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Manage your meetings and get things done!

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Press information for the introduction of MeetingKingFebruary 2012Paracas Solutions LLC

Table of Contents

What some of our Beta-Users are saying...........................................................................2

Introducing MeetingKing....................................................................................................3

What does MeetingKing do and what are the benefits?....................................................5

How does MeetingKing work?...........................................................................................7

Before the Meeting: Agenda...........................................................................................7

During the Meeting: Making Notes................................................................................9

After the Meeting: Minutes..........................................................................................11

Tasks and Task Management........................................................................................13

Powerful Archive and Tasks Management Tool............................................................15

Who and What is it for?...................................................................................................16

Costs, efficiencies and savings..........................................................................................17

Why MeetingKing?...........................................................................................................18

About MeetingKing..........................................................................................................19

Contact information.....................................................................................................19

Copyright 2012 Paracas Solutions LCC Page 1

What some of our Beta-Users are saying

MeetingKing was released in limited beta in September 2011. Since then a few thousand people have signed up and many are using MeetingKing on a very regular basis. Here is some of the feedback we received.

“For a long while we struggled under the weight of the admin surrounding meetings, from invites to minutes to tasks and followups. MeetingKing has made these simple and made the time so much more productive.” -- Aaron Alsweiler, CEO StorMan Software, New Zealand

"It was easy to get started with MeetingKing and I needed no instructions on how to work with it. I like how you can just fill in the fields and when you click print it is already formatted." -- Roshni Patel, University of Aberdeen.

"I have been using MeetingKing for a number of months now and it is great – it is really helping me to manage meetings and track actions as a result –" -- Andrew Brown, Carros, France

“Meeting King has been superb. This is a must-have for any meeting minute administrator. Extremely easy to use and customer service is great. Im so glad I found this site!” -- Desiree Matthews, Peace Baptist Church, Decatur GA

“I have been using MeetingKing for the last few months. My meetings have never been so organized as with MeetingKing. I can easily create a new meeting right from Google calendar, set the agenda and plan the topics. I can even upload files and attached them to the meeting. Sharing the meeting agenda is a simple click away. But this is just the beginning. MeetingKing made my meeting way more productive and effective by enabling me to capture notes, decisions and tasks and share them right at the end of the meeting with everyone in my organization and other companies. Follow up on meeting and making sure that decision and tasks getting done was never as simple as with MeetingKing.” -- Daniel Nissan, President & CEO, StructuredWeb, Inc., New York

“Fantastic. We've been using various Google Docs for years. Never realised how antiquated our system had become - it seemed cutting edge at the time! Been using MeetingKing for a few months now - the nicest thing is that there's almost no learning curve. Great!” -- A Google User, in Chrome Web Store


Introducing MeetingKing

What is MeetingKing?MeetingKing is a new on-line tool to manage all information and documentation before, during and after your meetings. We developed MeetingKing around the natural information and workflow related to meetings and corresponding action items.

MeetingKing is all about ease of use, speed and up-to-date actionable information. You “scribble” short bullets and MeetingKing transforms them into:

Meeting agenda Professional meeting minutes Tasks and task reminders Powerful searchable archive And more

What is it NOT?It is not another Goto Meeting, Webex or other web conferencing clone.

MeetingKing encourages the meeting organizer to follow best practices to make his or her meetings as efficient and effective as possible, but its flexibility allows the user to work the way he or she wants to. MeetingKing is already effective if only the organizer has an account; other participants are not required to have a MeetingKing account.

What is it for?MeetingKing can be used for one-on-one meetings, team meetings, board meetings, annual reviews, project meetings etc. It can be used for face-to-face and virtual meetings.

What else does it offer?In addition to creating an agenda, distributing the minutes and a complete task manager, it is a delivery platform for your tasks and you can easily find anything related to a project or department regardless of which meeting it was discussed in. It is an accounting system for all your decisions and action items.

How does it compare with other tools?Project management tools are great, but you can only discuss one project at the time and in most cases you can only record tasks and not decisions and notes. There is also not a practical way to create an agenda or automatically produce minutes.


Task management tools, like Asana and Trello, can be part of the usual combination of email, Word and task manager, however, combining these elements still requires time to follow the workflow around meetings.

What does it cost?MeetingKing is free for all attendees of all meetings. With a free account you can also organize unlimited public meetings (town, soccer club, etc.) and unlimited one-on-one private meetings. For private meetings with more than one invitee a Pro account is required. The introduction price for an individual account is $9.95 per month (50% off and lock in for as long as you keep the account). Discounts for organizations with more organizer accounts. There is a 30 day free trail for the Pro version.


What does MeetingKing do and what are the benefits?

Create professional agendas and minutes

You enter all information in the form of separate bullets or paragraphs and MeetingKing takes care of the formatting and turns them into professional looking agenda and minutes. It even includes related information from other meetings.

Collaborate before, during and after meetings

A good meeting starts with thorough preparation and ends with clear, well documented minutes and tasks. With MeetingKing all participants can easily work together on the agenda, share documents, and provide updates on tasks.

Note: MeetingKing is already effective without requiring the other participants to have a MeetingKing account.

All information in one tool and one place

No more confusion about the agenda, always access to the latest presentation, and everyone sees the same notes and action items. All information is in one place and not scattered in your inbox, on the server or in 4 different tools in the cloud.


Get things done

The central interactive task list will make sure that things get done. MeetingKing will send you automatic reminders and in your dashboard you can see what you have to do and what others are supposed to do for you.

By using tags you can find any task related to a certain project, department or customer, regardless of what meeting it was created in.

Stay focused

A new issue comes up during a meeting, but it may be outside the scope of the meeting. Simply add it to the Parking Lot and discuss it in another meeting. Your current meeting stays on track and the issue won’t drop off the radar.

Powerful archive

Don’t waste time on discussing the same issues over and over again. Simply search your past discussions and decisions in MeetingKing to see what was decided.


How does MeetingKing work?

Before the Meeting: Agenda

There are many great scheduling tools to set up a meeting, but all these tools are limited to setting a time and populating the user’s calendar. To set an agenda you have to include a message, attach a word document or send an email. Any changes, additional topics, updated attachments lead to more emails and unless you have one person in charge of updating all the information in one central place, invitees will lose track of the actual agenda. In addition adding information for previous meetings to the agenda requires searches and a lot of copy and paste.

MeetingKing makes it much easier; MeetingKing is your agenda assistant. Schedule and invite participants Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar, add [email protected] to the list of invitees and MeetingKing will automatically create a meetings space with the list of participants, location date and time already complete. In that meeting space you can create the actual agenda. You can attach supporting documents (so no need for a separate file sharing service or email attachments) and invitees can add their topics. It is even possible to assign tasks before the meeting and to provide comments. Some topics might even have been dealt with before the meeting!

In case of a follow-up meeting MeetingKing will automatically populate the agenda with open action items from previous meetings and list any topics that were placed in the parking lot in one of the previous meetings.

With one click you can email the agenda to all participants and towns, (sports)clubs and other public organizations can easily post a link to the PDF version of the agenda on the MeetingKing website.

During the meeting the agenda will keep the discussion on track and serves as the basis for making notes. If a new topic comes up during the meeting or you did not set an agenda, no problem, you can easily add topics during your meeting.

We all know that effective meetings start with a clear agenda. Now that MeetingKing makes it so easy there is no excuse to start a meeting without one.


mailto:[email protected]

This information is automatically copied from your meeting request from Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar. You can also enter or edit this information in MeetingKing.

Adding topics and attachments to the agenda


During the Meeting: Making Notes

Each meeting should result in clear and well documented decisions and tasks. If not, the meeting was just a waste of time. Taking notes, emailing minutes, archiving the minutes and managing a task list is time consuming and therefore in most cases not done.

MeetingKing makes it easy. You just write short bullets, and MeetingKing turns them into valuable actionable information. Your quick notes are turned into:

powerful agenda, with supporting materials professional meeting minutes tasks (with automatic task reminders) searchable archive that lets you combine information from different meetings in

one view and more

Taking notes in MeetingKing is extremely fast. You write a short bullet (or a long essay) and save it as a note, decision or task. To speed it up you don’t have to leave the keyboard, you can navigate the note taking page with the Tab and Enter keys. The agenda serves as your framework. If you did not create an agenda, maybe because you are having a quick ad-hoc meeting, you can create topics on the fly. MeetingKing works the way you work.

Private notesIn your agenda and minutes you can also make private notes and tasks. You got your private information in the same document the team is working in. These private notes can include arguments you like to bring up during the discussion or some private task that you need to do or assign to someone else. All information is in one place.


Taking notes


After the Meeting: Minutes

MeetingKing turns your short notes into professional looking meeting minutes and the build-in email functionality can send it to all participants. Your meeting participants will be impressed if they find great looking minutes in their inbox 30 seconds after the meeting ended!

The complete minutes, just like the agenda, are in the body of the email message and in an attached PDF file. This makes it also valuable for meeting participants who do not have a MeetingKing account and participants who use their inbox as their archive can find anything that was discussed in any meeting. And of course you can still save a copy of the minutes on the server.


Example of meeting minutes created by MeetingKing


Tasks and Task Management

Creating a task during a meeting is a breeze. Just type the task and click the save as task button (or hit tab-tab-enter). You can immediately assign the task and give it a due date. As soon as the task is created the task owner will optionally receive an email and the task will show up in his/her dashboard AND in the dashboard of the meeting organizer under the header “Tasks others have to do for me”. A reminder will be sent when the task is due. You can also create tasks outside of a meeting.

In your minutes there is a task summary and your agenda for the next meeting will automatically include the tasks from the previous meeting(s).

By adding tags to your meetings and topics, you can find all tasks related to a certain project, department or customer, regardless of what meeting they were created in. MeetingKing helps you to be in control and make sure things actually get done.

Creating a task while taking notes


The Quick Overview in your dashboard shows your tasks and tasks others have to do for you


Powerful Archive and Tasks Management Tool

The filter and search functionality helps you to find anything. You can filter by task owner, meeting participant(s), tag (project, department, etc.), date range, task status, etc. Of course you can also just enter a search term.

You will have anything at your finger tips and there is no need to search your inbox or try to find something “on the server”. With the right, up-to-date information, you will be prepared and in control.

Powerful filter and search functionality help you to find any related tasks


Who and What is it for?

MeetingKing is for everyone who has meetings: CEOs – for executive team meetings Sales Managers – for internal and/or remote staff meetings Sales people – for customer meetings Marketing Managers – for department meetings Department Managers and HR departments – for personnel reviews School Administrators – for management team meetings Lawyers and accountants – for client meetings Venture Capitalists – for board meetings Secretary of the Soccer Club – for parent meetings ……..

You get the idea. If you have meetings, are responsible for tasks or assign tasks, MeetingKing will make your life easier and your work more productive.


Costs, efficiencies and savings.

We all spend a lot of time in meetings. According to the Wharton Center for Applied Research in a Wall Street Journal article, the average CEO spends 17 hours per week in meetings, senior executives an average of 23 hours and middle managers 11 hours. And according to senior and middle managers only 56% of these meetings are productive. This leaves little time for “real” work.

The same research found that if managers use meetings appropriately they can reduce the time spent in meetings by 25%. Effective management of remaining meetings can reduce the time spent in meetings by another 20%. This translates into huge savings.

For example if you have a management team with 5 people at an annual salary of $100,000 per person and they spend an average of 15 hours a week in meetings, your weekly meeting cost for only these people is $4,076 and your annual costs are a shocking $212,000! If you can reduce that by 40% you are saving $85,000 per year!

In addition to the financial savings you will probably get more done, get a greater sense of accomplishment and a happier team.

To calculate what your meetings cost, visit our meeting cost calculator at:http://meetingking.com/meeting-cost-calculator


http://meetingking.com/meeting-cost-calculator

Why MeetingKing?

Meetings are inspiring sessions that get everyone on the same page to help move an initiative forward. But are they? These days, it seems that the word “Meeting” often triggers eye rolls and exasperation, with many employees writing off the time as wasted. It is not that we are not willing to have efficient and effective meetings, it is just that there doesn’t seem to be any practical efficient tool to manage them without spending a lot of time and using multiple applications.

For years I have been looking for an easy to use solution to streamline the information and documentation processes for meetings. The current ways to set an agenda by sending emails back and forth; creating minutes in a separate word processor document; “archiving” minutes and decisions in our inboxes or on a server (a.k.a. black hole); and having no central integrated way to track tasks, is hardly an improvement over the pre-PC period of the 1970’s.

There are a lot of great project management tools, but they are just not practical to manage a multi-disciplined team, that sits together once a week to discuss various different topics. File sharing in Google docs or SharePoint may be a good way to share documents, but it is not an integrated solution to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of meetings. I needed a tool to work together, to keep track of decisions and to make sure things would get done.

Since I could not find anything to run my business, and hearing similar complaints from others, I decided to build a true collaboration tool which integrates all processes and documentation before, during and after meetings. You will get the maximum benefit if all participants have a MeetingKing account (free for participants), but that is not required. Even if only one person uses MeetingKing to make notes and assign tasks, it is already effective and a huge improvement over current methods, as it will email minutes and task reminders.

The benefits of using MeetingKing go beyond saving time and money, or ensuring that tasks and issues don’t drop of the radar. Participants of a well-run meeting will feel more informed and more involved in the company or the project. The fact that previously assigned tasks will be reviewed in a next meeting, will create an increased sense of responsibility and urgency as well as a sense of accomplishment.


As much as a poor meeting will create a negative feeling about your organization, an efficient meeting will create a feeling of pride and excitement. And very likely, as a result of the improved efficiencies, you may need fewer meetings.

About MeetingKing

MeetingKing is developed and published by Paracas Solutions LLC, a privately held company in Connecticut. The founder of Paracas Solutions, Edwin Siebesma, has more than 15 years senior executive experience in both privately held companies as well as publicly traded multinationals. Most recently Edwin was president/CEO of WinZip. http://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinsiebesma.

Contact informationParacas Solutions LLCEdwin Siebesma, FounderPO box 581Tolland CT 06084http://[email protected]: +1 860 255 8430cellular: +1 860 341 1870


mailto:[email protected]

http://meetingking.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinsiebesma

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