March 2022
Last updated
Last updated
Since we launched the Digital Venue a few months ago, we have received a lot of feedback. Thanks to it, we've worked on some aesthetic changes that give it a more modern look and feel and improve the user experience in certain flows and views.
Actually there is a lot more behind this than just aesthetic changes, but I don't want to bore you with explanations. Summarising in a few words, we are improving our design system and this will allow us to develop functionalities much (much!) faster in the future. Something that used to take us months, will now take us weeks.
The Digital Venue is being a huge success and you are hosting bigger and bigger events on it, so we have been working on improving the performance of the Digital Venue to be more efficient and support better events with thousands of attendees.
Our "traditional" meeting system is the 1-2-1. This product is specialised in physical events where you want to do a structured networking, with meetings between 2 people (that's why it's called one to one) who sit at a table occupying a specific time slot.
When Covid arrived (and online events along with it), we created an alternative system for online meetings, which is much more free, where attendees can create the meetings they want, with the duration they want, with the people they want.
Each of these systems is designed for a different type of event, but the reality is that many times you ask us for combined features of both systems, because the strengths of one system are the weaknesses of the other. One system is very rigid and the other is very flexible. For some of you, rigidity is good. For others, rigidity is bad. And the same goes for flexibility.
Considering this, we have decided to make a very important move: to create a completely new meeting system that combines the best of both worlds. So we have reviewed all our experience with our clients (and also with those who decided not to hire us) to start from scratch and make a meeting system that solves all the classic problems we have encountered during the last years.
Today we present you a first (and very simple) version of this new system: attendees of an event can send meeting requests to other attendees to have an online meeting, and they can accept or reject it.
Here you have some screenshots:
We are aware that this first version is very simple and will probably not be enough for your events, but we have to start with something 🙂
We are already developing more functionalities (to be able to do meetings in physical events) and we have a lot of ideas. Over the next few months we will be working very hard on it.
Do you want to try it?
This new system is a private beta. If you want to try it, contact your Project Manager and we will activate it on your platform.
Before we developed the new meeting system we have just presented to you, we already had a feature for spontaneous networking: Invite to video call.
But with the launch of the new meeting system, we felt that users would not understand the difference between a video call and a scheduled meeting, so we decided to change the names of the video calls to "digital coffee" to emphasise the difference between the two types of networking.
The main idea behind this name is that meetings are a more formal way of networking, where one person sends a meeting request to other people and they accept or decline it, while digital coffees (formerly video calls) are a spontaneous and informal way of networking, where one attendee sends a chat message to another with a link to a video conference.
We believe that the name digital coffee reflects this idea of informal online networking perfectly.
A few months ago we published the possibility of logging in without a password via a Magic Link.
The problem with Magic Link is that it forces you to open the email on the same device where you want to log in. In other words, if you want to log in on your computer, you are forced to open the email containing the Magic Link on your computer. You can't check the email from your mobile phone to log in on your computer because the link would open on your phone.
For many of you this was a problem, so we have improved the way to log in without a password. Now, instead of a link, we send a 6-digit numerical code valid for 15 minutes. We call this code One-Time Password (OTP).
I'm sure you've used a similar system a thousand times in other tools 🙂
We will continue to make further improvements in the coming weeks.
