We find that Yuuguu gets all sorts of different users and uses. We have larger corporate clients, who use it as a logical extension of an internal phone network. Instead of looking up ‘Barry from Accounts’ in the directory and talking to him on x3647, you simply click on ‘Barry from Accounts’ in your contact list and you are instant messaging and screen sharing. Very useful.

But I find the possibilities for startups all the more exciting. We know there is still a global economic downturn on. We know that major governments are making cuts. At least – if they haven’t already gone broke. We know – sadly – this means job losses.

The good news is that broadband is commonplace, the mobile web is here to stay, and new devices like the iPad are blurring the lines between computer, television, print and voice. At the same time, the promised information economy is actually here. People can – and do – pay for information-led products and services on the web these days.

I personally think the likes of eBay and Amazon – the early ‘buy products online’ pioneers broke that one. They were the first commonly known sites where you would put credit card details on the web. Nervous early users found – to their surprise and delight – their orders arrived. I recall back in 1995 when none of us thought that would ever work, people trusting the web with their money.

All this makes it a great time to think about starting your own internet business.

Where tools like Yuuguu come into their own is in enabling the ‘homepreneur’ to work with other people easily. When you start a business around a passion, you quickly learn that you whilst you are great at doing ‘your thing’, your business needs ‘other things’ to succeed. Unless you can create content and products, design and run websites, market, sell and account, you will be able to use some help. And by placing practical help just one click away – anytime, anywhere, anyone – tools like Yuuguu are a great fit for your ‘backroom startup’.

If you are a budding ‘homepreneur’ – what do you have to lose? Get started! As soon as you need to work with others, you know where to come.

The ways we use Yuuguu inside the company

I started work here as a software guy, working on our server implementation. There’s quite a lot going on there. It’s got bits of Java, SQL, various HTTP and XML bindings to it, all the usual buzz word stuff for a modern server development. Our website coding is PHP – again, talking to servers via XML, XMPP and HTTP. Plenty to code, plenty of diverse technologies.

One way we handle the diversity is to use Pair Programming – the technique first brought to light in ‘Agile Methods’. It’s where two programmers sit at the same keyboard and computer screen, and both work on a piece of code. Sounds wasteful – until you try it. The benefits are real. At the very least, one guy can be typing away at the low level stuff – making it work – whilst the other can think about high level issues. The benefits are more compelling still when you pair up people with radically different – but overlapping – skillsets.

We found it particularly useful during a recent major upgrade – rewriting our screen sharing software, to make it faster, and with better looking pictures. Pairing a low-level bit twiddling expert with someone with video codec expertise proved to be a significant help in getting the job done. You find that the real-time, fully-engaged nature of pairing means that problems get found and worked on much faster. Typically, with one programmer, once they are stuck, they can spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out solutions on their own. And their colleague might well be able to solve it in seconds, due to their different background.

Finally, a shout-out with thanks to @dorkitude for asking the question about how strict we are in our application of ‘pair programming’. Cheers!

Til next time,
Have a great week –
Al.

A great picture sent in to us of the Yuuguu Web Viewer running on an Android tablet.

We’ve been somewhat pained by Apple’s decision to not use Flash technology on their iPad and iPhone products, as this means our web browser based screen sharing doesn’t work. And the whole point of us picking Flash in the first place is that 98% of all browsers at the time already had it installed. So for most people, this meant no downloads to use our web viewer. A big win for sales calls, where any obstacles beyond those of getting you and your offerings in front of a potential customer are just not needed.

But this photo cheered me back up again. If you have an Android based tablet device, you now can truly collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world – from anywhere in the world!

If you’ve used Yuuguu to share your screen, you’ll know that an image like this nice one I took this evening would give you a dilemma: Use our fast mode – but get posterised colours – or use our slow mode, if you wanted to see the image correctly. And who wants to be slow?

No more!

Launched today, we have an entirely new screen sharing technology. It’s an optimised codec that is optimised for speed, mouse movement and picture quality. A codec (coder/decoder), for those less geeky than our development team, is the piece of software which squashes your picture down the internet to make it get there faster, then unsquashes it at the other end. Our previous one was generally good – and fantastic for sharp text – but … well. We thought we should do even better. So we have!

Better Mouse Movement

The first thing we’ve done is to give you the mouse pointer. We used to show a ‘laser pointer’ red dot during a screen share to show where the ‘other’ mouse was – the mouse on the host’s computer. Quite a few people have told us they wanted to see a mouse pointer, not a red dot, so we changed that.

More importantly, the mouse updates much faster. As your host moves their mouse, you will see it on your screen share in near real time. It is *much* faster than we had before, due to a fundamentally different – and rather clever – way of handling the mouse movement.

Better Images

Our new codec squashes pictures differently. It is much better at dealing with lots of different colours than our old one for any given speed of screen sharing. The images look much more ‘photographic’ at any of our quality levels.

Faster Start Up

My personal favourite new feature – when you click ‘share my screen’, the time delay before your viewers can see the first screen has been massively reduced. It’s just much slicker for those important presentations.

Better Default Quality

We now have three settings for colour/speed. The new default is ‘medium’ which shares the screen at about the same speed as we used to, but with much better quality and many more colours. There is both a ‘more colours’ and ‘less colours’ setting. My favourite personally is to go into the settings panel, and set the default to ‘fastest’. I find that gives me all the colours and quality I need, but the sharing is really much quicker than it used to be.

This new technology is available now to everybody who tries or buys Yuuguu from our website. With our seven day free trial, it really does make sense to check this out.

Until next week -

Happy Improved Sharing!


Al.

Interesting industry news this week has been that Salesforce.com has acquired DimDim. Apparently existing contracts will be honoured, but no new DimDim customers will be taken.

On a personal note, if this means job losses (I don’t know) then my sincere condolences. That’s never easy on the people and families involved. We always thought DimDim were pretty worthy competitors in the overall scheme of things.

If you’ve followed Yuuguu on twitter for any length of time, you’ll know that we don’t do that awful trick of trying to persuade our competitor’s customers to use our service instead. We’re pretty happy about standing on our own two feet.


All the ‘screen sharing’ service providers – when you get into details – actually target different customers. Yuuguu is particularly good at Business Collaboration, and, increasingly, Unified Communications. Some of our work – like how we integrate one-click, browser-based group screen sharing into Skype is pretty innovative, as well as being useful. I digress. So you will never have seen the statement ‘DimDim people come to Yuuguu’ … errr, until you just read it then. Not our style, thank you very much.

Good news

But equally, it has been a pleasure for me personally to talk to a lot of new Yuuguu customers this week. Certainly, it seems that for a good deal of people, changing to Yuuguu has resulted in considerable cost saving (just £59/$79 for a full year!). Many people also like our simple, easy to use, just-works-without-complicated-setup ethos as well.

So my personal thanks for your time and trust in checking us out.

Even better news!

And you couldn’t have picked a better time. We’re close to a fairly major new release which will definitely delight our existing customers (definitely…) as well as our latest users. Our roadmap for 2011, following our own acquistion by Conference Calling company Powwownow is pretty exciting. Can’t say too much, but definite moves towards better integrated Unified Communications to come.

Should be a good year.

Do keep in touch …

To all our new found friends, we like to keep in touch, so make sure you:

• Follow us on twitter
• Know where to find our support forums
• Drop by on Facebook

And always remember we’re here to build the best collaboration/conferencing product there is, so all your feedback is most warmly welcomed.


Oh yes. And don’t forget to subscribe to this blog

Until next time
A warmest welcome from Al Mellor

Turns out there is one meeting you absolutely, definitely, positively cannot use Yuuguu for: Christmas Day with friends, family and children opening presents!

Our family had a great time over the break, and whilst we did send the odd Instant Message to each other (really!) it has to be said that even Yuuguu can’t make a Turkey taste good remotely.

But anyway. A very Happy New Year from me (Al) for 2011. All of us here at Yuuguu wish you every success, and hope that we can help in some way with our great-value web conferencing and collaboration tools.

We’ve certainly got a really busy roadmap this year, and if all plans work out, Yuuguu will have some extremely compelling new capabilities by the time I say Happy New Year again for 2012.

Upcoming new release

We have a new release coming out shortly – which will appear on your automatic Yuuguu upgrades, without you having to do anything – and I’ll let you know here and on twitter when it finally escapes QA into the real world. As always, we would love your feedback on it then.

He raises the point that ‘The Office’ is very important in most companies, in terms of cost, and the management desire to force people to attend one – and yet very often is not the place where productive work is done.

His argument is a little more nuanced than ‘so don’t use one’. Jason recognises that people are individual, and have different needs and tastes with regard to how they give their best. For example, some people are more creative late at night or at weekends. Some work needs to be done without the distraction inherent in ‘Management By Wandering Around’ practices.

In my own experience, I have found that I am very good at doing routine tasks in an office environment, sat close to other staff. But I simply for the life of me cannot script an original presentation.

For that, I have to go in a quiet room – and speak it out loud. I experiment with how several of the lines sound, with how I want to express ideas. I will make sure that key points scan well – so they sound nice. I pace up and down like an idiot. I don’t know why I do that; I know it sure does look off-putting to other staff – and I know that if I don’t do it, my thought processes stop.

I suspect I am not alone. Okay; maybe I *am* alone in my own specific weirdness – my wife seems to think that – but I reckon we all have something similar. Some individualistic ‘not-quite-the-done-thing’ way of getting the best out of us on behalf of our team. Some way that a typical office setting is not flexible enough to accommodate.

It’s at this point I would recommend taking that brave management decision: what do you really want? The best from your individual, talented staff? Or to do the done thing and follow The Rules ™ which clearly state that at all times, all staff are seated at a desk?

Interesting – as always – TED talk. What are your experiences? Any aspect of your work that you do better outside of the confines of the office?

(inspired by this BBC article)

As UK snow levels rise and desire to venture out falls faster than a thawed snowman’s scarf, we ask ourselves ‘can working in an office ever be a skive?’.

The received wisdom appears to be that remote workers cannot be trusted to do anything other than watch Jeremy Kyle (UK daytime TV; US readers simply breathe a sigh of relief. You simply do not want to know -ed). As a result, many are forced to difficult, depressing and often dangerous travels to an office somewhere.

So, conclusive proof. Home work equals skiving. The solution is simply to stick said skiver in an office, where skiving – so it is believed – is impossible.

But must we home skivers really accept this? Is there really no way we can practice our beloved skiving away from home comforts?

We sent our roving investigators out to an office somewhere in the frozen wastelands of the UK to find out if anything could be done.

We found that all was not lost.

Such were the findings that our reporters hid their notes, fearing reprisals. But we found them on wikileaks.ch anyway. Here is what they discovered:

The Watercooler Technique

Rather satisfyingly, a basic technique that is rather easy to pull off, requiring only equipment readily found to hand. The plastic cup is held firmly in the right hand and filled with water. A quick glance around the office should be enough to attract an accomplice. A cursory ‘Did you get that project plan?’ should be all that is needed to attract the accomplice over, and proceed to discuss just how poor last night’s match was, and how rubbish iPhone battery life actually is. All essential business stuff.

The Reverse Telecommute

Modern technology leaves no stone unturned, and the most popular technique we investigated was the Reverse Telecommute. Requires web browser access. From the sumptuous comfort – and free coffee, lighting, heating and internet – of your office chair, simply log in to your personal finances! Buy christmas presents online! Even arrange redeliveries of your friend’s sofa! All without even making a sound.

For extra effect, a few looks of concentration every now and then, as if on some difficult problem, should be enough to secure not only success but probably an Oscar.

The Stores Run

Modern business cannot survive on words alone. There are staplers, pens, stamps, envelopes, tea, milk, sandwiches, the office group lottery ticket. These items don’t appear magically you know! Someone has to get them. Our investigators were told the word ‘shop’, but in fact heard ‘opportunity’. They found that, on average, a shop run to buy a pint of milk lasts 1:42min 13 seconds, and involves several essential visits to the gadget shop, Oddbins, Tesco and that place that sells cheap SD cards for digital cameras.

The Clipboard

Our researchers found ‘The Clipboard’ was by far the most efficacious technique, but can only be pulled off with a certain amount of skill. Advanced skivers only. The props are simple. One needs a clipboard, pen, and a sheet of A4 paper on the clipboard with some arcane notes.

The technique involves bustling around the office at various locations, scrawling notes as you go. If various objects can be ‘examined’ along the run, this adds to the effect. The illusion – in the hands of experts – is complete: Important work! Deadline NOW!!

The additional master-level tactic is to wear a furrowed scowl throughout, to indicate that you are simply too busy to be interrupted with any other requests. For the professional skiver, this technique can actually go undetected for several weeks, especially if the luxury of ‘multiple departments’ is available.

It appears we skivers can all relax. The rumours of the death of skiving in the office have been greatly exaggerated.

I’d finish this piece with a witty sign out, but frankly – today, I’m working from hom….

Winners!

Congratulations are due to our friends at PowWowNow who scooped up the award for ‘Best limited budget campagn’ at last night’s B2B awards. Great win for two reasons: Who doesn’t have a limited budget? And have you seen who the competiton was? Well done!

Turkeys!

A big Hi to our many Stateside customers!


Back here in chilly old Blighty, the 25th of November is pretty much a resting day between Fireworks Night (Nov 1) and mad pre-Christmas panic, which runs pretty much Dec 01 – Dec 24! Not so in the US of A, so I understand: Thanksgiving Day has been and gone.

We hope you had a great time, and managed to get to wish all of your family a very happy day. But in case you couldn’t quite travel round to see everyone, why not fire up Yuuguu and give them a conference call.

That’s right – the whole lot! Everyone! Mom, Pa, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents – the works. It’s by far the cheapest and easiest way of getting all those people talking together by phone, all at the same time!