Mass Innovation Nights are a once a month gathering for local entrepreneurs to network with other technologists, meet the media, and generally connect to the outside world (apart from our cramped offices where we spend so many hours). 

 

WebNotes was just selected to come present along with 9 other companies, which is a tremendous honor! For Boston locals, swing on by July 8 at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation.

 

You can also help us out by voting for us here!  Winners of this contest will be chosen to give a special presentation to the audience, so we'd really like the chance to show off. 

 

Thanks! 

 

Today marks the launch of WebNotes Pro, a day that our team has looked forward to for the last year of development. It's been an arduous task full of surprises and challenges, but we finally made it!

 

Read all about the launch here.

 

So what do you get with WebNotes Pro? For $9.99 a month, you get the best online PDF annotation tools in the business (unlike other tools where you can only overlay images and shapes onto the PDF, we can actually aggregate the data you highlight or note for organization and reporting purposes), multi-colored highlighting, and access to WebNotes Priority Support. You also get all of the standard web page annotation tools found in WebNotes Basic.  Believe me when I say all of this took forever to build!

 

Want to see it in action? Try this demo. Alternatively, you can sign up here.

 

For Organizations that are interested in using WebNotes for their teams, try WebNotes Group Solutions. It provides you with your own branded domain (i.e. acme.webnotes.net) and user administration tools to add/remove/block your users. It's a deeply powerful tool for businesses and schools that has been shown to improve your research efficiency by anywhere from 30%-75%. One business that uses WebNotes Group Solutions saves $1000/week in time (Roundpeg). Another business that uses us, saves $2000 for every project they complete (G2G Sales Communications). Read more in depth examples of our case studies here.

 

Still have questions? Shoot me an email at aking@webnotes.net. I'd love to help you get set up!

 

Best, 

Alex 

Thanks to everyone who participated in our last survey! I love how unbelievably dedicated our small community is. A few interesting results before I announce the winner. 

1. Speed is one of the most important issues you guys face. We hear you loud and clear and are working on optimizing our code to make it faster for you.
   
2. "Server timeouts" are another issue that we need to look into. Many times this is caused by slow internet connections or physical distance from our servers (we have a few users in India and China who experience timeouts more frequently because of this). For all remaining timeout issues, we hope to have these resolved over coming months.
   
3. Despite these issues, you rank us as having about a 2 out of 5 in terms of total bugginess (5 being buggier). We like to think this is wonderful considering we are still in Beta!

And now on to the raffle! We would like to congratulate David Lafon for being our lucky survey winner.

David has been a web developer since 2000 working in the French entity Groupe Reflect, of Emakina, a European interactive agency. You can check him out on his blog www.web-intention.com where David shares his passions for work and intellectual pursuits.

 
Thanks again everyone! 

For our last survey, I realized that I never established an ending date! Therefore, tomorrow will be the last day to submit your feedback before we do our raffle. So far we have about a 10% response rate, so thanks to everyone who has given their feedback!! 

Despite our lack of blog posting, things have been trucking along here at WebNotes. Over the past few months we've had wonderful conversations with PR firms, law librarians, consultants, students, academics and others about how WebNotes helps them solve their research and reporting problems. We've been developing several new features, but we've decided to try to take a break to smash as many bugs as possible. 

 

And we need your help! Let us know what bugs are annoying you and you can have the chance to win a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. Click here to fill out our survey! 

 

As a follow up to last month's article on the history of highlighters, I now bring you The History of Sticky Notes!

As you all know, my first point of research on any topic is Wikipedia. Wiki defines the Post-It or sticky note as "a piece of stationery with a readherable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and to other surfaces". It was invented in 1974 (it turns 35 this year!) by a scientist at 3M named Art Fry,who needed a better way to keep his place in his hymn book at church. However, in order to truly understand the sticky note, we have to go back to 1968, and a couple of scientists named Spencer Silver and Jesse Kops.

 

Spencer, with the help of Jesse, developed a"low-tack", reusable pressure sensitive adhesive. This adhesive was made of tiny, indestructible acrylic spheres that were strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough to pull them apart. For 5 years, Spencer tried promoting his invention amongst the executives at 3M but had no success. Spencer's first application of the adhesive was a "Post-It Bulletin Board", which was essentially a large photograph covered in the glue that would allow people to stick documents to it without a thumbtack. Sales disappointed, however, and most of the attention the bulletin board attracted was from dust that got stuck in the glue.
 

Spencer, undetered, put on various seminars and informal discussions to no avail, but by chance one afternoon, Art Fry attended one ofthem. It turns out that Art had heard about Silver's figurative 'glue that doesn't stick' while golfing with another colleague. Art thought that this low-tack adhesive was fascinating and wanted to learn more, but was also stumped for a potential application.
 

Art Fry also performed in his church choir and typically organized all of the various hymns that they would sing with paper bookmarks. With each flip of the page these bookmarks would move or fall out creating an annoyance for Art. One day, while performing, Art realized that if he were to apply Silver's adhesive to his bookmarks, they would stay in place perfectly without permanently bonding to the book.
 

Using 3M's policy of allowing employees to use 15% of their time for independent projects, Art began working on this new application. The first few attempts worked, but left too much of the adhesive on the pages ofhis hymnal. Eventually, he was able to perfect the formula and created a batch of notes for some of his coworkers. People used the notes, but they mostly fizzled, further frustrating Art.
 

Time passes, and one day while he was reading a report, he had some questions about the data. Art clipped out a sticky note, drew an arrow to the data, wrote his question and then gave it to his supervisor. His supervisor then wrote the response on Fry's note and then attached it to another document to send back. Later that day, the two men discussed the exchange and immediately realized the value of the sticky note. This new layer of communication quickly allowed more effective correspondence, not just better bookmarking. Knowing this, Fry reintroduced the sticky note to his colleagues and the note immediately took off. 3M employees were clammoring for more, sometimes trudging across 3M's snow filled campus to get them.
 

Despite this internal success, there were still institutional biases that prevented 3M execs from "getting" the product. Further complicating the process was the need for new machines to mass produce these sticky notes, which engineers claimed would be exceedingly difficult to implement. Art, once again, proved them wrong and built a prototype machine in the basement of his house. With the proper machinery inplace, the Post-It could now be market tested. 3M chose 4 cities, and as you might have guessed, Post-It's failed in all of them.
 

How could this be? The product was great, secretaries at 3M loved them, so what could've gone wrong? Two execs decided that they needed to investigate further and began cold calling the test markets and interacting with the users, showing them how to use Post-Its correctly. This time, the response was incredible, and according to one of the execs, Steve Collins,"those things really were like cocaine". The great success of this "Boise Blitz" marketing test finally convinced 3M to commercialize the product in 1980. Millions of free notes were distributed in the 1st year, and when the free notes ran out, people started buying more. The product took off so quickly that in 1981, 3M awarded Post-It's the Golden Step award, given to any product generating more than 2 million in revenues. By 1998, Post-It's accounted for more than $1 Billion in revenues.

 

But the saga doesn't end here, Art Fry himself notes: “The digital age generates so many documents, and they all look the same. How do you organize all that material?”  How indeed?

 

[Thanks to Viernest for the Photo] 

 

In early November 2008, I added an entry to Wikipedia detailing what WebNotes is and how it came to life. I poured well over 2 hours into this post, detailing what I thought to be the perfect content, learning how to use Wikipedia, and formatting the article to my liking.

 

Within about 24 hours, it was deleted as being spam.

 

Mind you, I do work for WebNotes so I probably am a bit biased, but I honestly had made an effort to be as neutral as possible. I notified Wikipedia and was told that any article must be news in and of itself, and that purely because a company exists does not make it news-worthy. 

 

 And so I waited. We launched on December 10th, 2008, were covered by magazines, hundreds of blogs, and even on-air at CNBC. Enough time had passed, and enough news generated, so that at long last, I bring you our Wikipedia article. It's nothing fancy, but I invite all of you to edit and add to it.  

Two days ago, we pushed out a small update for our users. This update contains two new enhancements:

 

1. For shared pages, you now have the ability to select whether or not you want to BCC the recipients. Previously, all shared emails were BCC by default.  
   
   
2. You are now able to rearrange annotated pages within the Organizer. Consequently, this will also change the order should you choose to Publish your annotations. Both the Publisher and the Organizer still default to order your annotations by creation date, but we now give the user a choice. This update also fixes the pesky bug where published documents would sometimes be ordered randomly!
   
   

  

 

After working at WebNotes for the last 6 months, I've become interested in how Highlighters and Sticky Notes came to be. I've done a bit of rooting around the web, and decided it might make a nice posting for those who are interested. Today's section will be on highlighters but I'll get into sticky notes later.

   

In the Beginning:

 

Highlighters, by definition are just felt-tip pens filled with transparent fluorescent ink. The first felt tip pen was invented by Sidney Rosenthal in 1952 and his device consisted of a squat glass bottle filled with ink and a wool felt wick and tip. Thus, the "magic marker" was born, so named for it's ability to mark up any surface. Despite his new invention, Sidney's Magic Marker corporation was never particularly successful given the large amount of competition and innovation by others, and consequently, he was forced to sell the "Magic Marker" brand name to Binney & Smith in 1989.

 

In 1962, the modern fiber-tipped pen was invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationary Company in Japan. These pens used bamboo for the fiber (though synthetic fibers later replaced the bamboo) and were the first to use dyes rather than inks to get their pigment.

 

In 1963, the Avery Corporation created the first "Hi-Liter" by introducing translucent-ink into the cartridge. The pen came in various pastel shades but in 1978, they introduced the first fluorescent colors. The first fluorescent color, coincidentally, was yellow which is why we stereotypically think of highlighters being yellow. 

 

To view the PDF of my research, click here: WebNotes Report(3).pdf (33.57 kb)

 

[Thanks to Megapixel Eyes for the photo] 

Yahoo has recently launched their latest development called Search Pad. This trial program tracks your research habbits, collects the URL's that you visit and places them onto a behind the scenes notebook. Yahoo then prompts the user to ask if they'd like to start a notebook and allows them to copy and paste text in next to the URL's for later reference. WebNotes would like to welcome Yahoo to the research field; we believe that Yahoo's entrance into this space shows how valuable and how untapped the market really is. 

 

Yahoo's Search Pad blog notes that "our user studies show that people often use word-processing documents, sticky notes, emails, bookmarks (or a combination of the above) to record what they find on the Web. These methods can be quite cumbersome and require extra steps which are time-consuming and distracting." We agree, and think that the service that best consolidates these various resources into an easy to use interface will become incredibly successful.

To see the solution they came up with, click here. 

Good luck, Yahoo!