AUSTIN â€" If you attend a lot of meetings, you often might not know much about your fellow participants. Enter Charlie, a new service designed to help you better prep for meetings, and know more about with whom you’re chatting on your next conference call.
A 2013 SXSW Accelerator finalist, the app pulls in information about people in your meeting as well as details about what you and that person have in common. Currently in development and being tested, the Chicago-based company plans to make Charlie available publicly in Q2, 2013.
We caught up with Aaron Frazin, co-founder and CEO of Charlie to learn more.
Q: What does Charlie do?
Charlie helps people kick ass in their meetings and calls. It does this by connecting to your calendar and prepping you on the people and companies that you are meeting with.
Specifically, Charlie filters through different online sources to prep you on the people you are meeting with. Some of the highlights we are proud of include alerting you if you have anything in common (you both like the Chicago Cubs) and what’s going on in the news with your commonalities (the Cubs actually won today!).
We will also tell you more about where they work and check for breaking news on any of their current positions and companies, all so that you can walk in the most prepared person in the room.
Q: What made you start the company?
Before every career fair and job interview back at Indiana University, I always researched the people and companies I was meeting with. I spent hours doing this each time. I remember thinking, why isn't there some app that can do this for me? There wasn’t. At that moment, Charlie began.
Soon after, we began testing by calling companies and professionals â€" and telling them they could test Charlie before we had even developed anything. We proceeded to make them manual versions of Charlie, and spent a few weeks doing nothing else but creating these manual “Charlie Reports†and telling people that Charlie generated these reports just so we could see how much people wanted it. We had people calling us and telling us they wanted to pay for it â€" and we didn’t even have a product at all.
Q: Who’s involved, and what makes them perfect for the gig?
I’d like to highlight Junaid Kalmadi â€" a co-founder and man of many great traits (can develop and has successfully led business development at FormAssembly before).
Q: What makes you better than your competition?
Our competitive advantage is our ability to filter out what is important. Instead of simply presenting a whole slew of aggregated social information, our algorithms filter through this information to only present the important nuggets. With Charlie, you will rock all your meetings, conferences, and calls.
Q: How are you funded?
We are funded by a group of Chicago angels, founders, and Dreamit Ventures.
Q: Are you looking for any additional funding?
We are nearing completion of a seed round right now.
You can keep up with Charlie on its website, or Twitter or Facebook page. You can also sign up to be part of Charlie's beta on its website.
What do you think of Charlie? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Thumbnail image courtesy iStock, Lightbox; screenshot courtesy Charlie
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