Last week I was asked to comment for Crain’s article this morning on Yuuguu. I had to offer up a disclaimer, as I do now, that I have done a little bit of work for Yuuguu and I’m under NDA on what I know about the specifics of the internals of their technology.

Typically when asked to quote I give the journalist way more than they need in the knowledge they’ll pick out the one sentence that fits the story they want to tell. On this occasion what I said in full was:

“Yuuguu is interesting because they’ve executed a plan quite wisely. Rather than get overly clever about technology as many start-ups in the web sector do, they’ve used a suite of established technologies, understood user expectations and then combined them expertly. You don’t know how hard it is to do that right until you try.

They’re also very different to the other IM services out there - they’ve skirted around the problems people have with VoIP in a way that gives them a solid, proven business model.

They’ve taken on multiple markets at once in a way established players in those sectors are going to have a problem responding to quickly.

Even better, they haven’t spent years trying to come up with proprietary protocols and re-inventing the wheel, but instead cleverly blended together the best of what works and extended it to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

They’re in a tough area and they’re competing on multiple fronts, but I think they’re in a strong position. The IM sector is not engaging with the audience Yuuguu is and uses technology that would scare most IT admins away from deploying it anyway, the web conferencing sector still don’t “get” the modern Web in my opinion, and the companies selling shared desktop solutions have just had Yuuguu chop their business model out from under them - but many have yet to realise it yet, so aren’t responding.

The only real threat might come from better SIP services threatening their revenue model and customers communicating on voice outside of the Yuuguu system. Having spoken to the guys at Yuuguu though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t already have an answer to that.”

I think Yuuguu are a clever outfit that are doing something quite unique. They aren’t innovating in the madcap “let’s reinvent the wheel way”, nor are they jumping on a bandwagon and trying to use the words “social networking” in their business plan. They’ve looked at what does and doesn’t work, found a way to make something that works better and then established a set of technologies based on best industry practice to make those ideas happen. And all the while, the business model is sat right at the core of what they’re doing.

I hope Yuuguu does take off, and does make considerable profits in the long-term. It would be great to see a local tech start-up fly.