Meet this app for more productivity

Help, finally, has arrived for executives who loathe meetings.

It comes in the form of Meetr, a locally invented and developed iPhone iOS application. The app, available on iTunes for $1.99, helps companies calculate the cost of meetings, conference calls and other unified workday stoppages. Users can input the names of anyone at the meeting, along with the estimated salary of each attendee. The app then provides a real-time running cost vs. benefit of each meeting.

The meetings on the app can be saved and compared against past sessions or other departments. The results and costs, further, are displayed in time and dollars, and can be shared in spreadsheets and graphs.

The developers behind the app hope executives will find it a fun, yet useful tool to improve overall workplace productivity. Ringling School of Art and Design graduate Miguel Elasmar and Patrick Denney, a programmer with Sarasota-based Voalte, a health care IT firm that helps nurses communicate through iPhones and smart phones, created Meetr. Elasmar, a freelance visual and graphics designer, says the goal was to address a serious issue with “a little bit of Dilbert.”

The pair began early last year with an idea sketched out on a napkin. Denney brought his personal experience to the project, noting he spent time in the U.S. Army, where he says he whittled away many hours in incessant gatherings. “I'm not very big on meetings,” Denney tells Coffee Talk. “When you have one, very few people come out feeling like they were productive. It's usually just one person talking.”

Elasmar and Denney are doing the work for Meetr on nights and weekends. The first version of the app debuted earlier this year and they hope to add features in the next few months while they build buzz. Says Elasmar: “We are trying to gain traction with the business community.”