Getting to know you
When meeting a new client or a potential partner, wouldn’t it be nice to have a brief synopsis of who you’re meeting with, what they’re interested in, and what they and their company have been up to recently before you go through the door?
SXSW finalist
Charlie does that—and more– for you. A 2013 SXSW Accelerator finalist, Charlie gives you a distinct advantage in any meeting by providing a one-page overview of information about other people in the meeting, identifying what you and they have in common. Beyond the individuals involved, Charlie gives you information about the companies those individuals work for, as well as their direct competition.
Saves time and headache
According to Charlie’s webpage, they save their users an average of more than 30 minutes per day by eliminating the nearly 60 Google searches that individuals did to prepare for meetings and to do company and competitor research.
Available through their website, or via the app downloaded from the ITunes Store, Charlie is quick to access and intuitive to set up. Currently synced to Google Calendars, with planned support for Outlook coming in the future, Charlie works by filtering through over 100,000 information sources, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google News among others to identify news, information, and items of interest about individuals identified as participating in the meeting, as well as the companies they work for.
Reports are emailed to you the morning of the meeting, and then again updated an hour before the meeting begins to capture any vital updates to the information.
“Anything on the company, such as any breaking news, or even if someone is mentioned in a news article, Charlie will highlight the area in the news article that they were mentioned,” said Aaron Frazin, the co-founder and CEO of Charlie, speaking to Business Insider. “Instead of showing you a thousand of tweets it will say ‘They love to talk about video games and golf, and so do you.’”
What Charlie can do
The genesis of Charlie came from how Frazin used to personally prepare for job fairs as an undergraduate student. “Before every career fair and job interview back at Indiana University, I always researched the people and companies I was meeting with,” Frazin said, speaking to Mashable. “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.”
Rather than receiving an overburdened report, Charlie presents information to users in a tidy one-pager that provides important notes about the person or the company based on their search algorithm.
It’s important to note that every information source that Charlie relies upon is freely found on the Internet; there’s no Dark Web searching by Charlie to get their information. The number of hours in necessary research that Charlie can save is an amazing resource, and frees one up to do the other million things that we’re required to do in the work day.
For those of us without the time to do such intensive research about our possible clients, Charlie does the heavy lifting and removes the excuses of not knowing where to begin to find the information and not having the time to search effectively and synthesize the information.
#Charlie
