Teeme (/tiːm/)
The name Teeme is derived from two words that we feel encapsulate what we are about;
Team, which is perhaps the most obvious aspect of the name, and one that we can surely agree could be defined as a group of people with a full set of complementary skills required to complete a task, job, or project. The other word which may not be as obvious is Meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene that has been popularised by social media through the spread of images (usually cat pictures) with a witty tag line. Meme was initially a term used solely by academics to describe a social element that, like a gene, could replicate itself and evolve. This social media version of a meme is not that far of a stretch from its original meaning; these cat pictures spread like wildfire and they change as each person puts their own spin on the popular image. Internet memes could very easily be used as a study in social sciences, but they also provide a readily accessible example of what a meme would traditionally be defined as – an idea that evolves.
This term is not only essential to our name (Team + Meme = Teeme), it also reflects what we want from our product. We want people to be able to work within a team, regardless of who they are, or where, or even when. We want Teeme to enable this natural evolution of ideas to flow smoothly within teams, and to allow collaboration to happen in one place, where ideas can be shared and collected, revisited and re-imagined, where ideas can evolve and come together to create something tangible.
We believe that the way we work is changing, and in the fashion of memes it has evolved into something entirely different from the way we worked a little as a few years ago. The way we conduct business has moved away from tall office buildings and nine-to-five hours, we are witnessing a trend in which people are more frequently working from home or in a café rather than at a central office down town, and to us this is a step in the right direction. This is a time of change and we are all a part of it, so why not just leap into the fold and embrace it?
