Tony Goodson has a good explanation of how he used MindManager recently to respond to a tender ("tender" is described here by Wikipedia):

"I used MindManager to run the tender response," Tony says. "We brainstormed ideas using a projector on to a wall.  We reviewed our progress every day as a group. We planned our response, and did lots of rearranging of all the info and ideas we’d gathered, across the MindMap.  And finally, I wrote my part of the response in MindManager, whereby I’d write my response in the Notes section of each main Topic/Branch, whilst looking at all the sub-branches I’d gathered.  Then I exported all the notes into Word – a complete response that needed nothing but formatting."

Tony also makes a reference to a discussion on Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users that is very relevant to mapping. Sierra, in talking about the need to "make products interesting," poses the question "If you were a brain, and you’d been evolving for a very, very long time… what would you find interesting?"

Clearly, the content itself has to be compelling. But will the average business person be willing to slog through pages of text to find the kernal of inspiration that convinces them of the value of your product or service? We have one customer who submitted a proposal for new business, was summarily turned down, and then resubmitted the proposal as a MindManager map. The client could immediately drill to what was most interesting to them, see all the detail they needed–and gave our customer a big chunk of business.

It is the message AND how it is delivered.

Chuck Frey of Innovation Weblog noted today that in a special Tech Insert to this week’s (Dec. 19) issue of Newsweek, Bill Gates has written a column titled: “The Road Ahead: How ‘intelligent agents’ and mind-mappers are taking our information democracy to the next stage.”

Gates notes that “…advanced software and Web services can help us trace, slice and dice this information [available to PC users] in ways that were impossible only a decade ago. But while we’ve gone a long way towards optimizing how we use information, we haven’t yet done the same for knowledge…On another level, OneNote and a new generation of ‘mind-mapping’ software can also be used as a digital ‘blank slate’ to help connect and synthesize ideas and data—and ultimately create new knowledge.”

Mindjet has a great many users at Microsoft. That fact, along with the reference to "ideas and data" suggest that when Gates refers to "a new generation of mind mapping software"–he is referring to us!

NOTE: Gates’s column is not available online at this point.

In order to highlight the fact that our IE-based viewer is, in fact, a beta, we have moved the web page where information and download instructions reside from our Product area to our Support area.

To install the IE-based viewer and/or learn how to embed maps in Intranets or blogs, please go to http://www.mindjet.com/us/support/beta/index.php?s=9.

We have now had two "Powered by MindManager" events. That title is a bit presumptuous. It is more accurate to say that we have been involved with two events in which the organizers have worked with us to integrate MindManager into the proceedings. This is a new initiative of ours. But we are already in further talks with the organizers of the two following events and are getting interest from a number of high-profile event organizers ready to build into upcoming conferences the kind of interactivity MindManager enables. We will chronicle subsequent "Powered by MindManager" events here on the Mindjet Blog.

Most recently, Mindjet’s own Tom Blossom reached out to Chris Heuer, the organizer behind a series of Web 2.1: A BrainJam for the rest of us events. (Chris came to our attention because Tom saw a resume Chris made using MindManager). As a result, Chris brought Tom and MindManager into BrainJams3Dec2005 held in Menlo Park.

Here’s a shot of Chris using a map to wrap up the event.

And here’s Tom, serving as one of the scribes (AKA note makers) for the events:

Prior to that, in late October, Matt Homann reached out to us to support his first BlawgThink event. At the beginning of BlawgThink 2005, Matt and his co-organizer and co-host Dennis Kennedy warm up the crowd with some jokes and a softshoe routine.  They are using MindManager first to display the agenda for the two-day event.

Early in the afternoon of the first day (Nov. 11), Bonnie Shucha, who runs the WisBlawg – From the UW Law Library  and Diane Murley, who runs the wonderfuly named Law Dawg Blawg, give an introduction to RSS and News Aggregators.

Later that afternoon, Matt Buchanan, Doug Sorocco and Steve Nipper (here we see a nice shot of Steve’s ear)…gave a presentation on group blogs. The three attorneys have one such blog themselves, ReThink(IP).

Later still, Fred Faulkner, webmaster for the American Bar Association and a prolific blogger in his own right, presented "How’d you do that?  Technical tips, tricks, and problem-solving techniques."

The inimicals (new word) Jack Vinson and Jim McGee appropriately teamed up to discuss "Collaboration, KM, and the power of the virtual first impression." But all I could grab was a shot of Jim sitting by himself, next to a shot of his parents.

Finally, a closign shot of one of the BlawgThink participants using MindManager on his Tablet PC to learn how to design a blog.

More "Powered by MindManager" events to come.

The Mindjet Labs has just released a new Mindjet MindManager Pro 6 OPML Editor. The Editor enables users to open, edit, and save Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files in MindManager Pro 6.  The editor also reads and writes the Simple Sharing Extensions to OPML introduced by Microsoft under a Creative Commons License.

Originally conceived by Dave Winer, founder of Userland Software, OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is, according to WikiPedia, "an XML format for outlines. Originally developed…as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators. The OPML specification defines an outline as a hierarchical, ordered list of arbitrary elements. The specification is fairly open which makes it suitable for many types of list data."