Back in October, and in quite a few posts, I weblogged about the huge potential that a recently started company around the world of Instant Messaging would be having as soon as it would get busy moving away from just being a fun tool to try out and progress into a much more business focused offering. And by the looks of it, a couple of months after, it seems that things are on the right track now. Thanks to my good old friend Vinnie he has just indicated to me a couple of days back that he has joined the Meetro team while he moved to the west coast. Over at his weblog you will be able to find all of the details of the great things that will continue to happen with Meetro in order to take it into new grounds and consolidate it amongst one of the most powerful real-time collaboration tools for one particular audience: mobile workers.
Indeed, if you are one of those people who are constantly on the road, or working remotely, and doing a fair bit of travelling but you would still need to be able to get in touch with your colleagues so that you can continue collaborating and sharing knowledge with them I think that Meetro would probably be very suitable for your needs. Amongst other things, because it is a very light Instant Messaging client that connects you with some of the most popular IM protocols around (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN) -I hope one of these days they would add as well both Skype or Google Talk, so you would be able to keep in touch with your colleagues regardless what IM tool they are using. At the same time you would be able to collaborate using all of the rich text features that you can find in pretty much all of the different IM tools out there, but there is a single feature that will make it unique against all of the other different IM tools. And that is its location awareness capabilities.
Indeed, in a world where more and more of the remote workforce needs to be able to still keep in touch with the office in order to be able to access all of the knowledge, resources and subject matter experts and also in a growing need to stay connected regardless where you are, Meetro would allow them to keep in touch with their colleagues while on the road. Thanks to its great integration as a location awareness tool people would be able to connect and collaborate with one another and perhaps meet up if they are in the same city just because this particular tool offers the possiblity of showing your buddy list, not only how many miles / kilometers away from your colleague(s) but also it would allow folks to meet up with one another by being able to share with each other their location details.
Thus Meetro actually introduces something that hardly anybody has looked into: location awareness for the remote workers so that they could get very much connected and hardly ever had that sense that they may be alone. Something, in concept, very similar to what Plazes does, except that perhaps, Meetro improves that real-time flavour just a bit more. There are many other good reasons to perhaps give a try to this particular tool (Maybe I will detail in an upcoming weblog post what my favourites would be), but one thing for sure, if you are looking for a real-time collaboration tool where location awareness is an important item to consider for your mobile workforce I doubt there would be a much better tool than Meetro. If not give it a try yourself and see what you think. In an upcoming weblog post I shall detail what my experience has been with it the last week or so that I have been trying it out since last time I weblogged about it. To say the least, worth while the wait, for sure !
Technorati Tags: Meetro, Instant Messaging, Location Awareness
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