yaM Labs secures $500k to take meeting management to the Cloud

yaM Labs, a Russian startup not to be confused with Yammer, has secured $500k from Foresight Ventures. The company has developed Cloud-based software to make meetings – both face-to-face and virtual – more efficient by enabling participants to collaborate on the planning, running, and execution of a meeting.

The premise being that traditional offline tools make for a lot of wasted time because meetings lack focus and ‘memory’ – you have to be there to know what went down and even if you were, often the answer is not a lot or there at least exists no actual record. Shifting these tools to the Cloud – the yaM app runs completely in a web browser – and improving them along the way is supposed to help with this. The startup broke cover at our recent TechCrunch Moscow event.

yaM says it will use the new funding to accelerate product integrations with iPad and other tablets, Google App Marketplace, Yammer, Jive Networks. Additionally, money will be spent on marketing the app in the U.S.

To that end, the current yaM app offers a tabbed and notepad-like Interface – not far from being tablet ready, one suspects – to a suite of real-time collaboration tools to let meeting participants take part in trackable brainstorming sessions, SWOT and pro/con analyses, “action item prioritization”, and other meeting techniques and methods – all of which, if utilized, can make meetings more valuable, apparently.

As for the name, yaM actually stands for ‘yet another meeting’. Its founder is Anatoly Gaverdoskiy, a serial entrepreneur, including founding California-based InvisibleCRM, while the business model is a classic freemium play, The free version will be limited to a set number of meetings after which you pay a monthly subscription for unlimited meetings, storage and added security.