Today I had the honor to give a 45-minute presentation at my former college, the Stuttgart Media University (Hochschule der Medien, HdM), on my zig-zag career path, our products from DEVONthink to DEVONsphere, and about how to build an Internet startup. It was a lot of fun being back in the hallowed halls again and meet some fantastic customers who use our apps intensively for their research and educational work.

BBC News today writes about what tags are and how they can be used to navigate notes, ideas, and other items. Technology reporter Ian Hardy also talks to our support specialist Jim Neumann.

The traditional “files and folders” way of storing our data is decades old. And while it does reward our brain with a sense of control and ease of accessibility, it’s certainly not perfect. As the file structure increases, documents several subfolders deep slowly get consumed, like a donkey in quicksand. That’s where tags come in. (more)

Historian and power user Rachel Leow has recently published a thorough review of DEVONthink Pro Office in Perspectives on History. She explains how she uses our software for her research and where the obstacles are when trying to reach the Holy Grail, the paperless office. Rachel introduces us into this conundrum: … (more)

… with Neal Thompson and mentions also DEVONthink. Neil about the interview:

Steven Johnson (author of “The Ghost Map”) visited a Seattle Barnes & Noble to discuss his latest book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.” I spoke with him afterwards about the rituals and routines of his daily writing life. The key? A big cup of coffee and 500 words a day. — Seattle, October 2010 … (more)

This weekend DEVONthink Pro Office is mentioned in BBC’s world-wide program “Click!”.

The promise we can all go paperless has been around for years so why is it that despite email, smartphones and computers we are all still so dependent on pen and paper? LJ Rich reports on how the experiment went to encourage the Click team to produce an episode of the programme without using paper. (more)

In the Academic Technology blog Evan Cordulack describes how he uses DEVONthink Pro Office for his research:

Its basic features allow me to organize my research in a way that lets me see big chunks of it at the same time from a variety of different groupings and view options. Once the sources are in Devonthink Pro Office, it largely gets out of the way so that I can focus interpreting the sources. The application’s ability to group, tag, and search documents as well as convert documents to full text makes it useful to me and has made my writing process easier. (more)

DEVONsphere Express is the latest addition to our product portfolio. Bernard Le Du from the the French Mac magazine Vous et Votre Mac has reviewed it and honored it with 4.5 out of 5 stars:

Une recherche plus intelligent — This “contextual” search tool is very useful for retrieving documents and related data. It is useful for students, researchers, writer of sorts, everyone … … (more)

From time to time I cannot resist to posting some feedback we receive, especially when it’s from people who usually don’t give any feedback to companies. Like Tony Vanderharst from Melbourne, Australia: … (more)

Mac blogger Macdrifter recently started a mini series of postings about how writers work and which tools they use. He started with blogger and multimedia designer Brett Terpstra. For his research Brett uses DEVONagent Pro and DEVONagent Express. (more)

In a recent article on TidBITS Tonya Engst talks about how she manages school papers digitally:

The ScanSnap is addictive, and I’ve hardly begun to learn how to use it. Here’s how cool it is: My son comes home from the first day of school with a fistful of forms and handouts. I open the scanner, stick them in, choose an option from the ScanSnap icon in the Dock, and push the big blue button on the scanner. Within moments (or minutes if I chose to run OCR) the entire pile is onscreen, even the double-sided forms and the pages that emerge from the backpack slightly crumpled. (more)