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.

Yakkle Emoticons Are Here

Announcing release v0.5.7


We've had a real spike in the number of new Yakkle users and want to thank you all for your continued feedback and the many blogs, articles and reviews that are now appearing all over the net and all over the world. We are featuring them on our "News" page, so if you find one or write one, let us know and we'll add a link to you.


What's New In This Release?

Automatic status updates: In our last release, we introduced automatically setting your status to "Away" if you have left your computer. If you were Yakkling, we did not set your status automatically. With this release we will. If you are Yakkling and leave your computer and forget to stop Yakkling, we'll automatically change your status to "Away" for you. We've also changed the "Away" time from 5 minutes to 3 minutes, meaning that if you leave your computer for 3 minutes, we will automatically determine you are away.

New Releases: If you start Yakkle and we have a new release for you to install, we will automatically notify you of this. You can click on the "What's New?" button to instantly see what we've changed in the new release so that you can download and use it.

Emoticons are here: Send a smile, a happy face, a wink, a heart and more. When instant messaging with someone, you will now see an emoticon smiley face in the chat area. Click on this face and you will see all the different emoticons that we currently support. Pick any of these and they'll be sent along with your text to the person you are chatting with. We automatically convert the icon into text so that if you happen to be chatting with someone not using Yakkle, they will still be able to see your smiley face.

Here's our first set of emoticons.





If you want more or have a suggestion for some, send us the text pattern, like :-) and what the resulting emoticon should be and we'll draw some more.


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

Yakkle Goes Worldwide

When we embarked on building an application that we thought everyone could use, was viral in nature, and that fit in with the trends in social and business collaboration, we had no idea how to market it on essentially a zero budget. We got advice from VC’s (venture capitalists) and former CEO’s that we would need to drive users to us by embracing open standards and by connecting with existing user communities. So we spent 2007 completing our features, fixing our bugs, honing our message, and wondering if our product “had legs.” We launched an alpha program with our closest friends and family members and were pleasantly surprised with how well we “got it” in building an easy to install, simple setup and “one-click-to-use” product. We then took a bold step in going public with the launch of our web site http://www.yakkle.com and with the general availability of a beta version of our product. Then the fun began! We started getting downloads, web hits, email, we even got included in a California company's newsletter even though we had no prior contact with them. Very cool.

We found a neat web site tool call Feedjit http://www.feedjit.com which tracks where web site hits are coming from. It uses Google maps to give a relative location and will track your last 100 hits. We decided to put it on our web site one day. Within 24 hours, we had our 100 hits and we were global. San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Canada, Rio, England, France, Germany, Sweden, even China, India and Taipei had found us. “Amazing” was all we could say.

Now a month has gone by and the viral nature of our product is taking hold. We were featured in a German web site write up on our product, we were featured in a French web site write up and someone took screen shots from our web site and wrote a “How to Use Yakkle” article. We continue to submit our product to various web sites to be listed as a free download or to have someone evaluate our product. We’ve sent pointers to our web site to Realtors, teachers, tutors, and so on.

With 2008 upon us, we want to provide some insight into what's next for Yakkle. Given the feedback we are getting, we are moving quickly into enhancing Yakkle with meeting recording and playback features, easy to setup collaboration sessions with invitations, and a feature rich IM portion with fonts, colors, and emoticons. We are also looking into tighter integration with Google including new email notification, offline chats, and shared status messages."

We don’t know where 2008 will take us, but if it is anything like the last month of 2007, our journey will be wild, vast, global, and unknown.

Discover Yakkle for yourself. Come along for the ride!

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

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...

Building Yakkle (Part 3: MyOODB)

So you've decided to change the world by writing the coolest Internet application and you'd like to hear how we built ours. This and the next several posts will focus on what makes up Yakkle and will be geared towards software programmers.

Nowadays there are so many off the shelf software components to help you implement your idea, some commercial, but many are Open-Source and free. Since most reading this blog will be building their application out of their Garage we're recommending you choose open-source. Open-source software has a large community and can be really good. You just need to know what you need and where/how to look. Yakkle for instance, gets many of its components from open-source. Even our development tools are free and/or open-source.

Like we mentioned in a previous post, Yakkle uses a Distributed Object Architecture. This differs greatly from traditional client/server or even peer-to-peer applications. Distributed object software requires a new way of thinking that changes the very nature of the design. Now such architecture is not the Holy Grail, but it does change the way one approaches design. It puts an emphasis on information theory and data modeling. In fact, it extends object-oriented design across application boundaries; a holistic approach to software design.

The MyOODB Framework
For Yakkle, we based our Framework on the MyOODB project. MyOODB is an open-source, Java based software framework. Some of our Design Patterns were derived from the open-source txObject project.

Both projects provide a framework, design philosophy, and Software Components. It is important when designing your own architecture that you add such concepts into your development.

Distributed Object computing can be seen as Object-Oriented programming without bounds. Therefore our first step was to define the objects a Yakkle application would need to share in its world. For Yakkle to be a collaboration application, it needed things like Users, Voice, Desktop, and Text Messaging characteristics. So our first step was to define theses objects and their behavior. Just like a standalone object-oriented application design, but with the unique understanding that these objects would also be used in a distributed sense.

In Our Next Post
In our next post with will go into detail on how we design and implemented these objects, as well as, their user-interface interactions. Until then, if you would like to experience the result of our works go to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

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.