NovaMind Company Information

NovaMind was founded in Australia by Gideon King in 2002, after he developed the initial versions of NovaMind while living in Malaysia.

The official company name is NMS Global Pty Ltd, and we are trading as NovaMind Software.

Originally, the company was run from a small room Gideon's house, but eventually outgrew that and moved to an office in Shailer Park.

The vision of NovaMind started as one of becoming the best Mind Mapping program on Mac computers.

This goal turned out to be relatively easy, so we kept pushing the envelope on the Mac, and also turned our attention to producing the best Windows Mind Mapping software. We found that there is a lot more competition on Windows, and although in many respects we are already best as far as visuals, presentations, and many other features go, and many of the unique features of NovaMind such as the Suggesterator, Screenwriting etc are only available in NovaMind, but there are a few areas where we are currently weak, like import and export, so we are making these areas a primary focus until we have both caught up and surpassed all the other products. Our goal remains to make NovaMind the best Mind Mapping program on whatever platform it is running on.

The original product was NovaMind for Mac, and that was the only product until NovaMind 3.

We then developed the Standard and Screenwriter editions, and started selling Merlin, as well as developing the Windows version of NovaMind.

Next, Gideon's first book, "Teacher's guide to Mind Mapping" was released, first in physical book form and later in e-book form.

Then we moved to three products on each platform: NovaMind Express, NovaMind Pro, and NovaMind Platinum.

After that, Gideon's second book, "Business Guide to Mind Mapping" was released.

Although NovaMind started slowly, the company is now growing very quickly to be able to both speed up the development of all the new features and improving the ease of use of the software, and supporting all the many users of NovaMind.

We are always looking for high quality people to join the team, so please check out our jobs page.

The first commercial release of NovaMind was made from Malaysia in August 2002.

In December 2002, the development was moved to Australia.

2003 saw the establishment and growth of the company and recruitment of staff, particularly in the business development, testing, support and office administration areas to support the development team and get the news about NovaMind known worldwide (along with the translation into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish).

2004 saw the implementation of a number of new features including Screen Writers (for movie, TV and play scripts etc), Flexi-Branches™, Branch Proposal System™ (later updated to become the Suggesterator™), export to HTML, Mind Manager Import/Export, export to PowerPoint, addition of hundreds of new adornments, implementation of the graphics library, translation into Japanese and Chinese and so much more.

Early in 2005 we looked at the state of the application, and although the version of NovaMind we had on the market at that time was far better than anything else, we are passionate about providing absolutely the best possible for you, and in order to do that, it was necessary to rewrite all the internals of NovaMind from the ground up - a massive undertaking, but one that allows us to add many new features we would not have been able to do with the old structure. It also allowed us to pave the way for the Windows version of NovaMind.

2006 saw some exciting innovations within NovaMind, the final touches put to NovaMind 3, and the roll out of the Windows version. We have added many new features, like the spotlight searching, branch boundaries, new line styles, task information, and the new ribbon bar look etc.

2007 again saw a huge amount of development with a complete rewrite of the entire user interface of NovaMind for both Windows and Mac. This allowed us to streamline a lot of options that people used to have problems using. We also split the product into three editions: Express, Pro and Platinum, and added a lot of new features to the Platinum edition while making many improvements to Pro, and streamlining things for the Express edition. This allows us to support our very diverse user base much better.

2008 was another big year with many developments of NovaMind including enhancements to the Mac presentation system, the completely rewritten screenwriting features for Mac, glassy overlay branches, corner options for images, reflections for images, fit, fill and stretch for branch images, exports to MS Project, MS Word, MS Powerpoint, and RTF. The imports were enhanced to add Movie Magic, Final Draft, Mind Manager and MS Project. We added presentation templates to make it easier to create presentations. The layout was further enhanced with the new connection line styles. We added Hebrew, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish to the Windows version of NovaMind.

We completely recreated the NovaMind web site to make it easier to find information, and added a lot more examples and articles about using NovaMind in different ways. We also started creating articles for other web sites like Squidoo and HubPages, as well as starting the NovaMind Facebook page and Power Mind Mapping Facebook group, and creating 36 videos about Mind Mapping.

We added the Business Guide to Mind Mapping book, the time management book, and Merlin web sharing to our product lineup.

Also in 2008, we created NovaMind Connect, our social networking system, with over 300 Mind Maps added in the first couple of months of use.

Latest updates

Please refer to the NovaMind news blog for up to date information about the latest happenings.

The development of NovaMind is a team effort, and the result of the input of many brilliant minds, including company founder Gideon King, Matt, Patrick, Lam, Clinton, David, Florian, Karen, Lloyd, Ben, Katherine, Olivia, Rebecca, Damian, Jay, Chantelle, Anthony, Michele, Ralph, Margaret and Tony.

And most importantly to our customers, beta testers, translators, and for the many people who have taken the time and made the effort to give us feedback to enable us to continue to grow and improve NovaMind.