YuJa is a start-up based in Califonia that is designed to connect groups together. The thing that these groups have in common is that everyone is there to learn and YuJa facilitates that.

In case you are curious about their name, 'Yuja' in Sanskrit means to join or weld together and true to their name and their motive the folks at YuJa are doing providing users a platform to collaborate and share ideas using their multimedia tools like video broadcast and meeting, group texting and IM, desktop sharing, discussion forums, polls and quizzes.

According to their website, "The core of YuJa's collaboration platform is a light-weight multimedia engine that unlocks novel scenarios including video broadcasting, impromptu face-to-face collaboration, and integrated video desktop-sharing".

YuJa is easy to use and allows users to create groups within 2 minutes, which is super quick.

Talking about why they are doing, what they are doing, Yuja is trying to bridge the gap between the online and offline activities and in respect to working together and sharing ideas, YuJa is a great tool for teachers, students, study groups and organizations.

"Open access to learning tools is a force for positive social change. We aim to be a catalyst in this revolution".

To know more about YuJa, we got in touch with Nathan Arora one of its core team members and here is what he told us.

Happy reading!

1. Congratulations on designing YuJa. Please introduce yourself to our readers Nathan.

Thanks - YuJa is something our team is really excited about!

I am driven by a mission to improve access to education as I believe that it is a key driver to positive societal change. My background is in Computer Science with engineering experience at Microsoft within the mobility space. I also have an MBA from Duke in marketing and strategy and have been involved in the online education space for about 7 years. It is very exciting to see what an active space it has become recently.


YuJa stems from a belief that regardless of the medium of instruction – online, offline, blended or even MOOC – that we need better tools to connect and collaborate with our learning groups. Feeling stuck and alone in large lecture hall is probably one of the worst feelings a student can have. All members of our team have certainly experienced this feeling at one point or another in their academic careers.

3. YuJa is a pretty complex piece of software. How long did it take for your team to complete the development cycle from start to end?

Indeed it is quite complex so a key ingredient is to start with great engineers! We have a pretty fantastic team with PhD's in Distributed Systems, Applied Mathematics and top-of-their-class Computer Science graduates. We've been perfecting our no-downloads Collaboration Space for over a year and the development of the YuJa collaboration tools have been an ongoing development over the past year.




Building collaboration tools that are super simple to use out-of-the-box that "just work" on every desktop platform and browser type is a challenge. Further, it is our goal to design tools that are intuitive to non-tech savvy users.

5. How are you promoting YuJa? What do you think works best - promotion through social media channels or word-of-mouth promotion?

While we leverage all channels to promote YuJa, one of the best ways is to have happy users invite new participants to groups… who then create new groups and accounts...and so on.

6. Explain to our readers how YuJa can be used by a company or a student/professor group to more efficiently carry out their tasks at hand.

I think there is no better way to show it than our explainer video available here: http://www.yuja.com/

7. When you are not working on improving and promoting YuJa, how do you like to spend your spare time? What do you find most relaxing?

Most of my free time is spent exploring the Bay Area with my beautiful wife and also running around town with my dog, Newton.

8. What are your future plans with YuJa? Are you planning on adding any new interesting features to it?

We are adding tools in the next few releases to provide basic integration and notifications to Smartphones and are also exploring ways to extend our collaboration tools into the mobile space in novel ways.

9. From the experience that you have gained during the development of YuJa, what knowledge would you like to pass on to a budding and aspiring entrepreneur?

Build something you're passionate about because it makes it easier to navigate the bumps along the way.

Thanks Nathan for taking out the time and doing this interview with us. We'd like to wish you and your team at YuJa the very best for the future.

Stay tuned with E-junkie for more of such inspirational start-up stories.