Idea: 17
Saturday, 17 January 2015
By. Beau Bergeron and Jorge Pedraza
Notetaker
Record in-person meetings and phone calls, and within 24 hours, receive finished notes.
Like most professionals, Beau and Jorge have lots of meetings and calls. Too many to keep track of, without taking notes. Notes help them jog their memory, follow up on next steps, and bring a summary back to share with their team. But taking notes is cumbersome. It takes focus away from conversation. Because of that trade-off, conversation quality and note quality tend to be inversely correlated. As a result, notes are often sloppy, unfinished and missing key points.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if a professional notetaker was always there to help? Enter “Notetaker” — professional notetaking as a service. Here’s how it works:
- For in-person meetings, just record the meeting with the Notetaker app — which is similar to Rev (transcription as a service), but for note-taking.
- For phone meetings, dial the Notetaker bot first, then patch it through when you call the other person. Alternatively, use a dedicated Notetaker conference line.
- Within 24 hours, you receive finished notes via e-mail and app notification. They are well organized, carefully prepared, and beautifully written.
Standard service costs $1 per minute, so an hour-long meeting costs $60. If you’re flexibile on the turn-around time, you can pay less. Or if you want them as soon as possible, you can pay more. Easily share notes with colleagues, write the cost off as a business expense, or even request that your counter-party split the bill in exchange for a copy. Notetakers operate under a strict NDA to protect client confidentiality. Through various settings and feedback systems, clients can customize the format and focus of their notes. If clients wish to keep their meeting recordings, they may pay Notetaker at industry-standard cloud storage rates. Otherwise recordings will be deleted after thirty days.
(Preliminary research via Google, AngelList, and the Apple App Store suggests there are no startups offering notetaking as a service. Although, some services exist for handicapped individuals, they are antiquated and not targeted to professionals.)
