If you are a LiveMinutes user, you have probably noticed than LiveMinutes works pretty well with Evernote. Many of you have asked how that works, and how you could integrate this feature into your service/product. Today we will tell you a little more about our technology.

One of the preferred and most differentiated feature of LiveMinutes is the ability to take notes collaboratively, in realtime, during the meeting. Our users leverage this feature to work on to-do-lists or meeting agendas, but also review and edit text documents, or computer code. Additionally, thanks to the Evernote integration, Evernote users can edit their notes together, at the same time, by connecting their account to LiveMinutes.

LiveMinutes’ shared text editor is beautiful and blazing fast, but also quite unique: no other meeting application lets users take notes collaboratively. Think about it, the first thing you do in meetings is take notes, right? Despite this, no other meeting app, Webex, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, Fuze, Join.me, or goInstant, lets you take notes together… Even Evernote, which primary focus is note taking and sharing, does not let their users type at the same time in the same note.

Here’s why:

In computer science, allowing several people to modify simultaneously the same text is a hard problem to solve. Very hard. So hard that Google acquired one of the only company that had figured out how to do it properly, Etherpad. Google has used Etherpad as a basis for building Google Docs, which is now the ubiquitous mean for collaborative text editing.  No other collaboration player has been able to come up with its own technology to fulfill the very basic need of taking notes together.

Well – and we are going to boast little here – that was until we launched our own technology. For the techies, we have developed our own algorithm, which does not rely on Operational Transform (OT). We solve the problem on the client side while OT is server side, allowing for better performance, and the performance gap increases with the number of simultaneous editors. For the non techies, just know that our editor is blazing fast, and unlike screen sharing, it lets you takes notes in the the meeting with other participants.

Taking notes together is the keystone of collaborative meetings. You get in the meeting, upload some content (design, slides), and once you start discussing, you make decisions on what to do next. So you start writing notes and to-do lists with your peers. And since LiveMinutes stores everything, your notes and todo lists are automatically saved to your downloadable meeting report. So you can keep track of your work. And if you connected your Evernote account, we save your report to Evernote as well.

So what’s next? well, we have some great improvements coming up: better integration with Evernote, rich-text features, computer code highlighting, integration with to-do apps… This is where we would love to hear from you. Tell us what you need the most, and help us build the best real-time collaboration app!

The LiveMinutes Team