Yuuguu’s Ten Minutes September 12, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in chat, collaboration, screen sharing.add a comment
What it is: Yuuguu (from the Japanese word for fusion) is “a solution to help people work together remotely, through any firewall, across different platforms, with as many colleagues as needed, just as if they were sat right next to each other.”
Executive summary: Good way to quickly get up and running and share screens and chat online with colleagues and friends. Don’t expect cute graphics; the name is about the only Web 2.0 thing about this service. And the price: free.
Installation is pretty smooth. A 10 MB download, the usual installation stuff:
You sign up from the application itself:
It’s cute enough to try to figure out your name from your email address. Always a good sign.
You can add people manually, or have Yuuguu find them for you:
It’s early days, I guess: No one I knew seemed to have an account, or it didn’t find them:
Which was weird because I know at least one person using it who is also in my address book:
Still, it works pretty well from there on, if you don’t mind the Java feel to it all. Add contacts and you can share screens straightaway, either at high res or faster low resolution:
Both seemed to work even on slower connections. You can chat at the same time:
You can also get cheap international calls through the software, though I didn’t try that.
Verdict: There are other products out there, and they may be as good, but this is a good simple effort for collaborating, or, as the company says, just surfing and co-habiting online.
Ten Minutes With Egnyte April 16, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in backup, collaboration, editing, file sharing, productivity, web apps.1 comment so far
What is it: Egnyte describes itself as a “Web 2.0 content sharing solution that combines sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability. Using continuous synchronization, Egnyte seamlessly integrates the desktop with the web.” In English, that means a way to share, search and tag your documents with others online, keeping old versions and an audit of changes along the way. Its beta version was lauched April 15.
Executive summary: Promising quick and straightforward way of collaborating on documents if you don’t want to actually edit online. Not ready for primetime.
My ten minutes: Signing up is painless and requires no waiting around for an email confirmation. You’re then invited to upload files individually, or download an extra piece of software that will let you upload folders or bunches of files (obviously better if you’re planning on sharing a lot more files.)
It reminds me of Groove in the sharing idea, and the storing of version histories but it leverages Web 2.0 to add important extra features, including being able to search the content of files and tagging.
Uploading a single file was easy, following the instructions, although it is only possible to select one file at a time, and no folders. For that you need a widget, and that was when things started to go wrong for me. The widget loaded fine, and the process was self-explanatory, with the selected folder and subfolder but the folder and its subfolders acquiring a little orange ‘e’ to indicate they’d been “activated”, but that was as far as it went. Clicking the Done button merely took me back to the same page I’d been on, telling me I had to select folders. The system tray widget was no better: Clicking on “Upload now” merely brought up a message telling me an upload was in process:
replaced shortly thereafter by another telling me the upload was complete:
The folder in question never arrived alongside a file I had uploaded manually. Indeed, a second file I tried to upload manually suggested it was there, and yet upon closer inspection wasn’t. I still can’t see what I might have done wrong here, and if it was an important file I was sharing with my boss, I would be in a panic by now.
My verdict: The ten minutes rule doesn’t mean that if a product is broken it’s all over. Ten minutes, the theory goes, should be enough for a product’s qualities to reveal itself, not whether it works seamlessly. Egnyte, despite its frankly awful name, clearly has promise; the guys behind it have thought things through and it has the whiff of potential to it. But the problem is this: Online collaboration is fraught with peril, since you’re asking punters to entrust valuable documents to your servce. I’d say Egnyte needs another six months before it’s worth another ten minutes.
Score: 5 out of 10, but worth a second look.
Thanks to: StartupSquad (which has more details on features I wasn’t able to test.)
Ten Minutes With Mindomo April 9, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in collaboration, Flash, mindmapping, productivity.3 comments
What is it: Mindomo is “a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser – with no complex software to install or maintain.” Anyone familiar with mindmapping, and MindManager, will recognise the terrain. The company behind it is Romania-based Expert Software Applications.
Executive Summary: If you mind map, another useful option. If you don’t, a good place to start.
My ten minutes: Mindomo opens in a separate browser window and is, unsurprisingly, a Flash app. The interface is simple, and borrows more than a little from Microsoft Office’s ribbon idea (or maybe it’s a licensee?) This works well although as with Peepel, it tends to reduce space on the screen.
If you’re used to mindmaps, and in particular MindManager, Mindomo will be very straightforward, right down to the keyboard shortcuts for adding subbranches and branches. In fact in some ways it feels smoother than MindManager, although I don’t know why. There is a generous array of features available, from being able to change the shape of branches to adding a rudimentary image here and there to brighten things up.
I did hit some snags. Flash prevented me from selecting everything on the page when I wanted to change fonts or layout, and my effort to register (necessary if you want to save your mindmap) failed. Neither was I able to export to PDF (one of the supported formats): the process seemed to work but the file could not be found. I also found that I wasn’t able to import a MindManager map.
For collaboration, it seems to be possible to save a map as either a public or private one, and, if public, to be able to set whether others can read, copy, modify or delete those maps. As far as I can see it’s not possible to set whether a map is accessible only by certain other users. I’m guessing that is in the works.
Verdict: Great promise as a quick brainstorming app if you don’t have Mindmanager, or Freemind, or just want something quick and dirty. But it needs some work.
Score: 7 out of 10
Ten Minutes With Highrise March 20, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in calendars, collaboration, contacts, organizers.add a comment
Intro: Highrise is another product from 37Signals, who make project-organizing, collaborative websites like Basecamp, Campfire and Backpack. Highrise focuses on organizing your contacts in a more imaginative way than an address book: “Highrise is your homebase for everyone that’s important to your business. It puts together all those little points of contact so you can see the bigger picture. It makes one history out of many interactions. Highrise helps you make sense of it all.”
Exec Sum: Quick to figure out, useful if you’re having problems keeping tabs on the people your company is dealing with. Not, though, if you don’t like paying for stuff, or hate entering data.
My tenminut.es: Having used 37Signals stuff before it all looked familiar, perhaps too much so. At first I thought it looked too much like their other services to be, well, different. But it doesn’t take long to figure out the distinguishing marks: Basecamp builds itself around projects and collaboration; Campfire is group-oriented chat. Backpack is a dumping ground for stuff. Highrise is a group database of who your business is dealng with. It’s built around “cases” – closing a sale, getting a jaded and elusive journalist to write about your product, etc.
To make it work, of course, you have to add your data. It’s easy enough, with all the AJAXy niceness you’d expect, but it could be easier. There are separate fields, for example for first and second names. That’s one extra step I don’t want to make if I’m dragging or copying from somewhere else. I could upload a vCard instead, but if I can do that, why not let me import my whole address book, or at least select from a list?
Once you’ve entered a few key contacts you can add notes, tasks and other information about them and about your dealings with them. Great if more than one of you is dealing with them. You can group these notes around “cases” as well as people; so, say, you’re trying to woo a WSJ columnist you can build a case called “WSJ wooing” and have colleagues involved in the wooing share their information (including emails) on one page. I couldn’t test this because the free version doesn’t allow you to add cases (prices go from $12 a month to $150 a month.)
Verdict: As usual a quality product from 37Signals that is intuitive and well-thought out. I’d like to see more generous features in the free version, and less legwork to get it up and keep it running.
Score: 7 out of 10
Update March 23: Impressively, 37Signals have listened to feedback and changed some of their plans. The free option now includes 1 case open at any one time, and increased the number of contacts from 25 to 250. More details here. I’d still like to see easier uploading of contacts, and of course synchronizing with other programs and devices. But this is a good start.
