Like many other people, I use Evernote as an information dump. Despite my best efforts to keep things organized with multiple notebooks and tags, my account has become almost as unwieldy as an overstuffed filing cabinet, with stacks of PDFs, web clippings, and notes going back years.
That’s why I was intrigued by Mohiomap, a web app that turns your Evernote into mind maps. Mohiomap also recently added support for Google Drive and Dropbox accounts.
Mohiomap, which has received seed funding from investors in New Zealand, where it is based, currently uses a freemium model. In the free version, users can look at, navigate, and search their mind maps. With the premium feature, which costs $5 a month, you can choose from custom themes and create connections between different nodes on your map; access an analytics dashboard; and add comments to notes or files.
Mohiomap wants to solve the problem of information overload and help people organize their content in a visual form. In addition to Evernote, Google Drive, and Dropbox, Mohiomap has also rolled out an early prototype of their Twitter visualization tool, which started as an experiment to see if they could apply their technology to other data sources.
The startup was founded by Christian Hirsch, who got the idea for Mohiomap while doing PhD research in computer science at the University of Auckland.
“I was looking into visual languages and visualizations and how they can help with language management. While doing that, I found that there might be some very interesting commercial applications,” says Hirsch. Then he participated in Evernote’s annual development challenge.
“We wanted to apply this technology to Evernote because we saw the issue of having a lot of content and how to get a visual overview of what’s in there, to comprehend all this information and knowledge stored in the platform, and make it more accessible,” he says.
At that time, Mohiomap was an experiment, but after getting good feedback at the development challenge and being asked to make Mohiomap available in Evernote’s app marketplace, Hirsch decided there was potential for the startup. Mohiomap officially launched a year ago.
Mind maps are “simply an alternative way of exploring and interacting with your information,” says Hirsch.
“We are used to interacting with data using a list-based approach, a very flat structure of a long list of documents or folders or so on. We offer an alternative way of looking at and interacting with that. By giving more context, it’s naturally a better way of seeing the context of different information, how your documents or certain projects look like, and how these patterns compare to other projects.”
Uses cases include utilizing Mohiomap as a visual alternative to the search tools in Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive; rediscovering and organizing older files and documents; or simply getting a grasp on all the information you have stored in each platform.
Mohiomap’s future plans include working on its Twitter visualization tool and expanding to other data sources and cloud storage platforms. In addition to consumer-facing products, Hirsch says he also wants to start expanding Mohiomap to enterprise cloud platforms so employees can create mind maps to share with their workplace. The startup is also working on a native mobile app for iPad.
Mohiomap currently monetizes through its premium subscriptions and is planning to roll out custom products for enterprise customers, such as visualization databases or other document repositories.
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