One of the core features of enterprise 2.0 is enhancing collaboration. I continue to find it interesting to see all the different approaches that firms take to support this activity. Here is another. Last week I spoke with Karel Lukas, COO, at Yugma. Yugma is a cross-platform, team collaboration tool that provides a set of web meeting services. The basic version is free and there is free and there is a small charge for the premium service.

With Yugma you can collaborate with offsite team members, give virtual presentations, hold webinars, streamline workflow, provide remote tech support, and any other activities that can benefit for a common web session. Yugma is a Sanskrit term for a state of togetherness or sharing thought. The Yugma people use it as both a verb – to Yugma – and a place – as is going to a Yugma.

Yugma launched in December 2006 with the goal to provide a simple cross-platform tool for collaboration that was free or low cost. They now have 80,000 subscribers with most of the growth in the last 6 months. Karel was brought in to run the business when it launched. He began his career with Bell Labs working on the convergence of voice and data in its early days. He migrated within AT&T through sales and marketing to the rolling out of new services. I was pleased to learn that he had actually taken some of the internal technology-based sales training I did for AT&T in the mid-80s.

I think they are doing some good things from a market perspective. The free service has a robust set of features that really do let you see how the web meetings work. Included in both versions are features such as desktop sharing, annotations and whiteboarding, public and private chat, Outlook and Skype compatibility, customizable widgets, and the ability to change presenters. The paid service provides more enterprise friendly features such the ability to scale to larger numbers of attendees, more advanced scheduling, and no ads.

Yugma is also looking to provide their service for education purposes for several reasons. First, it can be a low cost way to support teaching activities and they have high school teachers using Yugma to communicate with their classes. The free service can be very beneficial here. They also offer universities 100 free accounts of the premium service. This has been picked by over 15 so far with no marketing on their part. Examples include Duke University, University of Hawaii, University of Vermont, Notre Dame – Mendoza College of Business, and UCLA, Kepler College. Karel also sees this as a good way to “seed” their market as these college students will soon be in the workforce and will want to bring their web tools with them.

Yugma appears very simple to use and this is a goal. When Karel and I talked, he quickly launched into a Yugma session at the right time in the conversation to show me stuff through his desktop. There was no need to set up anything in advance. This type of spontaneous collaboration is one of the activities they aim to support. For example, you can go into a Yugma session in the midst of a Skype session. They are even very Mac friendly which I appreciate. The Mac user base has recognized this and that is one of their faster growing markets. They have a Yugma blog to give you more context to their efforts.