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"Worktopia, an online meeting booking service, has raised $5 million in Series A Funding, led by DFJ Gotham Ventures.  Milestone Venture Partners and High Peaks Venture Partners are participating in this round as well.  The New York-based booking service has tapped into the small business community, especially those that operate from home offices or in a virtual manner.  \nWhat Worktopia has done is partner with venues and services across the world in order to offer you search and booking services, which are all automated.  If you need a meeting room for a conference next month, you can use Worktopia to book the space, and even the caterer for lunch.  What's more, is Worktopia allows for planning much of your needs directly in its service, including break times, etc. so you can better utilize its services, and the space you're reserving.  There are other services that you can sign up for through worktopia, like a virtual office with monthly plans.  \nBut the largest benefit for worktopia is the automatic manner in which you can plan for your events.  This currently includes office space, hotels and catering options.  As tools for virtual planning become more automatic and integrated, we're seeing more options for implementing plans.  Just yesterday I took a look at ActionThis to see how it could better help execute tasks, and linked back to another meeting tool, Ikordo, which integrates with email for scheduling purposes.  While these three aspects of work life are still somewhat separated in the web space, the combining of many of these tools is rather inevitable.  \nGoing through Worktopia's past releases and announcements, you'll notice that it's becoming more of a central resource for planning meetings, and doing so in a very similar manner to trip-planning services like Expedia or TripAdvisor.  With a growing number of partners, this is clearly the direction in which worktopia is going, with hopes of offering infinite resources for small businesses in need of office tools, on a global scale.  How soon before we see these search and planning tools become a community , and is that what businesses need?  Or would a tool such as Worktopia work better as a supplemental feature for existing services?\n[via centernetworks]\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/10/29/worktopia-funded/>