Journal
Notes on meetings, privacy & building.
Articles on Lean Coffee practice, product decisions, EU infrastructure, and the Austrian tradition that shapes our thinking.
What's new in Punkto, 9 October 2026 — Next meeting
From the summary of a finished standard session, start the next one now or schedule it. Open actions and unfinished topics come along. Done topics stay. Votes start at zero.
What's new in Punkto, 9 October 2026 — Open actions by webhook
A summary webhook can add each open action to the signed POST. The transcript, the summary text, and the audio stay in Punkto. A US web service is a US destination.
What's new in Punkto
Screen sharing in Direct Video, joining a meeting without a webcam, summaries you can paste, and shared transcripts on the Team plan.
Meeting notes and privacy — what your transcription tool keeps after the call
A practical look at what happens to your meeting recordings, transcripts and summaries after the call ends — retention windows, training opt-outs, and how Punkto compares.
Lean Coffee for product teams — a 30-minute weekly cadence that works
How product teams use Lean Coffee for weekly syncs, retros and pre-mortems. A field-tested format with concrete agenda templates and facilitation prompts.
The Otter.ai alternative for European teams — what changes when transcription stays in the EU
Otter.ai stores audio in the US under the CLOUD Act. For EU teams under GDPR, the practical difference between Otter and an EU-hosted alternative that does not keep the audio in the account.
Is Google Meet GDPR-compliant? The honest answer in 2026
A clear breakdown of where Google Meet stands on GDPR — DPA, data residency, subprocessors, and what "EU region" actually means under the CLOUD Act.
How to run a remote Lean Coffee in 30 minutes — a practical guide
A facilitator-tested protocol to run a remote Lean Coffee in exactly 30 minutes — from topic proposal to action items. Cadence, prompts, common mistakes.
How AI meeting summaries actually work — and what to look for
A clear walkthrough of how AI-generated meeting summaries work: speech-to-text engines, language models, prompt patterns, and the privacy trade-offs.
Why EU data sovereignty for meetings matters in 2026
Schrems II, Schrems III, the US CLOUD Act and the FISA 702 reauthorization explain why "EU region on AWS" is not the same as EU data sovereignty. What changed in 2025–2026.
Zero audio retention — what it actually means, and how we built it
Most "private" meeting tools still store your call audio. Punkto does not — by architecture, not policy. The engineering case for zero audio retention.
GDPR-compliant meeting tools in 2026 — the practical checklist
A lawyer-free, 12-question checklist to choose a GDPR-compliant video meeting and AI transcription tool — covering data residency, lawful basis, retention, subprocessors, DPA, and cross-border transfers.
Tactiq, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom — and the EU alternative you probably missed
A clear-eyed comparison of the leading meeting-AI tools in 2026, with a specific lens on European data residency, GDPR exposure, and what actually changes for compliance-driven teams.
What is Lean Coffee — the self-organizing meeting format
Meetings with no fixed agenda: participants propose topics, vote on priorities, and discuss each in a 5-minute timebox. How it works and why it outperforms traditional agendas.