Memonic Blog

Today's changes: March 18, 2010

Christoph Hauzenberger — 2010-03-18T15:37:52Z

Plain Text Editor - Efficiently save your thoughts on Memonic

As a Memonic user you always had the possibility of composing your own Items and use our tool as text editor, brain dump, shopping list creator or more. In order that you're able to save your thoughts and ideas more efficiently, we added a plain text editor that allows you to simply write text. Not more, not less. Compose a new Item in your account and switch between the Rich Formatting and Plain Text editors at any time. Your preference will be stored for the next use.

When converting from Rich Formatting to Plain Text, you will lose the images and text styles but we're trying the best to keep some reasonable formatting, such as lists.

Searching all languages

We added support for searching in all kind of languages with non latin character sets, such as Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hebrew or others. We hope that this improves the use of Memonic in your favourite language. If you encounter problems, don't hesitate to contact us.

Smaller Improvements and Bugfixes

For more information on further features and bugfixes check the release notes.

Interview: Joel compares cooking with Memonic

Dorian Selz — 2010-03-17T17:54:23Z

Joel is a software developer at liip, a web consultancy here in Zurich. He is a Memonic user right from start. We recently asked him a few questions:

Question: To warm up we asked: Why do you use Memonic?

Joel: I'm a Memonic user by discipline. I try to teach myself to use it because it solves a problem we got used to and we shouldn't have.

If I buy a nice tshirt and place it in my cupboard at home I really expect it will still be there a month later. On the web it's different. I won't really freak out if that page I found some weeks earlier is not online anymore. That's actually crazy if think about it. And no one's really complaining. It became normal. Memomic provides me the tool go around that problem. Saving stuff to my own space, organizing it and make sure it'll be there whenever I need it.

Q: Surely there are plenty of things that you don't like about Memonic?

Joel: What I don't like with Memonic is that I don't use it for everything I should. I guess I still haven't really realized all the benefits of collecting my stuff for the amount of work it requires to save and organise it. But I use it because a such great team like yours has certainly lots of ideas for features to motivate me using it even more.

Q: To conclude: What has cooking and Memonic in common - or not?

Joel: I would compare : the capturing tool to the kitchenware the items to the recipes to use again and again the sharing collections to inviting friends for tasting your dishes the items editing to your the own touch you add to given recipes the items organizations to our freedom of mixing dishes the mobile access to.... ok that's harder... so I guess this is what's different with cooking. There's no app for using your mobile phone as a stove. Not yet.

Thanks Joel!

Presentation at the Cloud Suisse Conference 2010

Patrice Neff — 2010-03-16T09:47:45Z

At Memonic we use a lot of Amazon's cloud services. I talked about our experiences with those at yesterday's Cloud Suisse conference in Zürich, Switzerland. The presentation (PDF, 1MB) is in German, but most of the information is in the graphics anyway.

I also created a Memonic Set for this presentation with some background material and additional links.

Thanks to the Cloud Suisse committee for organizing the interesting conference!

22 random hints for startups: A new series

Dorian Selz — 2010-03-15T11:15:22Z

A couple of days ago the second StartupCamp took place in Basel. Toni and Dorian collected a couple of tips from their current experience and their previous startup gig at local.ch. These random hints complement the startup series published on this blog some months ago. Thanks to popular demand we also publish these hints (in German) over at Swissstartups, Dominik Tarolli's excellent blog on the Swiss Startup scene.

1 – Start with a simple plan

Building a company is tough enough. Don’t complicate your life with a complex plan. A simple plan stating a simple goal will help you, your future employees, any partner and any future investor to understand quickly what you’re at.

Example: At local.ch our game plan was a simple line: “Best local search in Switzerland”. At Memonic it’s: “Keep the Essential”.

Sure there’s plenty of explanation to each tagline. Yet the essential is summarized on one A4 Page.

2 – A few commonly shared rules

At both local.ch and Memonic we defined a kind of „company constitution“. Why? A few commonly shared rules expedite decision-making. You have a frame of reference for any decision.

It is not so relevant whether anyone on the team knows them by heart. Yet if the team is in a decision-making impasse, the rules help you to get out of this gridlock quickly with a minimum of emotions involved.

Rule 1 - User First
Rule 2 - A great team is great people
Rule 3 - The solution is the team
Rule 4 - Getting things done
Rule 5 - Long Term over Shortterminism
Rule 6 - And yet we count the time in months not years
Rule 7 - We're optimistic & focus on the real issues
Rule 8 - Creativity and Communication are Key
Rule 9 - Errors are ok, if...
Rule 10 - Be nice

Business Chuchi challenge of memonic

Dorian Selz — 2010-03-10T20:36:54Z

Another good challenge of our application: The Business Chuchi is a gathering of folks here in Zurich talking about the business aspects of online applications. Tonight was our turn. Great feedback from the folks present. Thank you!

New features: Badge and Premium subscriptions

Patrice Neff — 2010-03-05T12:09:30Z

Today we rolled out two new features on Memonic.

Badge

With the badge you embed a Memonic Set into any web page. There are many potential uses for that. Just a few examples:

Insert it to the right column of your blog so that visitors to your blog see what you're currently researching.
Combine background material to a blog post in a Set and insert a badge for that Set into the blog post.
Add your Web development Set to your company Wiki for easy access by your colleagues.

We're sure you have many more ideas on how to use this.

To create a badge, use the context menu of a Set and then use the option "Embed into webpage".

The badge will only display public items. So make sure you use the toolbar drop-down "Permissions..." to change the permissions of your Items to public.

Premium subscriptions

Free accounts now have limits. If you want to use Memonic to the full potential, you'll need to purchase a Memonic Premium subscription. We currently offer an introductory price of €29 Euros. Students profit from an additional €10 Euros discount.

Lift@home: Thinkdata Conference in Lausanne

Dorian Selz — 2010-03-02T21:22:21Z

As part of the renowned Lift conference series the ThinkData Conference takes place in Lausanne on March 18. An afternoon on social, semantic, manipulation, real-time, and mobile data. Raphael Briner, the organizer and founder of Hyperweek, states a simple goal: "Learn from the data, letting it influence our ideas for the next iteration through the loop"

Memonic das Internetmerkbuch

Dorian Selz — 2010-02-23T20:46:20Z

Martin Schmitt - er lebt in Uruguay - schreibt in seinem exzellenten Lateinamerika Reisemagazin über Memonic. Und er prägt gleich einen neuen Begriff für Memonic: Das Internetmerkbuch. Gute Beschreibung, danke Martin!

At Google Travel Summit in Zurich

Dorian Selz — 2010-02-23T13:20:00Z

Today I am attending the Google Travel Summit here at Google Zurich. An interesting mix of Google folks and startups like RouteRank, TouristWay, TripSay, Gekko, YourTour, HouseTrip, TripWolf, GetYouGuide and ourselves.

Funny question of the day: What do you do different than Google Notebook? Answer: Google Notebook is no longer. ;-)

Today's changes: February 18, 2010

Patrice Neff — 2010-02-18T10:17:19Z

Finally - File Attachments!

Until today Memonic had great tools to save parts of any web page. Now you can also store normal documents. So you can for example clip the flight plan you're booking and then attach the booking confirmation they send you as a PDF document.

You can create Items with attachments in two ways. Either open an existing Item and attach files or send us your information by email.

An all new Hompage

Additionally we redesigned the homepage to make it easier for new users to understand what Memonic is about.

As always you find all the details of this release in our release notes.