7 posts tagged “unyte”
It's good to see that the Yugma desktop sharing tool has made it to Skype's very own short list of valuable "extras" for Skype users. Skype lists their list of "handy tools and plugin's" at http://skype.com/business/tools/extras/ . Yugma is listed first as one of the two desktop sharing tools mentioned.
It's interesting to note that Unyte, a screen sharing app that was heavily promoted by Skype in 2005/2006, and was subsequently purchased in 2007 by IBM, is lo longer listed or mentioned.
(Disclosure: Being as I helped to launch the company's web based service back in 2006, I own some shares in Yugma.)
In the last three months, since our official launch of Yugma, people around the world have found an infinite number of applications for it. Yugma's on fire! Over 50 thousand users in over 75 countries have used Yugma. Since Yugma is super easy, universal, and cost effective (e.g., free-forever basic version, and premium version is 75% less than WebEx and Gotomeeting), people are using Yugma for everything from business, education, and in their online communities. Everyone is finding Yugma and the new Yugma widget to be must-have utility apps.
Here is just a sample of the exciting things people are saying:
We at Yugma send a big "thank you" to the entire Yugma community for spreading the word about Yugma.
One of Yugma's coolest features is Yugma Widgets. Anybody can have a Yugma Widget. It doesn't matter if you use Yugma FREE and Yugma Premium.
Simply get a Yugma account, set up your Widget, and then insert the widget snippet of code into your home page, blog, elearning site, customer support page, email, where ever you want.
As an example, check out PearLogic's home page http://www.pearlogic.com. If you click the "Live Support" image in the upper right, it takes you right into a Yugma session with one of their support staff. Just think of the ways you can make use of this!!!
Go ahead and make your own Yugma Widget today. It's fun. Just select your very own image, enter title and subtitle text, and select your widget button.
Here's one just for fun. Click on this button and see...
Hey, does anyone know the chords to "Kashmir?"
I love speaking with members of the Yugma community (www.yugma.com). I always ask them "What brings you our way?" I get very consistent answers. They like what we've done to eliminate the complexities and costs of collaborating with others using the web. They like Yugma because it's fast, easy, truly real-time, cross platform, and saves them over 75% on their monthly bills. I also get to hear their web collaboration "war stories" after using the "other guys" for a couple of years. About how long it takes to set up their sessions, how clunky the "other guy's" interface has gotten... that Mac's could not present to Windows users.... that they couldn't share mouse/keyboard for real-time interaction with others (for joint editing of documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints).... that the "other guy's" service dropped sessions half way on a rather frequent basis. Well, I really sympathize with them.
All I can say is "Welcome to Yugma!"
Yugma has joined with other companies like Google and Level 3 to sponsor the upcoming Freedom to Connect Conference (F2C) scheduled for March 5-6, 2007 in Washington, D.C. F2C is a meeting of people engaged with Internet connectivity and all that it enables. This year, the theme of F2C is how universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production are changing our fundamental economic and social assumptions. David Isenberg produces the event and has pulled together an great roster of industry leaders and policy making.
I spoke with David a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned how "Yochai Benkler help set the theme for this year's event with his powerful hypothesis that lowering the capital requirements of information production
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reduces the value of proprietary strategies and makes public, shared information more important,
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encourages a wider range of motivations to produce, thus demoting supply-and-demand from prime motivator to one-of-many, and
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allows large-scale, cooperative information production efforts that were not possible before, from open-source software, to search engines and encyclopedias, to massively multi-player online games."
Benkler's hypothesis really resonated with me. When more people can connect and collaborate, more cost effectively and with greater ease, very interesting and innovative things happen. For example, I heard from a lawyer last week who was using Yugma to review and review complex contracts in real-time with his global clients. He said "10 emails over 10 days" was reduced to "10 minutes." Amazing.
Since our launch in December, we’ve worked non stop on continuously enhancing and improving Yugma (www.yugma.com). We’ve now officially dropped the Beta tag from our logo. A key focus in all of our development work has been making Yugma the easiest, fastest, and most cost effective way for people around the world to collaborate on line. This past weekend, we rolled out an MS Outlook Toolbar and an advanced proxy handler (for those of you on larger corporate networks) -- all geared at making web collaboration as easy as possible. That way you can focus on sharing your ideas with others regardless of locations, platforms, applications, browsers, and budgets.
But the work continues literally around the clock. In the coming days you will see some very exciting and very powerful new features. And most importantly, they will be really easy to use. I don't want to pre-announce anything... So please stay tuned!
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We launched the new Yugma FREE service in mid December and the team is delighted to see how quickly people around the world found out about us. We were convinced that there would be great interest in an easy, secure, real-time, cross-platform, and free web collaboration tool - that it would be very helpful in peoples' day to day activities. In our very first month, we've heard from so many who have told us how Yugma is making their lives easier. From lawyers using Yugma to review contracts with other lawyers, entrepreneurs using Yugma to present proposals to clients, small web-communities meeting to advance their projects, to tech companies using Yugma to remotely assist their customers. Even my daughter has been using Yugma to do some of her school projects with her friends. They think Yugma is "cool". It's exciting to see the Yugma community growing. The small team at Yugma has been passionately working on it for a while with the goal of leveraging the very latest OPEN SOURCE technologies to create a very COST EFFECTIVE collaboration tool that EVERYONE could use, anytime, anywhere. We think of it as collaborating across all of the barriers; barriers of physical distances, networking technologies, operating systems, security systems, computer proficiency, and even across limited financial budgets. In the last month we've been getting tons of great ideas about what we should do next... integrate VoIP, integrate with Skype and Google Talk, create a webinar version, create an enterprise version, make a rebrandable version, partner with specific Web 2.0 communities, and the list goes on. We thank you all for the encouragement, suggestions, and the feedback. We're very customer focused and your input means a lot to us. We're going through all of these suggestions right now and adapting the development plans to what is of most interest to the new Yugma community. In the meantime, we've just launched a Yugma TroubleShooter (see the support page), and we just added capacity to our systems and network connectivity. We'll be launching a post-session Quality Survey as well as a Yugma Service Status page in the coming days. It's all part of providing you with a secure service you can rely on. Karel Lukas is Yugma's Chief Operating Officer and enjoys spreading the word about how web and internet technologies can help businesses compete, students excel, and web 2.0 properties grow. |
