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.

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 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

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

Master Mouse Control Feature

In the just released update to Yakkle (v0.5.3), we added a feature called "Master Mouse Control." This feature allows the person sharing their desktop to more easily regain control back from a remote user that has been allowed mouse and keyboard control.

With Master Mouse Control, all the desktop sharer needs to do is move their mouse and they will regain control back from a remote user. Control is automatically retained by the desktop sharer for 5 seconds... which we feel is long enough to allow the sharer to be able to disable control previously granted to a remote viewer, but not too long when you want to again allow the remote viewer to have mouse and keyboard control.

In addition to Master Mouse Control, the following enhancements and fixes are included in v0.5.3:

• Improved desktop sharing efficiency. We have improved on Yakkle's already efficient screen capture algorithm to give even more CPU cycles to your applications when desktop sharing.Improved voice experience over jittery networks.
• Improved voice experience over jittery network connections. We have tweaked some parameters on our proprietary voice over IP algorithms to provide an even better voice experience over jittery networks (all while continuing to provide lossless, 16 bit audio).
• Fixed several bugs reported by our user base. We have fixed several bugs reported by our user base in the chat window area when chatting with multiple users at the same time.

As you probably already have experienced, when you fire up Yakkle it will automatically detect that a new version is available and give you the option to upgrade right within the application. You can also update your version of Yakkle by re-downloading it from our websiste 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.

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!

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.