AquaMinds Weblog

We're announcing a new productivity product today called NoteShare. It is scheduled to ship during the first quarter of 2006. It is a "one of a kind" information processing application (just runs on your desktop like any other application) designed to allow small workgroups, classrooms and project teams to instantly create interactive sessions via sharing of personal notebooks. NoteShare allows users to create and publish information as personal notebooks but adds a very powerful capability for ad-hoc sharing anytime, anywhere. It will initially run on OS X (with UBF support coming at the same time Apple releases Intel-based, hardware systems).

NoteTaker first shipped in 2002 and it was a key product milestone for our young sofware company which represented the beginning of an exciting journey. Since then we have continued to define information processing as more than just a desktop utility but as a power tool for processing both structured and un-structured data. From the very beginning, our product vision has been dedicated to making your notebooks and information available everywhere.

Way of Life software
When we first invented the idea of dynamic generation of Web Notebooks, it too signaled an important milestone by allowing users more choices for publishing their notebooks. But publishing information is only one part of our technology vision at AquaMinds. We recognize and appreciate that our users are working with their NoteTaker information daily. For many, it has become "way of life" software which is integrated into many users' tasks and creative efforts. And to this end, NoteTaker notebooks are not just static documents but dynamic collections of information, web clippings, live web pages, search results, dynamic plug-ins, bookmarks, annotations, file attachments, images, QuickTime, voice and more. Whether a user's applications are personal or work-related, NoteTaker is a highly interactive platform for creating, presenting and sharing media rich, multi-page documents. Notebooks have become living records of personal knowledge, insights and even conversations; a very natural approach to social software. Your information, your notes, your ideas, all in one place.

Share your notebooks - anytime, anywhere
But to be a truly interactive, media rich platform, we had to first solve a most difficult, technical problem. The challenge was how to allow users to not only share their notebook information but to actually work together while creating new information. We needed to provide and support multiple access, multiple viewing and multiple editing without burdening non-technical users with jargon like servers, clients, web hosts, etc. From this point of view came the conceptual genesis of the NoteShare design approach. The quest to solve this challenging user problem began nearly three years ago to this day.

And we continued to ask ourselves if we could design and build a solution that would allow users to simply share a notebook from their own desktop computer. To make it available for multiple authors or viewers to contribute their own content without the need for a dedicated IT or network technical staff to host it. Would it allow users to add their ideas, concepts and annotations to a shared notebook while supporting all of the feature richness of NoteTaker with drag and drop support too? And finally, could we make it as easy as one button sharing in order to be available anytime, anywhere with the least amount of set-up? No hosted service, no server or intermediary, just your own computer to share your own information with other users in your group or office or on your team (locally or globally).

Yes, instant notebook sharing is arriving January 16th
During the week of January 16th, we will begin offering registered NoteTaker users early access to purchase a NoteShare license at a special promotional price. It will be available directly from our site and we'll send a notification to the NoteShare mailing list (an opt-in program). In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll be sharing more about the NoteShare vision, where it's headed and what's next. And one more thing, by the end of 2006, shared notebooks will be accessible from as many platforms as possible including Windows, Linux, PDAs and smart phones.