I haven’t been attending New York Tech Meetups lately but there was one demo at last night’s gathering I would have liked to have seen.
Idea Flight from the folks at Conde Nast Digital turns the iPad into a collaborative document and screen sharing tool—think of it as WebEx for tablets.
One person is the host, or as Idea Flight calls it, the pilot, and the attendees are known as “passengers”.
I’m not sure I entirely get the flight metaphor, but this iPad app looks to be an on-the-fly approach to do shared presentations over a WiFi network.
This free app was released to the iTunes store in June. A quick scan of the comments reveals that it still needs work in a few areas, but it appears to be, as the venture capital types would say, a minimally viable product..
So who would be using this? As the iPad’s become more ubiquitous (and a status symbol) in business settings, sharing spreadsheets, docs, designs, etc. on an iPad may start replacing the clunky, temperamental digital projectors that are used in conference rooms.
And for big picture thinkers, apps like this mean that there’ll be a lot less printers—I’m talking to you Hewlett-Packard—in corporate mail rooms and scattered across cube-lined corridors.
The Idea Flight website is light on documentation, but they have a beautifully produced video that almost makes me want to grab a few of our editorial staff and start a meeting pronto.
Idea Flight supports up to 15 iPads; collaborative sessions are initiated by email invites without any bureaucratic scheduling procedures; and passengers can, if the wish, check-in using their LinkedIn account to provide photo mugshots and other information.
All in all, Idea Flight makes sense for many different kinds of meetings: marketing brainstorming sessions, spreadsheet parties, document reviews, and probably a thousand other uses.
It almost makes me want to splurge for an iPad.
Related articles
- Idea Flight
- Introducing Idea Flight – A New iPad Meeting App (linkedin.com)
