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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!



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.