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Dan, a student who was passionate about Legos back in the days of his childhood, uses Memonic for his everyday tasks and gathering research at school. However, since learning is a life-long activity, he plans to use it far beyond that. Please read on to get to know Dan and the way he integrated Memonic into his life! If you’d like to do such a short interview with us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at alex [at] memonic [dot] com.

You’re a Memonic user. Why?
As a student, Memonic offers me a research desk in the cloud. Being able to securely store my notes, bookmarks, and clippings where they can easily be retrieved is super sweet. I like that I can work privately in groups, or share clips just between friends. I was pleased with the desktop clipper which I used to capture presentation slides from a school lecture. That got me thinking about combining captured slides with notes and tagging them all into a collection that’s easier to search through and study.

While I may use Memonic as a student for now, I’m confident that I will be able to use it to synthesize all that I’ve gathered and want to learn about throughout my life. More than anything else, I see the web as an enabler for life-long learning. I’d be interested in figuring out how groups can use Memonic as a collaborative learning tool. That goes with my expectation that one day the Memonic squirrels will help their users pool together their gems of knowledge into a significant collective intelligence.

What do you dislike about Memonic and yet you keep using the service?
I have found that Memonic is not yet perfect. The browser tool sometimes slips away from me before I can tag or file the content I’m gathering. Also, while scrolling down through a large collection it takes too long to load. Maybe jumping ahead by page number would be quicker. But honestly, accessing all the content in an instant would be my preference. I’d also like a more granular search function that filters multiple tags and retrieves any mention of a word from content I’ve previously bookmarked. Another thing, where is the heck is the community at? Maybe there is one, but there should be an clearer way to discover fellow Memonic users.

How does Memonic compare with Legos?
As a child I loved Legos. I enjoyed discovering how the different building blocks could be combined to create cool structures. I compare Memonic to Legos because I see tagging like a way of identifying different blocks that can later be combined. The next step beyond curation is synthesis. I find tagging helps me determine the size, colors, and shapes of a given piece of content. These various types of content can be combined into larger structures. Building such structures is how we learn. Anyway, I admit that much of what I’ve accumulated in Memonic remain like scattered Legos in my messy childhood bedroom, but I’m getting more organised. I guess that’s part of the fun. Let me know if you want to come and play along.

This still young year started very luckily for us when it comes to finding great talents. Within just a few weeks we were able to find not only one but two great developers. Let me introduce Roberto, who joined us in January.

With his long experience in python development and a great knowledge of web development he is a perfect match to our team.

Without much introduction Roberto became a productive member of our little scrum team right from the start and helps us building the first iteration of the engine behind squirro. And by now he is also coordinating a big junk of our front-end work.
And whenever we are looking for an existing solution for a certain problem, you can be ensured that Roberto comes up with something from his big fund of known frameworks or services.

And – well look at him – he does all of that with style, as one would expect from being Italian.

Before joining us, he was actually thinking of leaving Switzerland and already quit his flat here. Roberto, we are very happy that you changed your mind and decided to stay and work with us. Thank you.

(And yes, he is still looking for a new flat in Zürich, so if you know of something…)

On Friday we felt like super stars – thanks to the talented photographer Michael Schmid (Website, Twitter) flashes enlightened the whole office. The reason for this paparazzi session was to take pics for our next big thing – Squirro. If you are ever looking for a talented photographer in the greater Zurich area, then we can highly recommend Michael, he did a fantastic job! Here are some shots from behind the scenes (they were taken with an iPhone4 camera, the final pics of us will certainly be of better quality):

For our new project Squirro we are starting our jet engines again. So at the end of last year we were again looking for great software developers to join our team. For that we did a pitch at the December Webtuesday in the hope of attracting one or or two good people. And indeed a few days later Patrick approached us and by the next Webtuesday he had already joined our team.

He had not written much Python before and still he was productive from the second day on. In this first weeks since he started, Patrick wrote several web services from scratch (I think the average is one per week). And he has just taken over management of our whole live infrastructure, using good old Puppet.

Patrick and me actually met briefly back in 2003 when he won the software development showcase event at the WorldSkills in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Outside of work he’s an active OpenStreetmap mapper and a pirate.

Thanks for your work Patrick!

We wanted to quickly let you know that we’ve hired three new absolutely amazing talents, Patrick, Roberto and Paola! While Patrick and Roberto will mainly focus on development, Paola will invest substantial time in marketing efforts! They will help us bringing knowledge curation to the next level (more about that in a few days). Introduction posts for each of them follow soon – so stay tuned and please join us in welcoming our three new colleagues!