simone. With over 25 years of experience in the videogame industry, blockchain, chatbots, and artificial intelligence, Gian Angelo Geminiani has valuable expertise in both software and programming. Guido Ricci has over 25 years of experience in data security and server architectures, specializing in infrastructure development. Lastly, Diego De Simone has over 15 years of experience in Marketing Management in a variety of markets, from retail to corporate.
As mentioned in our earlier article, the idea of Meeters was born from trying to solve one of the many inconveniences caused by the pandemic: the ability to meet and do business.
The B2B world has had to quickly readjust basic in-person functions to work in an online space. This has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to organically meet and network with customers and other target contacts. It has also decreased efficiency of internal communication for businesses and created a lack of community and company culture.
How Meeters was born
After being tasked to quickly rework a high school hack-a-thon event from in-person to a virtual landscape during the first several weeks of the pandemic, we realized the solutions potential that a platform like Meeters holds. After meeting with event industry experts and gaining valuable advice on which features are most important for user experience, the Meeters platform was born.
Many virtual event platforms try to recreate human contact with second life, avatars, and 3D elements. These features can be useful in many contexts, but do little to optimize user interaction. 3D slows down and tires easily, especially when used in a professional networking setting. We believe in a more social logic, so much so that we developed everything following the guidelines of social networks. It’s a path that visitors know well, since they spend more than three hours a day on social networking sites, and therefore are accustomed to navigate and view content in that way. The idea for Meeters was not to recreate human contact, but try to replicate the experiences, sentiments, and interactions of in-person events in an intuitive virtual platform.
Meeters Space basics
What are the features of Meeters and how does it allow you to continue doing Business?
AI Matching - The Meeters platform uses artificial intelligence to match visitors with other attendees and companies at the event to foster a more organic networking experience. The system provides the visitor with the experience of being able to enter into direct contact with buyers or other visitors in order to network. You have the ability to search for both companies and other visitors for networking activities. By visiting the exhibitor's stand, visitors are able to see the team members and contact them directly.
Exhibitor Stand - The stand is a showcase that allows companies to present their products or services with interactive catalogs and videos. From the stand you can manage the appointments of your own commercial task force.
Calendars - At each stand, the visitors have the opportunity to book appointments with the stand team according to the preferred time of the visitor and their person of interest on the stand team. With calendar synchronization, visitors can quickly view available time slots and schedule a meeting time that works for everyone. Meeters also allows people, upon the exchange of business cards, to initiate video calls. The visitor has easy access to their compiled list of appointments that they have set throughout the event with the people of their interest, and all the conversations they have started are always saved to be resumed at a later time. Visitors can bookmark both companies and individual members of each stand as well as the visitors of interest for networking.
Webinar - The platform offers the possibility of organizing congress events, “fair plenaries '' and webinars for exhibitors. The event calendars provide easy access links, and once the event is over the link will return to your registration for later review.
These are just a few of the Features that Meeters has to offer; if you want to learn more, you can visit en.meeters.space
A successful start
Due to the high customization Meeters offers, the platform was chosen to host the 2020 RemTech Expo. This is an industry-wide international event covering topics such as climate issues, urban regeneration, sustainable development and much more.
The Meeters Space received around 100,000 visits from professionals of government entities, private companies, innovative start-ups, universities, research centers, and many other industry experts (from 94 different countries) who were able to connect, learn and network! This event was not only a success for us, but for all the people who believed in it. For the first time, participants were able to experience “indirect” contact of an important event, while still having the ability to engage and evoke emotions. Check out the Meeters Space we created for the RemTech Expo here.
After the 2020 RemTech event, we started to propose Meeters to small companies or organizations that wanted to organize events, but who were unable to do so because of the ongoing global pandemic. This led to the successful creation of two other events, namely Fattore Innovazione Online and Nuove Idee Nuove Imprese. Both are online digital events, both aimed at bringing people together. Visit en.meeters.space to discover the events currently online.
The Future of Meeters
We are looking forward to the great opportunities of a new year, and are happy to announce that due to the success of the Meeters platform in 2020, the RemTech Expo, Fattore Innovazione Online, and Nuove Idee Nuove Imprese and several others have all confirmed that they will be hosting their upcoming 2021 events on the Meeters platform!
The idea of building connections is embedded in everything we have done with the Meeters platform, and this idea will continue to guide us as we shape the future innovations of Meeters.
As the normal way of business and life adapts during this difficult time, we asked ourselves if there were more ways the Meeters platform could bring people together. Since working-from-home is the new normal for many companies and industries, the company culture and sense of community within a workplace has become lost. After discussing this issue with companies looking for a solution, we decided to create online communities to help businesses strengthen internal communication using the Meeters platform. Every company is unique and therefore has specific needs that require flexibility in the creation and management of their own digital community. Adding features such as a company social network, activity feed, and easy document share will help foster interactions.
This sense of community can become even more difficult to cultivate if companies are trying to transition some workers back into the office while many employees or customers are still working from home. For this reason, we have been working hard to create Meeters 2.0. This new version of Meeters will be a hybrid platform with the added ability to support physical events. Meeters 2.0 will bring people from both the online platform and the physical event together and help participants interact, in addition to our added community features.
These are the ideas that are moving us now. A platform that can both help people communicate and do business while also providing the freedom to create their own community around products, companies, events, and more. We are looking forward to the opportunities that these new features will provide for our customers and the business world. Connect with us on LinkedIn to stay updated on the upcoming release of Meeters 2.0!
