The list of 200 finalists was whittled down to 100 winners (yes this means every second nominee won - so what?) at the award ceremony in Malta and Till - picking the longer straw again - was there to collect our shiny wood framed award plaque.

This is our third award in eight months and we’re in serious danger of becoming very big-headed. On the other hand we know awards are one thing, but the real indicator of the value of our mind mapping tool is the feedback of our users - so keep those feature requests and ideas coming, and us busy!

Our users often tell us that they like MindMeister because of its intuitive interface and overall simplicity. That’s why we try to add only the most necessary features in new releases - and still, this time it turned out to be quite a long list

Oh, and don’t fret if you can’t find your pet feature below, in spite of all the talk about simplicity some more updates are coming soon!

Task information on ideas As a first step to lightweight project management in MindMeister you can now add task information - priority, completion, due date and owner - to ideas. More to come! Attachments on ideas You can now upload file attachments to ideas and preview images through inline thumbnails. This feature is for Premium users only, but everybody can try it out for 30 days. WunderLink and WunderNote Try out these new functions to magically add links and notes to your ideas, using the wonders of the web. WunderLink gets its link from a little Yahoo! search performed in the background, while WunderNote uses a FreeBase database lookup. Automatic text wraps Idea captions will now automatically wrap at a certain length to avoid overlong nodes (you can keep the old behaviour by adding manual line breaks with Shift-RETURN) More Geistesblitz features In our constant quest to improve the Geistesblitz tools we have now added email support and a Geistesblitz Activity for Internet Explorer 8. With email support, you can send single Geistesblitzes or while mind maps just through an email. Subsharing for maps New option to allow collaborators to invite others when sharing a map - this will also work for already shared maps Print and export New option to center map on printout, PDF export of mind map now includes notes Formatting and navigation Apply text styles selectively to child ideas, nicer formatting of first level branches, ability to expand and collapse levels Notes and links Advanced and larger note editor with more formatting options, new links widget in sidebar, “Show popular links” for idea OpenID and Paypal support Support for signup and login through OpenIDs and Paypal support when upgrading to commercial licenses. Other enhancements Nicer invitation and sharing emails, new user options, improved support for Safari and Opera, performance improvements through better script and image loading.

Update: We are back with the new release. Enjoy! We will introduce the new features soon…

Apparently we’re one of 200 finalists for that award, and the 100 lucky winners will be announced at the Red Herring Europe 2008 event scheduled for April 14-16 on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Malta.

Red Herring say their editorial staff “rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development”. In any case, we’re in pretty good company, as past winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube (and before winning they must have been finalists too, right?).

Keen readers can check out the official press release (this time in English - yay!).

MindMeister was selected from over 1600 submitted tools and sites and they said we should be duly proud (well, we are!). The prize is awarded to software tools especially suited for use in small and medium businesses.

So my colleague Till just came back from CeBIT in Hannover where the prize was awarded and the glass trophy fits snugly beside last year’s design award. Your first award is always special of course, but when they give you a second one you know it wasn’t just a fluke! We’ll take this as an incentive to keep working hard on our online mind mapping tool and improve it for all our users in releases to come.

See some pictures of the award ceremony or read the official press release (german only, I’m sorry guys…).

Besides providing 1 GB of free storage space for every account, atoolo also enables users to work on documents directly in the browser, without the need for a native application. Which made MindMeister a pretty good fit, of course. There are also all the other usual office-type documents such as word processing and spreadsheets (powered by Zoho) as well as project support, instant messaging and a YouTube integration - check it out at www.atoolo.com!

If you also want to embed MindMeister in your application just go and register your API key at http://www.mindmeister.com/services/api

Since the private beta lots of features have been added, and also the interface has undergone a few revisions - albeit minor ones (it just looked good right away ;-)). Since the start of development, however, the design of the user interface has changed quite a bit - and luckily so, as you can see from the image above, showing the evolution of the map view in the early stages of implementation…

So, we’ve taken that feedback very seriously and now are proud to give you not one, not two - but three new versions of Geistesblitz, for Yahoo! Widgets, iGoogle and the iPhone. We hope this will make everybody happy! (if you’ve never heard of the Geistesblitz tools before you can check them out here first)

	Geistesblitz Yahoo! Widget Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is the most common widget engine out there and works on all recent Windows versions, as well as Mac OS. So we thought it only fair to support this as well! System Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Mac OS X Download Now!
	Geistesblitz iGoogle Gadget For those of you who already live and breathe through the web browser, the Geistesblitz gadget for iGoogle is the weapon of choice - one click to add the gadget to your iGoogle page and fire off ideas to MindMeister straight from your web portal! Browser Requirements: MSIE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Opera Install Now!
	Geistesblitz iPhone Gadget With 4 million phones sold within half a year, developing for the iPhone recently became more than a fashion statement. While you’ll have to wait a little longer for the full iPhone interface, here’s a cheeky gadget for your iPhone browser as a little taster! System Requirements: Apple iPhone or iPod Touch Install Now!

If you (like me) are late getting Christmas presents, and really have no better idea, you might want to sponsor a MindMeister Premium membership for somebody - we’ll even refund you 20% of the price on your credit card if you do this by 7th January 2008!

Well, that’s enough of the hard sell for this year, once again Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to everybody!

Passwords for public maps You can now set passwords for public maps for secure linking and embedding and to hide them from the public maps list Blog embedding for everybody Now you don’t need to be Premium user anymore to embed maps into websites or blogs Embed API A new embed API allows you to seamlessly integrate our map editor in virtually any other web application Improved performance Vastly reduced the number of requests when loading a map by combining icons and other tuning measures Reseller Scheme If you’re interested in reselling MindMeister to other users just sign up for an account here and get 20% on every license sold! Other enhancements Easy enable notifications when first sharing a map - tag auto completion - reworked publish dialog with easy copy buttons - view invoices and export as PDF - and many more…

Right now we’re working on a few fixes to some editing problems that some people have been having, as well as on a number of new features. They are things that have been requested frequently and that we think we need to complete our mind mapping offering, such as attachments and images, connections between nodes, possibly some project management things (e.g. task info) as well as Geistesblitz enhancements.