A new entry into the growing online meeting space is vCita. vCita’s a new “one-stop solution” that will debut at next week’s Tech Crunch Disrupt San Francisco (September 12-14). In an email to this blogger, the creators of vCita, describe it like this:
Currently in beta, vCita was created to address the current piecemealing that is taking place for small businesses and their scheduling technologies. Many companies currently use Tungle to schedule, GoToMeeting for conferencing and PayPal for receiving payments – vCita provides all of these capabilities in one free, easy-to-use solution.
vCita was founded by the Israeli creators of Kidaro – a booming virtualization company that was quickly acquired by Microsoft in 2008. The former Kidaro team’s latest creation is designed to provide end-to-end communications for SMBs and entrepreneurs.
vCita can be used as a “set a meeting” button on your website, a “contact me” sidebar on your blog or as a standalone contact page created and hosted by vCita, you can promote on social networks or even your email signature.
I joined vCita – the base level account is free – and tried it. But what was a bit confusing to me was the provision where you could have one pay for the right to meet with you. That is a bit confusing.
In other words, it’s some kind of “gate” fee, but why? Who would offer to pay it? I can see a fee for a service, but what was the rationale for having this “pay to meet me” set up?
We shall see at TC Disrupt.