Coming Soon: Yakkle + Twitter

We've been very busy this month of April and thought we would update our user community with some great news.

Yakkle is branching out! With our integrated IM, Voice and Desktop Sharing features making up our base product, we are almost ready to release Twitter integration into Yakkle. What does this mean? You will be able to log in to your Twitter account and view all the "tweets" you'd like. You can create statuses, reply to your friends, pick your favorites and follow other Twitter users that your are interested in. Not only that, Yakkle will notify you of any Twitter updates that you might want to view. That's just for starters.... when we are ready with this release, we'll let our users find the new features.

We've also taken care of some issues found by our users and continue to improve our user experience, from our web site through using Yakkle. We've also been working on some more Emoticons.

For all of our international users (which there is a lot!) we are looking into translating Yakkle into different languages. We'll be calling on our user community to help with the translation. Look for the "Help Us Translate" link on our web site and you can help internationalize Yakkle, making it the first multi-language collaboration product.

Check us out on Vator.tv, watch our Yakkle YouTube video, and read about our software certification on Softpedia.com.

Turbocharged Desktop Sharing

Announcing Release v0.5.6

First, we want to thank all you Yakklers out there that gave us feedback, sent us feature requests and told us about issues you were having.

Here's the latest goodies:

• Usability improvements including: tighter spacing in the Contacts list so that you can see more of your contacts without having to scroll, as well as some color, font and icons cleanup.
  


• File Sharing fixes: for those sharing very large files. See instantly how much data has been transferred and how much is left to go.
  


• Desktop Sharing performance: the desktop sharing code has been optimized and supercharged to bring you the best desktop sharing performance that Java can offer.
  


• Automatic status updates: have you ever set yourself to be "available" and then walked away from your computer? Your friends, family, or colleagues see that you are available but get no response when trying to Yakkle or Chat with you. With this release, Yakkle will automatically see that you are away and change your status to "Away". When you return, Yakkle will automatically reset your status to what it was before you left your computer. There's no need for away messages now!
  


• Googlemail.com support: for some of you, your gmail account is actually googlemail.com and not gmail.com. Yakkle now automatically picks the proper server to log you into and to get you connected.
  

Have fun with this latest release... get your own copy of Yakkle at http://www.yakkle.com

Introducing Yakkle video

We recently were inspired to create a little video introduction to Yakkle. Take a look and let us know what you think.




To experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, head over to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Yakkle 2008 - New Features

With the start of the New Year, Yakkle is getting new features. After listening to user feedback, we've decided to integrate Gmail into Yakkle so Google Talk users can now fully convert to become Yakkle users. So, this release now contains email integration with Google's GMAIL. What does this mean? If you are running Yakkle and new emails come in to your GMAIL account, Yakkle will instantly notify you of these emails and will even let you read a small snippet from the email.



You will also notice that Yakkle now uses a system tray icon (look in the lower right hand corner of your Windows screen and you'll see other applications icons as well). You can double-click on the Yakkle icon to open up Yakkle. You can right click on the Yakkle icon to exit Yakkle or to view your emails.



You will also notice that the Yakkle icon will pop up messages for you if an email arrives or if one of your users goes online or if you receive a new text message from someone.



Now, as a Yakkle user, you can start up Yakkle and leave it up and running all the time. Take advantage of the email, user, and message notifications that Yakkle will present to you. With this version of Yakkle, you will be required to update to Java 1.6, which you are probably already running. If not, follow the directions to upgrade as it will only take a minute.

If you are a new user to Yakkle, try using the "Show Help Text" menu item under the "View" menu. This will provide you with text on your toolbar icons so that you can quickly and easily identify the "Start Yakkling" icon, or the "Mute" icon, etc.

....these features are just a start to what will be coming in 2008 from ZenViva. Get your own copy of Yakkle now from http://www.yakkle.com/

Yakkle Comparison Charts

Based upon its features, Yakkle straddles two market segments as identified in the charts below.







If you currently use any of the listed products, we invite you to take Yakkle for a spin. You'll be Yakkling in under a minute....as opposed to doing long complicated installations, reading manuals, signing up for services and getting demonstrations just to understand the product. This is why we believe we are the only true "Instant Collaboration" tool in the marketplace today.

Happy Yakkling in 2008 http://www.yakkle.com

The Yakkle Difference

Imagine all the people who use instant messaging everyday. It’s a staggering number and it’s growing all the time. There’s literally millions of users online right now sending messages.

Now imagine if you had a product that could take a basic IM session and supercharge it. What do we mean by that? Say you are at the office and you are IMing with a colleague. What if you were one click away from connecting your voice to them to have a discussion and connecting your desktop to them to share an idea? What if you were another click away from bringing in a third or fourth person into the mix and having an instant conference call? Each of you now speaking with each other using crystal clear sound and each of you being able to share your desktop with anyone in the meeting.

Who could use Instant Collaboration?

• A real-estate agent wants to speak with his clients and show them house listings from his computer to theirs.
• A teacher wants to connect with her students for an extra tutoring session.
• A salesperson wants to present his product to customers all over the world.
• A customer support person that needs to connect with their customer and remotely fix a problem for them.

We call this instant collaboration and we think there is an untapped market for a cost effective chat, talk and desktop sharing product that does not require a central server to host these sessions.

Our company is ZenViva, our first product is Yakkle, and we welcome you to “share your ideas, your world, yourself.” http://www.yakkle.com

Collaborating Locally

When we think of collaboration software, we think of IM (instant messaging) from our computer to someone else's wherever they are, which is usually at a different location than we are. But what if we could use collaboration software when we're in the same room with our co-workers? You may ask, "Why would I want to do that? I'm in the same room?" Well, we have all been in meetings where a topic is discussed. Usually it's a brainstorming session, or design review, or even a demo being given. We've been in those meetings where everyone brings their laptops to take notes as well.

In comes Yakkle. Now we can connect to everyone in the room and each participant can share their own desktop.

What does that mean? We might be the one with the design document, so we open it on our computer and share it to the group. Others might have supporting documents or marked up copies of the design document that they reviewed the day before. They can share their desktops as well. Now we hold our meeting. As the document is reviewed or ideas are discussed, we can capture them in real-time and everyone can see our edits instantly. If someone thinks we entered the concept or idea wrong, they can comment on it right then or better yet, give them control of our desktop to make the edit themselves. If someone else has some idea to chime in with, everyone in the meeting can jump to their desktop and see it. Imagine being able to capture everything being discussed in real-time and having our participants see the document come to life on their own computer. Rather than hand editing a hardcopy of the document, we don't leave the room until all the edits are made and everyone agrees with them. The design review is done AND there's no follow up review to be held to make sure the edits were done right. There's no need to.

So the meeting ends, but first we want to give everyone the latest copy of the document, so we use the built-in file sharing and push our document out to all the meeting participants. Yes, we could email it to them, but then they’d have to weed it out of their email, maybe they'll misplace it, maybe they'll say they never got it….

Now that's what I call a productive meeting!

Try this for yourself at http://www.yakkle.com

Oh, and while the meeting is going on, Yakkle will create a conference chat tab to allow a group chat, but will also let us send private messages to anyone in the meeting as well….

Introducing Conference Tabs

When using a typical collaboration or chat tool, you get to send instant messages to someone who can then reply back. In practice, our Yakkle users are connecting with 2 or more users simultaneously and requested the ability to send one message to everyone in their session. We already had the "Send All" button for sending one message to everyone, but users were forgetting to press it and were just entering their message and pressing "enter".

Introducing Conference Tabs.
When you start Yakkling with someone on your Contacts list, you get instantly connected to them, a Conference Tab is automatically created, you hear their voice and you can see their desktop. You can then bring additional contacts into this session. Now you all hear each other and you can all see each others desktop. Here's a screen shot of a 3-way Yakkle session:



At the top of your Yakkle tab area, your fellow Yakklers are listed and your user icons will animate when someone is speaking so you can see who is talking. At the bottom of your Yakkle tab area is the IM/text messaging area. Entering text into this tab is sent to everyone in your session, similarly incoming messages from your Yakklers are placed here. However, should you want to send a private message to someone you are Yakkling with, you can go to their tab, enter your message, hit return and only they will get the message.

Try it out yourself. Go to www.yakkle.com and get your free download now and let us know if there's a feature you want to see...

New Yakkle Website

When we first had Yakkle ready for testing with the user community, we knew we would need a web site and we would need to communicate - What Yakkle Is?

We're proud to announce that our web site is up and running, complete with a "What's Yakkle" slide show and commentary to take you quickly through the product so you can see how easy it is to use. Our goal all along has been "click and go" and we think we've achieved that.

In designing our web site, we wanted to achieve simplicity, elegance, ease of use, and extendability. Being developers, we think with objects and repeating any code more than once means the design has flaws.

Enter style sheets. Yet another syntax to learn, but the effort is worth it!
We've actually ended up with just a few lines of html for each of our pages and the rest is common across all the pages. With the style sheets we can now change our web sites look and feel with just one edit.

A word of advice. If you are designing a web site, you are sure to get lots of feedback, so make sure you organize your pages, your thoughts and can easily make changes via your style sheet. Oh yea, and use Yakkle! You can share your browser to your coworkers, clients, family or friends, and let them give you instant feedback on what they like, don't like. Then make your edits, refresh the browser and collaborate until everyone is happy with the results....

....we do this every day and so can you. Come experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, check out www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Let us know how you like the web site too!

Yakkle Beta Update is Ready

The next time you start up Yakkle, you may see a message that a new version is now available and you have the option to download it. What’s in this new version? Here’s the list:

• Want to quickly see how many of your contacts are “online”? The Contacts Group label now shows an online count, for example, if you have 6 contacts in your Family group and 3 are online right now, your group label will read: “ Family (3/6) “.
• Want to insert a carriage return while you are typing an Instant Message to someone? Today, pressing the “enter” key will send your text message. Now, press “shift” + “enter” and you’ll insert a carriage return into your message.
• How do I know if someone is sharing their desktop to me? The desktop tabs, located on the right hand side of the Yakkle application, become active when someone is sharing their desktop. With this release, the desktop icon will become animated when someone is sharing their desktop. This should grab your attention and let you see quickly and easily which desktops you can go to.
• Want to control the sound effects? With the Yakkle->My Configuration menu you can turn on or turn off sounds when a Contact connects to you, when a text message arrives, and when a contacts status changes.
• When using Yakkle, you will get popup messages in the lower right hand corner of your PC screen when someone adds you, deletes you, wants to Yakkle with you, etc. These message will automatically scroll off you screen after a few seconds. Now you can close them immediately by clicking on their title bar “X” button.
• There are a few other minor tweaks and bug fixes with this new beta version as well.
  
  Want to let us know about a feature request, defect or issue you are having with Yakkle? Use the Help->Feedback form and we’ll consider your feature for our next update.
  
  As always, come experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, check out www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

What is Yakkle?

In our last post we talked a bit about ourselves. Now let's turn our attention to our first product, Yakkle.

Yakkle is a revolutionary new application that provides Instant Collaboration.

Yakkle combines the best features of existing instant messaging (IM) and voice (VoIP) applications with the ability to share desktops in real time, all within a single application.

It's kind of a triple-play. Now you can connect with anyone on the Internet, send them a text message, speak to them with superb sound quality, and show them anything you have on your PC, like photos or documents. You can even let them control your mouse and keyboard from their computer. Then without having to perform any disruptive application reconfiguration or restart, you can turn things around and have the person you are Yakkling with share their desktop back to you.

Even better, with Yakkle you are not limited to collaborating with just one other person, but you can instantly collaborate in a group. Unlike existing desktop presentation solutions, Yakkle doesn’t require you to purchase a premium service to collaborate with more than one other person. Yakkle also doesn't require you to set up a meeting or email out special pass-codes. With Yakkle you just find some folks in your contact list that are online and start Yakkling!

We believe that Yakkle is a first of its kind application providing a unique way to truly collaborate. To experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, check out www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Welcome to the Yakkle Blog

Yakkle is the first product brought to you by the ZenViva guys (a.k.a. Zenviva, LLC). We created this blog to let you know about exciting things going on with Yakkle and with us. Along the way we also plan on sharing knowledge we have gained during the creation of Yakkle as a software application.

But first a bit about us...

We are a small group of technologists looking to develop the software applications of tomorrow. We bring together a diverse skill set of system architecture, high performance distributed object expertise, Java development experience, industry knowledge, web, graphics and branding know how and go to market strategies. We pride ourselves in working on and solving technological problems that others say "Can't be done."

In subsequent posts we will talk more about Yakkle and all the innovative things you can do with it, but it you can't wait until then you can go to http://www.yakkle.com/ right now and watch a demo, or even better yet download it and start Yakkling!