Hobie is new to the world of blogging.  He has found that it allows employees to communicate with each other, and customers. The company is 11 years old, growing mostly by word of mouth. Client based application, currently only PC but will have Mac version in a year.

People don’t think linearly. A lot of the tools on the market are linear, whereas MindManager allows you to think. It is a branch structure with which you can drill down. As opposed to a PowerPoint slide, it is almost like a Visio layout. It can be published as a PowerPoint or Word, or export as XML. It is the place you go before you use your apps - the place you go to think about things.

Demo: Design a floating bike. He asked the audience to throw out ideas, and it became a frenzy as he was giving away free copies of the $350 software for good ideas. After entering a bunch of random ideas, we were able to drag-and-drop then into three separate categories - features, materials, misc. Very, very cool the way it worked. You can even put an RSS feed into a bubble, and expand it to see the actual entries.

You can even put search results into a bubble, and drill down whenever you want to see those search results. There is an IE icon within it which allows you to go to the search result page. This includes local PC search results (desktop search).

Did a drawing of the pedal in a new sketch category. Showing an idea of how you can also manage visual thinking. Copied the drawing a couple of times and added different aspects to it. Again, all is collapsible. You can now define task info, how long each task would take, the resources needed for each bubble, start date, due date, etc. There is an ink-to-text converter, which actually worked very well. There were just a few errors, but it was obvious that it was just a letter or two in a complicated word.

I asked about the IE icons, and if they were for IE or the default browser. They were IE launch icons, but the API is very configurable.

Hobart (Hobie) Swan is Manager of External Affairs for Mindjet and co-author of The Cancer Code, the story behind the creation of Mindjet, the company, and MindManager, its software. Before starting at Mindjet, Hobie produced health programming for CBS Radio’s The Osgood File, and was a freelance writer and video producer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has since left that burgeoning megalopolis for the wide sidewalks of Boise, Idaho. On a Tablet PC, Hobie will be presenting “Mapping the Floating Bicycle: An audience participation presentation using Mindjet’s MindManager to design the next extreme water sport.

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