NovaMind News

The videos on this blog are now available in iTunes - you can get directly to the NovaMind news podcast at:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275341730

Enjoy!

Gideon

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We now have a video available in which Stephen Feber, a long time NovaMind customer tells about how he used the planning and organizational capabilities of Mind Mapping to obtain £22m (US$43.5m) project funding for an urban regeneration project.

In the process, he beat 312 other competitors for the funding, making him one of the top 1% of all bidders on the proposal.

In this video Stephen shares his secrets of success in detail in an interview with Gideon King, founder of NovaMind.

And without further ado, here is the video:

For further information

Please see http://www.novamind.com/Business/case_studies/stephen_feber.php for further information and a PDF report with details about the project.

 

 Business Mind Mapping Success Story: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Business Mind Mapping Success Story: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Brainstorming can be an effective way to solve problems and plan projects, but there are so many brainstorming techniques out there, many of them ineffective. This article shows how you can use NovaMind for effective brainstorming:

Discover the way to increased efficiency—the brainstorming tool you wouldn’t think would get you there

I hope you find this useful in increasing your brainstorming and Mind Mapping skills.

If you like it, please give it the “Thumbs up”, and if you want to be notified of my new hubs, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. If you are on hubpages, you are also welcome to join my “Fan club”.

If you are on del.icio.us or technorati or stumbleupon or digg etc, there are links to add it to the social bookmarking sites of your choice (click on the “Share this page” icon).

All the best

Gideon

Quite often I am asked about the very basics of how to make Mind Maps, so I have written an article and posted it for everyone to see:

How to Create Mind Maps

I hope you find this useful in increasing your Mind Mapping skills.

If you like it, please give it the “Thumbs up”, and if you want to be notified of my new hubs, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. If you are on hubpages, you are also welcome to join my “Fan club”.

This is just the first of many hubs I plan to post.

All the best

Gideon

Stephen Feber, a long time NovaMind customer tells about how he used the planning and organizational capabilities of NovaMind to obtain &pound22m (US$43.5m) project funding for an urban regeneration project.

In the process, he beat 312 other competitors for the funding, making him one of the top 1% of all bidders on the proposal.

Stephen shares his secrets of success in detail in an interview with Gideon King, founder of NovaMind.

Read the full PDF report at:

http://www.novamind.com/Business/case_studies/stephen_feber.php

We now have a new book available covering the wide range of uses of Mind Mapping in business environments. The book is called “Business Guide to Mind Mapping“.

The book gives examples of using Mind Mapping as a business planning tool, a sales tool, for project management, staff management, and for personal and professional development, as well as many other uses.

There are example Mind Maps throughout the book to get you up and running quickly, so you can get the best leverage out of using Mind Mapping in your work.

Full information is available at:

http://www.novamind.com/Books/Business

and you can purchase the eBook from the NovaMind online store.

Come and join the NovaMind team! NovaMind Software currently has the following open positions:

C# / .NET / WPF developer
Cocoa / Objective-C developer
Marketing Assistant
Mind Mapper

For details on the positions, please click on the title of the positions or go to http://www.nova-mind.com/Jobs/

NovaMind 1.0 shipped just over 5 years ago, and the NovaMind team celebrated by having some fun time out. First of all we went out and shot each other at LaserForce, then we tried to scare each other to death on the Big Six rides at the Dreamworld fun park - one of our staff members almost didn’t make it! When we found that all of us had survived that, we went to Wildwater world and tried to drown each other.

I’m pleased to report that the whole team survived unharmed, and we are looking forward to the next 5 years of company and product growth. Looks like being lots of fun…

Well yesterday was an exciting day when I received the first printed copies of my new book “Teacher’s Guide to Mind Mapping“, subtitled “The research, theory, and practical use of Mind Mapping in primary, secondary, tertiary and business education”. It’s great to be able to finally see how it really looks in its final form.

It’s funny how when you’re waiting for things like this to arrive, that you start to doubt things - “are the example Mind Maps going to look good?”, “have I missed any typos?”, etc.

But to finally hold it in my hands was great, and I’m pretty happy with how the book turned out, and the contents, layout and diagrams look good. And now I know how much it weighs for postage, and it comes in at just 2g below the threshold before it would have gone up into the next postage rate and cost significantly more - phew.

So, about another 3.5 weeks until delivery of the full shipment. I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of pre-sales, and am looking forward to getting the books to their new owners.

Today I had the opportunity of meeting up with Edward De Bono, inventor of Lateral Thinking, author of over 70 books, and creator of the “6 thinking hats”, CoRT thinking lessons, and consultant to many governments, large organizations, schools and universities worldwide. He also created some fame for himself by owning four islands, and declaring his desire to be the king of Australia.

He happened to be coming to Brisbane for one night, so he arranged for us to meet while he was here.

As you may expect, the conversation was not on your run of the mill topics, with the discussion ranging over issues related to how to solve traffic congestion problems in London, how to bring a swift end to the Iraq war, population control in China, bringing the Israelis and Palestinians closer to peace, US politics, blonde jokes, and of course Mind Mapping, and some business opportunities.

Many of the ideas he has are just so out of the ordinary, but at the same time so exciting as new approaches to age-old problems. For example, ending the war in Iraq, he was proposing that the USA declare a date that they would pull out of Iraq - say the end of the year, and then for every week there are more killings, they extend their stay a week, and for every week that there are no killings, they advance their departure by a week. In this way there is strong pressure created amongst the population to police each other and overcome the conflict.

Not all the ideas are readily implemented on their own, but they are so dramatically out of the box thinking that the very concepts make you think in new directions. Take also the example of solving a problem where a city council needed to free up parking spaces by making sure that people would not park for so long. Their initial idea was to put in parking meters and charge people for parking there - his counter to that was “how about making them park with their lights on full beam?” In this way, there is a natural incentive to reduce the amount of time you are parked because you don’t want to get a flat battery.

In all, it was a very interesting and thought provoking meeting. It really made me think how little we really think through the possibilities, opportunities and alternatives in order to both solve problems and open up new opportunities.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been busy putting together a number of followup emails for after you download NovaMind. They help with the following topics:

• Installation
• What Mind Mapping is all about
• The “laws” of Mind Mapping
• Brainstorming
• Branch Boundaries
• Presentations
• Teaching using Mind Maps
• Using Images on your Mind Maps
• Using Mind Maps for Study
• Project Planning using Mind Maps

…and I have one more to write to complete the series - one that is dear to my heart - using Mind Mapping for enhancing personal effectiveness. Those who have read the company profile will know how I have totally changed every aspect of my life, and I share some of my secrets about this in that final email.

I have also started a similar series on how to get up to speed quickly with Merlin project manager for MacOS X, and so far have covered:

• Installation and getting started
• Understanding the Merlin user interface and how to show the information you want to work with at the time
• Starting new project plans in Merlin, linking activities together, and using the Merlin library

This is just the start, and I am planning to add articles on using NovaMind and Merlin together, resources, time and costs, risks, monitoring progress, changes that happen while you are running the project, reporting, and gaining feedback at the end of a project so that you can learn and do better next time.

With most of the lessons, I have a short homework exercise to make sure that the information is fully understood.

These email series will automatically start when you download either NovaMind or Merlin for the first time.

I hope they are useful for you and help you get the most out of the products.

Gideon

Virtually all our translations have been carried out by volunteers, and sometimes their circumstances change and they are unable to help us maintain the translations. Our Spanish translator has done a fantastic job in translating the NovaMind into Spanish and we would once again like to acknowledge Eduardo for his help, and all our other translators.

Unfortunately he is unable to continue to help out with the Spanish translation, so we would like to call for volunteers to help out with maintaining the Spanish translation, and completing the translation of the extra words required for us to complete a Spanish version of the Windows version of NovaMind. This will initially involve translating about 200 words and short phrases, and then occasionally when we add new features to NovaMind, there will be a few more words to translate. You will receive recognition by your name being mentioned in the about panel, and a free license for NovaMind.

We also like to have a fallback translator in case we lose contact with other existing translators or they are unable to continue to translate for us, so if you would like to volunteer, we would really appreciate that. Just send an email to info@nova-mind.com if you are able to help out.

Thank you.