Chicken Wisdom -or- Hey, Nice vYew
Ah, the free sample—staple of bakeries and food courts everywhere. “Hey buddy, check out this ginger chicken on a toothpick!”
That’s confidence, right? This stuff is so good you just taste it and you’ll want to buy it.
You know what I love about the food court sample? It’s always there. Sometimes on a busy day I just walk back and forth grabbing toothpick after toothpick. Score!
Think they notice it’s me over and over? Think they care? Listen, the chicken is cooked anyway, someone’s got to eat it.
When the day comes that I’m hungry enough, I’ll buy a meal. In the meantime I tell hungry friends to go eat there—ooh, did someone say viral marketing?
And now is when I compare ginger chicken to Web applications.
I just finished an online whiteboard collaboration with my team that works 80 miles away from me, and it was fantastic. “Oh, WebEx,” you say. “Maybe MS LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect.” Nope. Check out vYew, a FREE online collaboration and conferencing tool. It rocks.
Their model is much like the ginger-chicken-on-a-toothpick model (as taught at Wharton). After a simple registration, I get a taste of the chicken, not the whole bird. But I can return again and again whenever I need it. No trial expiration, no watermarked examples.
Much like the generous folks at 37 Signals, which offers up free online tools like Campfire (group chat) and Basecamp (project management), vYew is giving away their product to folks who need just a little bit. Currently, I may only need to use this online collaboration tool a few times a year, but now that the sample hooked me, it means two things:
- If I need more (more pages, file uploads, etc.) I will become a paying customer to them as opposed to one of the other players
- I’m telling other people (you) about them
Great product. Great model.
Austin said,
on July 30th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Hello, this is Austin at Yugma! If you like Vyew, make sure to check out our free online collaboration tool! We believe that collaboration should be easy, instant, spontaneous, and productive, and completely cross-platform between Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can leave Yugma on all day and share your desktop with one click of your mouse, as easily as any other IM like AIM, Yahoo, or Messenger. Or use Yugma for more structured situations like live presentations, webinars, and elearning.
Yugma = Instant and spontaneous collaboration
- Unlimited always-on use for up to 11 people per session
- Free forever instant desktop sharing
- Collaborate easily in any application
- Mouse and keyboard sharing
- Whiteboard with save feature
- Annotate with save feature
- Record and broadcast your user created content
- Private and public chat
- Built-in file sharing (great for large files)
- Cool customizable widget- embed Yugma anywhere
- Upgrades to handle up to 500 attendees
- No Spyware, Adware or Malware
I invite you to take just a few minutes to give us a try, and I hope you’ll let us know what you think about Yugma at info@yugma.com. Thanks!
Austin S.
Yugma Marketing Team
Chris Ammon said,
on July 31st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
After Austin’s subtle urging I checked out Yugma. The desktop share is very nice, the folks in our Winchester office said the mouse movements were pretty smooth and they could follow what I was doing on my desktop with no problems. That rocks indeed.
After testing both (admittedly not exhaustively) Yugma seems the leader for desktop sharing solely because it worked instantly. Vyew is having an issue with desktop sharing via Firefox. There is a fix, but I’m impatient. As for whiteboard and collaboration I like Vyew’s offering the best. So take a look at both and maybe you’ll need both!
One thing to note, Yugma is Java based and Vyew is Flash based, so if your work environment has restrictions against either, then perhaps your decision is made. Cheers, Chris