We’ve built on our existing services: Yuuguu Free, Yuuguu Plus and Yuuguu Teams to now address the web conferencing needs of larger companies as well as sales teams.   Our new Yuuguu Corporate service provides a simple to use instant web conferencing service, combined with instant messaging and presence to create a real time online collaboration platform.

We’ve aimed to address the issues that our users tell us have inhibited use of web conferencing to date: such as complexity to use, cumbersome scheduling, lack of branding options and cost of licenses.

So what did we do?  We’ve resolved some major irritations including: the need to go to a third party web conferencing provider’s website to host a web conference, complicated call scheduling and annoying participant downloads.  

Through Yuuguu Corporate, web conferences can be started instantly (no participant download) for improved team working or interactive sales calls, and scheduled sessions are easy to set up using any existing calendar such as Outlook, Google or Lotus Notes.  What’s more, users can host web conferences on their own websites as Yuuguu Corporate can be embedded into the host’s website, so allowing sessions to be branded.

With companies entering 2010 still looking for value for money, we’ve created a pricing package to help – we’re fixing costs across your organisation!  Yuuguu Corporate provides an instant web conferencing, instant messaging and presence service, across an organisation and with key partners and suppliers, for less than any of the major players.

Actually, we’re unique in allowing unlimited invited external participants, for no extra charge, so extending collaboration to all the people you need to work with.

We’re really looking forward to your feedback, so get in touch.

And finally a big cheer and thank you to everyone for all the hard work involved in making this happen.  Virtual beers are on me!

Skype integration has always been a hot topic request from our users and the ability to aggregate their contacts on all major instant messaging services (Google Talk, MSN, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM and now Skype) in one place. This new release allows Yuuguu users to instant message, perform instant screen sharing and collaborate in real time with colleagues and friends from one unified interface, without the required downloads found in other similar services – only the host needs access to Yuuguu.

Yuuguu users will now benefit from the free and low cost VOIP calling features of Skype, with the free and low cost instant screen sharing, real time collaboration and web conferencing capabilities of Yuuguu. This integration provides a more powerful and much lower cost alternative to existing online meeting and unified communications services.

So many new and existing Yuuguu customers are now taking advantage of this integration launch and we are welcoming all feedback which is looking very positive already on Twitter.

Increase your team’s skill set and complete your existing projects when full time employment is not an option. Hiring ‘remote workers‘ can make perfect business sense. ‘Too much to do and not enough time to do it’ is a phrase we hear many times. Elance comes to the rescue with their top 100 jobs to outsource and here’s our pick of the bunch.

Taken from the Elance website, here’s my pic of jobs:

Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing
‘The old axiom “If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t apply here. Search engine placement is critical to anyone with a website; even if you do build it, they won’t come if they can’t find you. Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists help your site gain high rankings. The algorithms change constantly so techniques naturally evolve – unless you’re in the web field you’re unlikely to have the necessary skills.’

Search engine marketing (SEM) is also a specialized field. It can take days, months and years of expertise to write effective ads, place your banners on the right sites, set up effective affiliate programs, or manage your pay-per-click programs so you get the most visitors and more importantly conversions.’

Skilled providers can do that for you – plus they can keep track of new developments and trends in the SEO and SEM fields.’

Virtual assistants
‘As your business grows so does your workload; especially your administrative workload. Time spent on administrative tasks is time you can’t spend continuing to grow your business. Instead of hiring employees, you can effectively multiply your staff by hiring a virtual assistant, either for a one-time project or for ongoing, long-term support.’

Virtual assistants can take on almost any business or personal task, whether it’s traditional office support or website maintenance and updates. They can handle word processing, answering phones, paying bills, scheduling appointments, maintaining appointment schedules, even ordering flowers or making dinner reservations. A good virtual assistant can go beyond administrative support and help develop new clients and provide marketing support.’

Mobile Applications
‘Either you yourself or someone you know owns an iPhone, BlackBerry, gPhone, or Windows Mobile phone. Mobile applications are proving to be big revenue streams for businesses, and the market is only going to grow bigger. Whether you’ve got a clever idea for the next killer iPhone app or you want to bring your useful desktop application into a mobile form, an Elance provider can create exactly what you’re looking for.’

Do your research
Hiring remote workers is similar to hiring full time employees so here’s some quick steps to consider.

1. Feedback - What did others think? Elance provides feedback information from clients.
2. Is their price realistic - An hourly rate is a good measure but how many hours will take to complete the project?
3. Are they willing to use technology to collaborate over the internet - build this in as a project work flow with milestones for communication to ensure your project runs smoothly.
4. Portfolio - Does their work suit what you are looking for on your project.
5. Do they work as part of a team or alone - Different skills may require different people to hire. If this is the case then hiring a team that already work together on projects may be a better way to go.

See the full list of outsourcing opportunities on Elance’s website.

The problem here is that people are thinking of Free as just a marketing tool -eg i’ll give away content/product for free to hold these new pretenders at bay whilst still maintaing my old business model.

The reality is that Free is a business model. This is a subtle but very important difference.

If you want to give away ’stuff’ for free and generate revenue from a small portion of paying users, then you need to have a cost base that allows you to make profit from this. You need to have expertise and business process in:

1. Acquiring customers for your free ’stuff’ at very low (zero if possible) cost

2. Getting people to use your free ’stuff’ so that they attribute value to it

3. Getting people to part with some of the value to you in the form of payment

4. Running your business to make profit whilst supporting all of the above

None of this is easy - many Web 2.0 companies that set out from day one to go down this route failed to make it work.

Its no wonder that large companies with established business models are fighting any transition to this model tooth and nail. The problem for a number of them is that customer expectations have been reset by new companies that can make this model work. This is the central argument of Freeconomics.

The incumbents have no choice now but adapt their business models, and embrace the freemium model. If they don’t they will die. Nowhere can this be seen more than in the media and publishing industries. As with any market transition it is painful and it takes time for value to be re-distributed in a fair manner.

Increasingly though this model is spreading to other industries. I was over in the Valley last week on WebMission 09 with some great Enterprise 2.0 companies, many of whom rely on word of mouth to replace big marketing budgets and web touch sales to replace travelling sales people.

They are fundamentally altering the cost structures and business models in that industry. More importantly, they are altering the customer expectation of how they buy services and what they pay for those services. Most of these companies are profitable, all are revenue generating and growing fast.

So is ‘Free’ dead - absolutely no. It is the other way around - ignore it at your peril.

I shall leave the last word to Chris Andersen:

“I’m not telling the apple to fall - I’m just telling that the apple will fall. That is what the laws of digital economics require. …you either compete with free or use free but fundamentally [it] is about how you make real money…”

With business leaders originally claiming this could prove a “nightmare” for small firms, here’s five tips on how to gear up for possible applications and make flexible working work for your company.

Understanding the process of application

The whole process can take up to 14 weeks to come in to effect from the initial request for a change to a flexible working pattern.

1. 28 days to arrange a discussion about a request for flexible working from a member of your staff
2. 14 days after the discussion is the deadline to inform them about the result of your discussion.
3. 14 days are allocated to your employee to appeal against the decision
4. 14 days for you to hear that appeal
5. 14 days after the hearing to inform your employee of the appeal decision.

After this, workers can seek conciliation through ACAS or other similar bodies, if required.

Be proactive, and set in place a defined workflow that guarantees that all employees who request flexible working are dealt with in a consistent way. Without these procedures in place you could find your human resources (HR) department hard pushed to deal with what could be a significant increase in requests starting today!

Take time to understand your staff and the roles they play

Set aside time to have a chat with your staff on an individual basis for the following reasons:

1. Identify possible employees who wish to apply for flexible working so you are more prepared
2. Look at the roles they play within the company and what sort of flexible work pattern may suit both the employee and your company. You can find the types of flexible working patterns on the Business Link website.

Trust your staff

Whilst 42 per cent of staff were confident that they could work better remotely, a recent survey of 3,743 employees by BT Business and Nortel shows that less than one in 10 UK small businesses trusts employees to work out of the office.

Proper communication with flexible workers and effective monitoring through technology can overcome this barrier. Choose  communication and remote collaborative technology incorporating presence and instant messaging to help to allay such worries and increase the level of trust.

Understand the effects on your business

The Business Link website lists a number improvements on how flexible working can benefit you and your business, here’s our pick of the bunch.

1. Greater cost-effectiveness and efficiency, such as savings on overheads when employees work remotely.
2. More job satisfaction and better staff morale.
3. Reduced levels of sickness absence.
4. Greater continuity as staff, who might otherwise have left, are offered hours they can manage.
5. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty as a result of the above.
6. Improved competitiveness, such as being able to react to changing market conditions more effectively.

Security

With an increase in flexible working and teleworking, become more aware of the security of business-critical data that is taken outside the office, and managing the network technology used by flexible workers for collaboration and secure access back-office data. Think about how your employees will have access to your data and documents, will it be via a VPN (Virtual Private Network), working on remote collaboration software that allows desktop control and file sharing or simply data that is transferred via laptops or USB devices.

Such data and services should be encrypted to the highest level. Choose a remote collaboration software that uses 128-bit SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which gives you the highest level of protection possible through online collaboration software. The same encryption is implemented by Banks and other organisations that use credit cards or make other financial or confidential transactions over the Internet.

Many companies small, medium and large can benefit from smarter working practices such as flexible working so make sure you do your research and start to look at possible ways to incorporate this into your business planning.

Sideline - Adobe AIR Application Review from RefreshingApps on Vimeo.

I know what your saying ‘doesn’t tweetdeck do this?’ Well, yes it does but put simply, Yahoo have done it better in my opinion. The user experience feels so much nicer in Sideline! By completely ignoring the main feed of your twitter posts, bucketing your custom searches into bigger groups really feels like you have control over the twitter population, or at least a handle on what you need from it.

The Trends group tab contains a collection of topics currently trending in Twitter, whilst adding your favorite posts to the favorites tab helps you keep an archive of your most interesting posts. By adding your own group tab you can quickly build up a group of custom search terms which is very powerful for keeping an eye on your brand. Click on your search term and take advantage of advanced settings including search by people ‘with a positive attitude’, people ‘asking a question’ or search for posts from one specific person to the next.

The disappointing part for me is that it does not sync directly with your twitter account , it’s more of a general monitor software at the moment but that aside (i’m sure the Yahoo developer network will be adding this), you can still link to other twitter profiles and reply to twitters, it just links you to your twitter account in your browser instead.

Syncing with your Twitter account within Sideline would have made this my new marketing monitor for Twitter by far. The user interface is clean and easy to read compared to other services, but i’m not sure how long I want to go back and forth to my browser each time i want to reply to a post!

The neat thing is yahoo made the decision to open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product. There’s more about developing the app on the Yahoo User Interface Blog. The first beta release is out and the code is hosted on github.

Doomi claims “Dead simple to-do’s. Designed to stay out of your way, easy to use and look pretty.” They’re not wrong!

Forget the usual hassle of creating and managing lists, Doomi lets you reorganize your to-do’s via ‘drag and drop’, set custom remind times and keep a record of old to-do’s.

Taken from the Doomi website “Doomi was designed from the ground up to stay out of your way and out of your browser. It has all the features you use, and none of the ones you don’t.” One thing i wont miss is deciding what priority status to set a task, the single most annoying feature in many list building applications.

Doomi obviously has future plans which include offline/online synchronization and customization of your color scheme, but this is one hell of a tool that i will continue to use.

Given the size of the company (One guy named John) this is a great example of how breaking the mold can produce something quite special.

If you want to stick with your old way of working then there are loads to choose from but here are a few: Forcedo |  Remeber the milk |  Gmail Tasks |  Tudumor

The Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as “tweets”, which are limited to 140 characters each.

Clearly this is a major challenge for a broadsheet newspaper publication, but we are pleased to see that that they are taking it very seriously:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

In fact, we at Yuuguu are delighted to take them a step further into the 21st century. Reading newsprint over somebody’s shoulder in the bus queue just smacks of yesteryear. Instead, simply load up the Guardian’s wonderful new Twitter page on your browser, share your screen with Yuuguu Web Share, and all your friends can read it over your shoulder from anywhere in the world.

Yuuguu, Twitter, The Guardian. Gutenberg would have been proud.

Saving powerful technology for scheduled online meetings is one use but make your monthly subscription become invaluable to the way you conduct business by taking advantage of the tools and features for everyday use. Here are my top five reasons for using online meeting tools everyday.

1. Productivity - Get it done there and then! Team Yuuguu believe in a proactive attitude towards online collaboration and shorter interactions. Instead of preparing for scheduled meetings, working this way maintains our focus on the tasks at  hand keeping our productivity levels high.

2. Build your private network - Your online meeting service should allow you to build your own private network of clients and colleagues for online collaboration. ‘Presence status’ within Yuuguu enables you to see when your contacts are online. This is a great asset to your working day, having the ability to contact clients direct whilst online and vice versa can increase your repeat business and strengthen your client relationships.

3. Security - Talking to our customers found that many of them share confidential documents and have private instant chat discussions. Choosing Yuuguu to share their screen and work collaboratively on these sensitive documents has proven far more secure than having multiple versions on email. Sending Instant messages to their private Yuuguu network of colleagues and clients ensures that they are not overheard when working remotely.

4. Collaboration in real time - Describing what is on your screen to a person not in the same room is hard, but actually describing how to do something on another person’s computer is even harder. Your online meeting service may have the ability to control another person’s keyboard and mouse just like Yuuguu, allowing you to show exactly what to do whilst the other person can watch your actions in real time. This is great for remote support and online demonstrations of software or simply working on the same document in remote teams over the internet.

5. Multiple contacts on multiple networks - With so many services for online meetings, Instant messaging and collaboration tools, it’s hard to know which to choose. Yuuguu turns your existing AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Live Messenger contacts into a business network that you can work with over the internet by importing them directly into your  Yuuguu contacts list.

We still have weekly management meetings (’We like to keep those short too’) and Yuuguu is ideal for meetings of that type with its integrated global conferencing service but it is all to easy to think of your online meeting services for scheduled online meetings only. Don’t miss out on a smarter way of using the tools you pay for each month.

Like anything in life, behind all good business practices are the relationships that you build and carefully nurture along the way. So how can social media applications and collaborative software change the way we think of offering support? I started with the main features and thought how I could apply them.

Build your Network/Community
This was the most obvious place to start, but i want you to think of these two words ‘Micro Community’. We’re not talking about building up a Facebook page here, what i am talking about is building your Micro Community of clients like a live online directory with which you can touch from time to time and re-offer your services.

To do this you’re going to need a service that offers the ability to create a contacts list with ‘presence status’. This will let you know when your clients are online and vice versa.

Live Twitter searches
Depending on the type of company, a live twitter search can reap many rewards to building new and existing relationships. Services such as Twhirl and Tweetdeck both offer the ability to search for keywords on twitter but here’s two ways in which i use them to provide support to our customers:

1. Search for your company name - This allows you to support anyone who is twittering about you and your services. Using Tweetdeck allows you to keep your search active and you receive live comments as they happen to which you can give an instant reply. Twhirl on the other hand is just as easy to manage, allowing you to search at your convenience rather than notifying you ever few minutes.

2. Search for what your company does - Think of the main features or functions of your company and then search for anyone talking about that terminology. These potential customers could easily be looking for your services and by offering them free advice can easily result in a loyal customer.

Collaboration tools
Screen sharing and sharing control of your customers computer can offer some real interesting uses for support amongst different industries other than the normal IT remote support. Here’s how i see two short examples of utilising these features.

Creative companies – For anyone in the creative industry, you can benefit from harnessing the power of online collaboration tools. Simple fast screen sharing can make showing concepts a much more valuable experience for both you and your clients. Instant feedback without the travel would save you time and money and help projects run smoother. By building in this form of support on projects, your clients will now see you in a new light and be much more likely to work with you again.

Business consultants – It is often the case that Start-Ups and established companies of any nature seek business planning advice from professional consultants. By using tools which allow sharing control of computers over the  internet and allowing collaborative work on the same document, you reduce  the risk of working on obsolete versions as multiple copies get emailed  around. Offering support remotely can increase your pool of prospective customers to a global scale.

Integration with other Networks
Now that so many people have access to so many networks, choose a service that can syncronize with other networks and import your contacts into the one application for easy management. What’s more, you don’t then have to ask your contacts to.

Integrated Conference calling
For when instant messages are not practical, integrated conference call services in collaboration software can enhance the experience of your clients and offer real benefit when clients reside in other countries. Make sure you pick a service that offers bridge numbers in other countries such as Yuuguu or a service that allows you to pay for the full call.

Update through social media
Don’t just wait until your customers have a problem to react. At Yuuguu we work with an attitude towards ‘proactive’ and not ‘reactive’ support. You simply can’t keep track of all of your customers by first name if you have a customer base in the hundreds of thousands and notify each one with a feature they wanted some months ago when it goes live. So be proactive in supporting all customers with new information.Use social media services such as the new Facebook pages to instantly update your customers. Facebook pages offer customers to become a fan of your page. You can offer  them the chance to provide feedback and share that feedback with other customers, online discussions and to participate in your latest poll on new features.

Let’s sum it all up
Put aside your thoughts of what you think remote support is – the IT support person telling you to switch off and then back on again. Well it is now time to ’switch on’ and think about how you can make a difference to your customers.

If we all keep in mind that behind most things in business, relationships play such a big part, then support is more than what we offer at present. It’s not about just giving customers a set of instructions on how to do something or just completing a project. It’s more about how we can use new technology to enhance our day to day relationships and workflow to provide a better experience.