June 10, 2009

NoteShare everywhere this year - the beginning of cross-platform notebook collaboration and sharing

Lots of news to share as we head into the summertime.  NoteShare Express 2.0 is now available for customers who are running NoteShare or NoteShare Server.  NoteShare Express is a powerful Java applet for viewing and editing shared notebooks using a standard web browser such as Safari, Firefox or Microsoft IE.  You can learn more about NoteShare Express here.

We are starting to organize beta-testing teams for some new products we plan to launch over the next 6 to 9 months.  If you're interested in being considered for new product testing, please take a few minutes to fill out the candidate form.  We will begin our first round of early beta testing this July for both Windows and Linux systems.  Sign-up here.   

What's on YouTube?  The AquaMinds channel is now available for viewing and sharing.  We've posted three of our favorite NoteShare videos and hope to add more throughout the year.

(Category/Tags: education, outlining, academic life, lifelong learning, share notes, lecture notes, enterprise, workgroups, productivity, business software, collaborative tools, information sharing, outline processing, OS X, Windows, Linux, smartphones, desktop, webtop, information processing software, enterprise, sharing, notebook, outlines, note-taking, shared notes, workgroup collaboration, Java, NoteShare Server, life sciences research, lab notebook, Web 2.0, NoteTaker, NoteShare Express, NoteShare, Apple, e-books, literature, digital books, iPhone, iPod Touch, Leopard, OS X, Apple, Macintosh, Vista, DELL, web notebook, wiki, blog, knowledge management, netbooks, pervasive computing, cloud computing, smartphone, outliners, To Do lists).

Posted by scott at 05:33 PM |



January 30, 2009

NoteShare wins award as District Administration Readers' Choice Top 100 Products for 2008

This announcement is a nice surprise for our development team.  It's a software recognition award that we're very proud of since we've been shipping NoteShare for OS X since 2006.  It's not always the case that a small software company can achieve recognition so soon especially since we depend upon our users telling other users about NoteShare. 

Much of NoteShare's success in education also goes to working with terrific school districts and educators around the country.  In particular,  the state of Maine's 1:1 Apple laptop program for middle schools is one of the most dynamic initiatives where NoteShare is in service daily supporting classroom collaboration and learning.

T100Logo-Client

The readers of District Administration magazine are school leaders, educators, technology integrators and learning specialists.  Our relationship to the education market (especially K-12 schools) goes all the way back to 2002 when we first introduced NoteTaker for Mac OS X.  Since then, we've been innovating and integrating our notebook sharing technology with flexible collaboration support to enable our users to work alone and work together, anywhere, anytime.    NoteShare enables learning to happen in the classroom, on the campus and in the cloud via the Internet.

Going forward, we plan to introduce new services and products in 2009 that will enable even more powerful cloud-based computing and notebook collaboration on laptops and netbooks including OS X, Windows, Linux and smartphones (iPhone and Android).  There is no standing still in meeting the needs of educators, students and lifelong learners as schools and organizations advance towards the 21st century classroom model of anywhere, anytime learning.


And finally, to the readers of District Administration, thank you for this honor!

Posted by scott at 12:46 PM |



January 05, 2009

NoteShare Express, Netbooks and Your Personal Cloud from AquaMinds

Today's blog post is an important milestone for AquaMinds and for our customers.  I'm authoring it using our new productivity application NoteShare Express.  The application is running in a web browser (Safari) which is running on my HP Mini 1000 (netbook) with Windows XP Home edition while connected to a 3G wireless broadband network.

Screenshotexpress The notebook document that I'm editing my post on is hosted on a Mac Mini running NoteShare Server at a co-location facility about 50 miles away from where I'm working right now.  In this scenario, NoteShare Server is my personal cloud that I can conveniently access 24x7 over the Internet using just a web browser or either NoteTaker or NoteShare.  The fun part is that I'm able to work from anywhere and access my shared notebooks but because I'm using a netbook running Windows, NoteShare Express allows me to edit my remote notebooks from a web browser. I'm not running any AquaMinds software from my Windows desktop; just NoteShare Express in my browser.


Getting Work Done The Netbook Way
Hpmini1000NetbookThis is no fad either. Netbooks are small yet highly functional laptop computers that are more than adequate for getting work done especially if you use productivity software like NoteShare Express that runs in a web browser.  And because netbooks are deliberately designed as highly portable/mobile "Internet" communication devices with built-in WiFi support, they aren't configured to run big, powerful desktop applications or store a lot of document data like a traditional laptop or desktop system.  So, you get your netbook work done using NoteShare Express from the "cloud" and keep your application data (notebooks) in the cloud for convenient, always fresh, up-to-date versions.


Using NoteShare Server as Personal Cloud Service
So how do you do this?  How do you set-up your own personal cloud service today.  For today's productivity recipe, you need a dedicated Mac system running OS X 10.4 or higher (Mac Mini is an excellent choice for this task), a NoteShare Server software license (which now comes bundled with two free web instances of NoteShare Express 2.0) and access to hooking up your NoteShare Server hardware for Internet connectivity.  If you have these components, you're ready to set-up your own cloud service from home or  your office.  For more information about NoteShare Server set-up, check out the documentation here.

Posted by scott at 07:41 PM |



December 27, 2008

Web Agents, NoteShare and Collaborative List Building and Note-Taking

I've been reading and pondering the various end of the year "top ten" lists that publications highlight to summarize the last 12 months.  They are predictable choices like most years although this year will go down in history for some notable first time events.  One such list that got my attention was Wired's Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 which was cleverly disguised by its title.  Actually, it was in fact a consumer "gadget" list while mostly touted devices or services related to digital technology for personal use.  Hardly what one would expect as breakthrough technology.

But it got me thinking about what was the most attention grabbing headline this year that I truly considered a scientific or technological breakthrough which stuck in my brain.  From my way of thinking, a real breakthrough would either demonstrate a significant milestone in our fundamental understanding of the underlying science behind the discovery and/or it would show the way to a potentially game-changing future in which the resulting applied technology would benefit the greatest number of humans. Simply put,  my metric was set on finding a technological breakthrough at the civilization or global level for positive change.

Suncover The #1 Technology Breakthrough of 2008
If you want to learn more about my top choice for technology breakthrough of 2008, open this web notebook and turn to page 87 to watch the presentation or download the notebook document (requires OS X) that I generated from using the ClusterSearch Dashboard widget (a free web agent utility available on our site or from Apple's site).

2008 and beyond - the buzzword is infrastructure
In the weeks and months ahead, the United States and the world will be discussing the need for rebuilding our communities and nations via infrastructure investments.  Traditional infrastructure spending typically means roads, highways, bridges and public works projects to improve the overall quality of life and productivity of the citizenry.  Also included in the nation's infrastructure wish list is networking infrastructure to modernize our power/energy transmission grids, to use more fiber optic lines within our communities to extend broadband capacity and to adopt a more intelligent approach to the networking of national information services (patient information system like the National VA Hospital system).  From magazines to newspaper thought leaders like Thomas Friedman, the nation's action item list is the hot topic of the month.  What's on your infrastructure wish-list?

Collaborative lists and notes
Many of my blog posts are about collaborative list building and sharing outlines using NoteShare and NoteTaker.  Today's blog theme about ranked lists and making national priorities raised another question that probably deserves a separate post but it certainly deserves attention.  Collaboration is a learned or acquired skill if not a formal, systematic process for teams.  If you're part of a workgroup or a project team that depends upon sharing information, building lists, making outlines to organize tasks and assigning responsibilities then you've probably tried several different tools or approaches.  If you're already a NoteShare user or accessing a NoteShare Server from your desktop or your webtop,  then you know how useful a shared notebook is to a project team staying organized.  Instead of files and emails flying around, you have a central information hub organized as your project notebook.  That's the power of using NoteShare.    One of our goals in 2009 is to make collaborative list building and note-taking even more ubiquitous.  And, most importantly, even easier to get started.


(Category/Tags: education, outlining, academic life, lifelong learning, share notes, lecture notes, enterprise, workgroups, productivity, business software, collaborative tools, information sharing, outline processing, OS X, Windows, Linux, smartphones, desktop, webtop, information processing software, enterprise, sharing, notebook, outlines, note-taking, shared notes, workgroup collaboration, Java, NoteShare Server, life sciences research, lab notebook, Web 2.0, NoteTaker, NoteShare Express, NoteShare, Apple, e-books, literature, digital books, iPhone, iPod Touch, Leopard, OS X, Apple, Macintosh, Vista, DELL, web notebook, wiki, blog, knowledge management, netbooks, pervasive computing, cloud computing, smartphone, outliners, to do lists).

Posted by scott at 04:04 PM |



December 13, 2008

The Known Universe - another way to share notebook content for teaching and learning

The intersection of the Internet and video has enabled users and organizations to capture and archive presentations, interviews and profiles of important thinkers, leaders and visionaries from different and diverse fields.  The notion of recording the "living" biographies of people is now possible especially among society's most thought provoking individuals.  Whether you're scanning iTunes U for new ideas, watching an Edge.org interview or browsing the TED event collection, there are as many opinions as there are people to be discovered on these video sites.  They are fantastically entertaining and equally as informative.  So, where do you begin?

Knownuniversenotebookcover There are any number of fun thought experiments you can do to begin your video journey but in this case, I chose to think about the most influential technology thinkers, scientists and inventors of the past 25 years that had impressed me or had influenced me in some way.  I deliberately limited my choice to five and that's probably a good number to ignite a passionate argument about the role of science and technology vs the role of politics and religion in shaping the direction of human progress on our planet.  Although he's not on the list, Carl Sagan would probably and rightly so, deserve a special honor for his work in educating and inspiring the public about the vast grandeur of our cosmos that surrounds us.  And so I've called this web notebook, The Known Universe.


(Category/Tags: education, outlining, academic life, lifelong learning, share notes, lecture notes, enterprise, workgroups, productivity, business software, collaborative tools, information sharing, outline processing, OS X, Windows, Linux, smartphones, desktop, webtop, information processing software, enterprise, sharing, notebook, outlines, note-taking, shared notes, workgroup collaboration, Java, NoteShare Server, life sciences research, lab notebook, Web 2.0, NoteTaker, NoteShare Express, NoteShare, Apple, e-books, literature, digital books, iPhone, iPod Touch, Leopard, OS X, Apple, Macintosh, Vista, DELL, web notebook, wiki, blog, knowledge management, netbooks, pervasive computing, cloud computing, smartphone, outliners, To Do lists).

Posted by scott at 03:14 PM |