Web 2.0

I’ve always been into mindmaps since discovering them whilst studying for the Leaving. At the time I was reading Tony Buzans original book on the subject. I used them intermittently in University which stopped completely after graduating.

Lately I’ve been doing alot of work on business planning. In particular I’ve been following the Alex Osterwalder model for innovative business plans, thanks to Diane Roberts from xCellPartners (more on this model to come for those of you who may be unfamiliar).

After checking out at a number of Mind Mapping applicationd most of them running locally on the desktop I had more or less settled on Mindjet Mindmanager. I then came across another program called Mindmeister.com.

Straightaway things were promising, the look and feel of the site as well as the sign up process were similar to many current Web 2.0 applications. After signing up for the free version and logging in I was able to get cracking straightaway.

The main dashboard screen shows your latest mindmaps along with various configuration menus. From here you can start a new mindmap, edit existing ones as well as configure various options.

The user interface for creating mindmaps is extremely intuitive, for anyone who is familiar with the concepts of creating a mind map it’s a breeze.

One of the most impressive features is the ability to have multiple persons work on the same mindmap at the same time. I have tried this with my business partner where each of us on Skype had a brainstorming session and it worked extremely well.

MindMeister is also compatible with other Mind Mapping software so may be possible to migrate to it from another program.

Apart from the free version there are 3 price options for the Personal, Academic and Business. Like most good products you get all the features you need to get going and can decide to upgrade when your needs for certain features become important.

Finally my favourite feature is the ability to embed the code for your mindmap in your blog or website. You even have the choice to have the mindmap editable so visitors to your website/blog/wiki can add to it. Check this out below.

To edit this map click here and have a go.

I love good software and can’t recommend this product highly enough. whether you’ve never used mind maps or are looking for a new tool to using this fits the bill.

This week it became public that General Electric have decided to roll out Zoho Docs for it’s employees. There are circa 400,000 user desktops so its a pretty substantial  development in the world of online collaboration.

Apparently they got rid of Google Docs because of the intrusiveness of Google. Understandable really. Apparently this is a quote from an unnamed source in GE

A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down. The spokesperson said the Google application was intrusive and the ads started to become a nuisance.

Interestingly Zoho have agreed to help GE setup their own instance of Zoho Docs on their internal servers. I really wonder what the implication is for future large rollouts. Will they all be hosted on the organisations servers or is this a once off?

otherInbox is one of those simple ideas that you say aha! as soon as you hear it. Founded by Joshua Baer OtherInbox automatically organizes commercial email so that its easy to find the messages you care about most and ignore the ones you don’t have time for.

From the demonstration at TechCrunch50 it seems really easy to identify who is sending you mail and allows you to go through content you are interested in when you feel like it rather than the current system where most people have email from subscriptions coming directly into their inbox. Basically for any time you are not giving your email to a real person use OtherInbox.

The user gets unlimited email addresses after signing up and use a different email address for each service they sign up for. For example:
amazon@enda.otherinbox.com
facebook@enda.otherinbox.com,
etc

OtherInbox now sorts these emails into folders. The user can get the information whatever way they want, e.g. aggregated into an email client or via RSS.

Here is the Tech Crunch demo from yesterday.