Overview
From Google’s website, Corporate Information – Company Overview:
"Google's mission
is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
What does MyUniverse want to do?
"Help you organize and take charge of your own information."
Not quite so dramatic but much more personal.
What is MyUniverse
We have a real challenge in classifying MyUniverse because its flexibility means it will be different things for different people.
For one it is a personal information organizer. For another, it could be an interactive presentation tool, an investment tracker or a home inventory. For another, it is a portable document for information exchange or a social network gateway. For another, it is something we have not yet imagined and for another, it is all of the above.
MyUniverse is built for flexibility, discovery and growth. MyUniverse is for everyone from novices to the technically savvy. Start simple and as your familiarity with MyUniverse grows, the possibilities grow.
Diverse capability with Smart Parts
On the surface, MyUniverse looks like a widget or gadget type application that you may have seen with Google Gadgets, Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft Gadgets, but this is much more. The gadgets we call "Smart Parts" work in conjunction with the MyUniverse application to provide powerful capabilities. The Smart Parts currently available for MyUniverse have a range of capabilities from Image display, Movie clips to Stock Quotes and a Formula calculator. By giving Smart Parts specific capabilities, you can structure the building blocks the way you need to display your knowledge and information – in your way.
MyUniverse is more than a gadget application
It is visually interactive
MyUniverse is a visually interactive application. Smart Parts are visual elements which you can manipulate by sizing and moving them to where they make sense to you. They can be grouped, overlapped and their visual appearance changed with shapes and colors. Smarts Parts each perform specific functions which can work with user interaction or automatically on their own.
As a Portable document
Adobe PDFs have become the standard for portable documents. We are not going to change that but we are bringing an interesting twist to the portable document concept. Because of a smart part called the "Link" Smart Part, it is actually possible to store other documents within the MyUniverse project file. What this means is you can create a MyUniverse document that can contain many Adobe PDF files, effectively creating a "portable document of portable documents". A single MyUniverse project could store hundreds of documents organized visually within a single MyUniverse document file.
Is Structured
MyUniverse projects are meant to be structured in a multi-page format. It is not meant to have everything on a single page. A Smart Part called a "Page" is used to add pages to allow MyUniverse projects to be structured in an organized way. To support this type of multi-page approach, Portals are available to allow jumps between any two parts in a document. Also, bookmarks can be set. The professional version includes "Slides" which can function as visual bookmarks.
MyUniverse includes an exciting way to manage your information through "Projections". With projections, information associated with a Smart Part can be entered and managed in one part but can be made visible in multiple places in a document. One part is designated as a projection source and any number of parts can be set as projection destinations. When information is changed on the source part, destination parts automatically pick up the changes. Using projections can reduce information redundancy in a project. Think of a MyUniverse project that contains an organizational chart and a contact list. By making the contact list part for an employee a projection source and the organization part for the employee a projection destination, changing the title in the contact list part will automatically make the change in the organizational chart. A major benefit of using Projections is to keep down the size of project files. If the same 50 Kilobyte image is used in multiple places in a document, the size of the file is can grow quickly. Using projections means only a single image is stored, but is visible in any place and as many times in a project as is needed.
Parts can also be visually associated to each other. This can be handled through grouping a set of parts or adding parts as sub-parts.
As a Presentation tool
MyUniverse can be used to create visually interactive projects. These can become components of a high school science presentation or an interactive business presentation. The Slide Show capability brings some interesting possibilities to slide show presentations. MyUniverse presentations do not need to be just simple static presentations. They can bring presentations alive with movies, audio and the presenter’s interaction with the presentation. Since the Script smart part brings some powerful capabilities to MyUniverse, slide shows can be fully scripted including media interactions. Scripting provides a way to automate project activity through writing simple programs.
MyUniverse can also be started in a "Kiosk" mode. Kiosk mode enables controlled user interactive capabilities similar to customer information presentations in interactive shopping center directories or museum presentations. If you are interested in setting up an information kiosk, MyUniverse can provide an inexpensive solution.
As a Personal information manager
Smart Parts provide a wide range of information and processing capabilities. Keep simple notes as in "Stickies", link to or store documents and link to your favorite internet sites. Present and process numeric information using a number of parts including Value, Totalizer, HTML Value and formula smart parts.
A free version
We provide a free version of MyUniverse. It is a very capable and valuable version on its own. There is no expiry, no nag screens, no registration requirements and no advertisements. It comes with a basic set of parts which on their own, can really help you take control of your information. It can be enhanced by adding parts some of which are free and some can be purchased.
Free means free to use for any purpose personal or commercial. The product is still owned and copyrighted by us. It can be freely shared with others but cannot be resold, rebranded or tampered with.
A free viewer
A Viewer version of MyUniverse is available. This means any published projects, even those created with the Professional will be fully functional to users in the viewer. If you have created something fabulous for the world, you can share the published file in all its glory freely to anyone with the free viewer.
A professional version
The professional version adds more capabilities to bring your projects alive. Features such as Actions enable you to set certain events on one part to cause actions to happen on other parts. For example, a button can be clicked to start a movie playing, when the movie has finished, it can execute a script function that could advance a slide show to the next slide and start another movie on it. Another example is to create a tracking route with Google Earth by setting parts for each waypoint. A button click can start positioning Google Earth to the starting point. When it reaches that point, it will go to the next point and so on and so on. Use it to create routes such as from the airport to your home to help people understand visually how to get there.
Alerts are another way to bring MyUniverse Projects alive. An alert is a way of notifying you when something has happened in the project. When an alert is raised, it will cause some kind of action you have configured. The action could be to, show a popup or play a sound, send an e-mail, post a Tweet on Twitter or perform an action on another part. Imagine using the Stock Part and configuring it so that when a stock price goes above a certain value, it sends you an e-mail or posts a notice to your private Twitter. Update stock alert settings in the morning before going to work and as alerts are raised during the day, get notifications on your smart phone as soon as MyUniverse sees them.
Additional features in the professional version are: Projections, Bookmarks, Layers, Database access, Slides and productivity features.