Nokia is working on a web-based mobile collaboration service called Nokia Easy Meet which lets you use your mobile device and/or PC to create, conduct, and participate in meetings with your business colleagues as well as your friends and family. The service which is in beta is aimed at sharing content synchronously and in real-time.

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Meeting with Family

While on vacation you see a perfect gift to your mom. You think its perfect but you won’t risk buying it before talking to your sisters about the gift. Well, what should you do? Snap a few photos of the gift with your mobile device and then you login to Nokia Easy Meet. Using Nokia Easy Meet, you could create a family meeting right from the store. This service sends out an email or SMS to the each participants. With just one click, each sisters can join the meeting via a PC or a mobile device and view the photo while talking together. Your sisters could use the chat features of Nokia Easy Meet or even download the photos.

With just few clicks you are able to collaborate with your sisters and share photos and converse in real-time.

Discussions with Business Colleagues

While you are traveling on a business trip, you would like to share the slides with your project team and discuss. Nokia Easy Meet allows you to create your own unique URL for regular collaboration. During the conference call, you can share PowerPoint slides and images while discussing the project via voice and chat. The services also captures the meeting minutes for future reference.

Sneak Peak at Nokia Easy Meet

• A S60 widget can be installed on your mobile phone and customized with your user and password. Auto login can be enabled and the list of meetings are always accessible easily when you login.

• You will have to signup at the Nokia Easy Meet website before you could login

• Enter your user name and password to login screen

• If you are a participants and the conference URL is sent to you via email or SMS, then you don’t need to signup. You can just login using your email ID

• Once you login, the meeting list screen is presented. You can just click on the meeting to participate. You can edit or delete the meeting only if you have created it.

• Two different screen layouts – Wide Screen layout and Small Screen layout are supported

• Participants can view the list of file shared.

• Participants can download a copy of shared file or upload a new file for sharing

• You can either upload a file from your mobile phone or a remote file

• The host can then share the file by just few clicks

• The host can then start sharing the slides, select colors from the draw pallet and highlight the slide contents while presenting

System Requirements

While the goal is to support all mobile devices with browser, extensive testing are done for E90, E66, E71i, N95, N800/810, GooglePhone, iPhone/iTouch. Browsers supported are S60, Opera, Firefox, IE7, Safari and IE6 is not supported.

While its a cool service that enables web-based mobile collaboration, the challenge is in making the service more efficient for mobile users.

Will Nokia overcome these challenges? Well, Nokia Easy Meet is a research prototype and hasn’t been integrated with Nokia Accounts yet. Will it get anywhere near to the WebEx on iPhone? Time will tell..

Is this a killer app for mobile?

Try it yourself at http://easymeet.nokia.com and let us know your comments/suggestions.