memonicOfficial Blog

Today is an important moment for Memonic: we take the next step and go from “keeping the essential” to “harvesting the essential”.

It is the next logical setup for us. Memonic is a great note taking application solving the everyday problem of keeping digital content. With Squirro we want to solve the problem of information overload and clutter: We aim at building something like a noise-cancelling headset; call it digital noise reduction.

To get this done we partner with a group of key business angels from Europe and the Americas to plug their experience in building great software companies.

You may want to read our press release here (PDF, 68KB).

What does this imply for Memonic? We continue to support Memonic as is, including bug fixing and some improvements. We also will allow all existing Memonic users to get Squirro first, as soon as it becomes available. However, it is true to to state, that we will not release a lot of entirely new features for Memonic. As a small team we need to strike a careful balance. We think this is a good way forward for you, our cherished users and us, the team behind Memonic.

We’re happy to announce that we’re nominated for the ‘Best Apps Ever Award‘. Every year they select the best and not just the best selling, as they claim on the website. Along other great apps we made it to the short list and be honored if you’d vote for us!

Much has been written about the future of newspapers. Here my humble contribution:

1. In a complex world people turn to trusted sources of information for news, analysis and comment, e.g. newspapers.
2. The unique value of a newspaper is its editorial staff (1).
3. The core competence of an editorial team is separating the relevant from the chaff and provide context. Simply put: Making sense of the world afar and close.
4. The result of journalistic work – articles, analysis and comment – is independent of the carrier medium (i.e. print, digital, spoken word, moving images).
5. An editorial team must cover a wide range of subjects to get to the heart of things and be able to provide context. Expert editorial teams on specific subjects complement a broad reporting approach.
6. A reader is interested only in a subset of topics covered; the limiting factors being time and interests. Corollary 1: A reader wants to select her topics of interest. Corollary 2: An ideal news offering is a collection of topics a reader chooses to follow. (2)
7. The reader expects each topic to be a continuously updated feed with factual reporting, analysis and comment.
8. The reader decides through which carrier medium or combination thereof she wants to receive her information.
9. The digital world is not something fundamentally new; the digital world only exacerbates this trend: In the digital world where news is abundant, the key factor is attention (Contrary to the physical world where scarcity is the limiting factor – 3).
10. There will always be people willing to pay for attention. Either pay someone for organizing a limited amount of available attention or someone pays for access to attention.

Obviously we’re working hard to make this vision happen here at Memonic. Stay tuned.

Notes:

(1) It is total nonsense to differentiate between a print and a online editorial team. It’s one news reporting organization regardless of output channel.

(2) A reader’s preferred subset is most likely not corresponding to the traditional sectioning of a newspaper in Politics (World, Home), Business, Arts, etc. Example: Reporting on the Euro crisis could be found in newspapers such as the NZZ, SZ, FAZ, Spiegel, NYT in the politics, business and feuilleton sections. The topic of interest though is euro crisis.  So why not simply offering exactly that: A follow-a-topic function allowing a reader to find everything relevant on say the euro crisis under that heading. And so it goes for every topic.

(3) In a sea of (digital) abundance it’s the attention that counts, as Michael Goldhaberpointed out in 1997. That is, in a sea of abundant ‘information’ on any event, with you having only so much attention to devote, you most likely turn to a trusted source of information for reporting and contextualization.

Raphael Cohen is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Geneva*. He most recently released his new book “Winning Opportunities“.

The book provides a step-by-step process to help you identify an opportunity, analyze it and convince the suitable decision-makers to give you the necessary resources and support. And all that without writing a proper business plan, claims Raphael. Instead he introduces his Innovation by Opportunity model of innovation, a process specifically designed to foster innovation processes driven by employees in larger organizations and corporations. It centers on how to set up the intrapreneurial process properly. From my own experience I only can confirm this. Innovation and entrepreneurship have a difficult stand in most large organizations. Instead of a focus on the opportunity most new ideas and undertakings are calculated off the board by countless versions of Excel based business plans.

Raphael’s book is a refreshing take on this topic. And an innovative one, too. You can download the book for free at the ”Winning Opportunities” website. You may pay what you want for the book once you read the book, be this nothing or 5 million.

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Disclosure: For a number of years I teach a segment on Virtual Organizations in the MBA Course run by Raphael.

This morning we came across this comment from Sasha Kovaliov:

“Guys, awesome work! Keep it up – stable and simple. Screw evernote and alike ;) Is there any way to search your notes via a custom google search or incorporate it into chrome like diigo has done? Ty!”

Thanks Sasha for the compliment. And yes, Sasha  - and all other Memonic users – their is: Check out this small video for a how to:

In text:

1. Go the the Google Chrome preferences menu
2. Go to the menu Basics / Manage Search engines
3. Add a new search engine in the last row – in the last field enter this string: https://www.memonic.com/user/me?search=%s

That’s it & have all a great Monday!