* Create teams for business situations using Swarmteams
There are many business situations where you want to have a team of people in constant connection. For example, if you are coordinating a marketing exercise or managing an event.
If all of the team members have something like the BlackBerry then you’re set but in most real world situations you’ll have someone back in the office on a PC, a group of people in the field using a variety of telephones, and still more people using any device you might think of. While you could go and upgrade everyone to the same platform the cost is usually prohibitive particularly when the group might only exist for the short term.
This is where a new service called Swarmteams could help.
Swarmteams requires no downloads and can interconnect and route messages between users who have any mobile phone or Web browser.
All messages and replies are organized and accessible on the Web and the service supports “Follow-me” that ensures all replies are forwarded to group members’ mobile phones as well as group chat that auto-forwards messages to all members.
Swarmteams can be of any size and with the use of any device you can invite other people using any device to join. Swarms can be of any size and contact data for any swarm member is available to the entire group.
The basic Swarmteams service, called Swarm-it is free and includes 50 SMS messages. Full membership is priced at $9.95 for 100 SMS text messages plus unlimited use of all other Swarm-it facilities, which includes group messaging via IM, Web, e-mail and RSS.
Swarm-pro, priced on application, is the next service level and includes branding, sub-team creation, message reporting, hierarchical management, and message ranging (the ability to control message distribution within selected sub-swarms).
Swarm-Web, again priced on application, is the top level and can support integration with existing Web applications without programming.
There’s also an API that allows the Swarmteam’s functionality to be built into other applications.
What Swarmteams offers is an easy way to create dynamic always-connected groups in a way that has never been possible. While there are obvious applications in civil defense and emergency services the potential for integrating teams engaged in large scale, distributed management and business processes is obvious.
