For our United Kingdom readers that are shopping for insurance, we are covering a website that provides free legal advice relating to auto insurance. 

ChooseInsurance.co.UK will help consumers that have been denied insurance claims in the UK providing not only free legal advice but also providing many different insurance company reviews and recommendations.

Drivers can use their site to Compare Car Insurance and find the best solution.  They tailor their services for individuals that are over fifty, or services for young drivers. 

For example, if you are a young driver and looking for solutions that might best suit your needs their young driver section provides reviews of insurance companies offering up not only information custom tailored for your needs, but often provided by people of the same age group.

Similarly, middle aged drivers over fifty will find reviews and recommendations more suitable for their driving experience and lifestyle as well.

In general this is an excellent strategy for providing more useful information targeting the reviews to people with similar needs, requirements, experience and capabilities at a given point in life.

Plus, they also provide information and reviews for insurance companies that provide insurance for your home and its contents.

Their reviews come in part from everyday people around the United Kingdom that provide testimonials to ChooseInsurance.  They even offer visitors a chance to win £100 by submitting a testimonial in relation to an insurance company that they have had personal experience in past dealings.

Finally, ChooseInsurance does provide both travel insurance and life insurance reviews and recommendations as well, using their review and testimonial processes and strategies to gather information that is truly useful for their readers.

The site currently does not offer reviews based on differences in prices men versus women, but that might be a likely extension as recent news has indicated that some insurance companies provided show that women in certain cities might get better rates than women in other cities.  When it comes to making a decision the more information the better and ChooseInsurnace does deliver.

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BlackBerry has gotten its berries pinched by Samsung Electronics new BlackJack device.  So BlackBerry is doing what it does so very well, its kicked off a Trademark infringement lawsuit, claiming that the BlackJack device is too similar to the BlackBerry trademark especially for a device that could be very easily confused in form and function.  (see review of BlackJack for Cingular)

However, the real issue here is that more and more companies are running out of names to use for trademarks.  Apple recently launched trademark lawsuits against companies that happened to use the word ‘pod’ somewhere in the name of the company or website.

Its a legitimate concern of companies that invest a lot of money into a brand name and device, but Trademark law is not very practical either as there is a limited availability of words in the English language to name a product.  There are also just so many derivatives of English words.

Where will the world be when all of the names have been trademarked?

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For all my snowbird readers, you might consider your needs as you venture on down to Florida this year. Christmas is coming and a great gift option for boat enthusiasts is giving them a new electronic chartplotter. Northeast Marine Electronics recently release some information with their growing line of Chartplotters.

They provide some great rates on chartplotter with prices ranging from $499 - $1600 US. Technology can do a lot to make your boating experience more enjoyable and safer and a good chartplotter is definitely going to be something that will help make that happen, it is for the boat what a GPS navigational system is for a car.

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The Following is a response that developed into a better question relating to the article, MindMapping with our Time Travelling Brain and moved to a discussion forum in the MindManager yahoo group.

I find this(MindMapping with greater sensory Perception tuning,training and development) very interesting from the perspective that through many years of growing a user base (900,000 MindManager users now) there is a new potential study group out there that is using mindmaps in a way that was not possible with paper based versions.

In the past we could look at how fast a person could pick up information from looking/reading at a mindmap.

But after many years of MM users learning the skills and practicing them on  aregular basis, we now have a new area of potential study.  Something like:

• What is the impact of MindMapping on Composition and the feedback loop of composition?
• On the individual composing?
• On the group composing together?

In creating a mindmap by myself, I can rapidly pull ideas floating in my mind and put them into position on my mindmap and repeat this idea after idea, rapidly moving throughout my thoughts organizing them as I go.

I find that I can pull in a much more comprehensive perspective than I could if I were writing in word (I’m sure many mindmappers would agree).

Similarly this also works in a group.

The question is how big of a difference is this really?  How much better is the quality of the composition?  How much more complete?  Is there more quantity?

Is this spurred on by the real time, almost real time, faster than time aspect of the immediate visual impact of pulling the idea from my mind and turning it into a visual object. 

maybe to put it a different way, as a student of languages in the past, its one thing to be able to think in your language and translate to another.  Once you can think in another language that is an entirely different order of magnitude of capability(not to mention dreaming in a foreign language).

Is there an order of magnitude difference in composition with MM users that have ceased to only think in words but now also think in images?  Artists have been doing this for years, but their application and profession take them down a different path.

MM usres are often words smiths, project managers, managers, programmers and more.  We often come from a word / language driven background and we have learned through MM to think visually.

so after doing this for so many years, where have we ended up?  have we learned something new about ourselves along the way?  About our capabilities?  About our needs and goals to take this journey to a new level?
My thoughts are that there are three areas that will drive the future of this work and we cover them here in this group with a little regularity.

1.  Three dimensional mindmapping combined with a collaborative wiki approach to mindmapping

2.  Adding Audio sensory capabilities to MM

3.  Adding video capabilities (images in vector form if you will) - an image may provide a thousand  words, but a 20 second video at 30 frames per second can provide 600,000 words - if we have the big picture context to absorb it.

To understand where we will go next, we need a slightly more complete understanding of where we are today, physically, mentally and in action.
Then we can review the order of magnitude changes from
1.  Language thinker to
2.  2d MM visual image thinker to
3.  3d MM Audio/Video Collaborative Thinkers

Do you grok?   

For more informatin on this topic see the conversation unfold in the Mindmanager Yahoo Group under the thread MindMapping with our Time Travelling Brain.

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Its simple economics, employers must hire people that are qualified to do the job.  If the labor pool in their current locale does not support their needs, then they will forced to look elsewhere to survive.

IncParadise, a provider of free advice for small business owners, recently covered the topic, Entrepreneurship Strong, Education Weak referring to the strong spirit of entrepreneurs in the US but the lagging educational level and result of US citizens compared to the rest of the world.  Their report highlights that the US is getting less bang for the buck, spending more than most other countries but yielding lower test scores.

Companies need employees with strong high tech skills but even more an ability to work with complex situations and thing critically and creatively. 

These are all things that MindMapping teaches executives to do.  Plus, its something that can and should be taught more in secondary education and at the University level. 

Similarly, the US has launched into a campaign to raise test scores with legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act, which forces schools and teachers to drill and kill students with just enough information to memorize answers on tests.  Unfortunately, this leaves no room for the teachers to teach those skills that will be high in demand in 10 years, creative, critical thinking and problem solving skills for complex situations.

If you are a US resident and working on your 10 year plan for employment, you might start by determining if you should move job markets yourself!

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As a follow up to my post MindManager Pro 6 MindMapping Tip Turning Auto Correct Off, I found something that is a little buggy in application.  I’ll send it to Mindjet, but wanted to mention it here so that everyone could understand the potential situation.

If a word is typed while AutoCorrect is on, and that word is in the autocorrect list, the word will be corrected immediately after the word is typed.
This ‘immediately after’ part is where things get a little buggy.
When in topics this can occur after hitting space, enter or tab (might be others)

When typing in notes it can be after a person hits space or enter.
Much of the time this will not create an issue.  I only ran into the problem with Texas Hold ‘em which is kind of strange.

here’s what happened
originally when I type em it would correct to me, Texas Hold me

Texas Hold Me is a completely different game and wasn’t the game I was playing.

So I went into the AutoCorrect library and changed the rule from

Replace: em With: me
to
Replace: em With: ‘em

Problem

1. Every time I typed Texas Hold ‘em,
2. I would hit enter or space after the letter m   and the auto correct would replace the 2 letters em with 3 characters ‘em. 
3. This resulted into falling into a strange loop.
4. I would hit  space and Texas Hold ‘em would change to Texas Hold ”em
   Then I would hit enter trying to get the cursor to move and ”em would change to ”’em

The buggy part

Apparently AutoCorrect did not recognize the single quote as a character included in the letter combination/word    ‘em                 

It was inserting the 3 characters I had told it to use.  Plus, I had to use my mouse to click on a different section or topic to get out of the strange loop.
With other characters that are letters this doesn’t seem to happen.

My Solution

So for my own purposes, I’m turning the AutoCorrect off and leaving it off.  I’ve run into other issues in the past that I didn’t write up, especially with Acronyms, names, and company names.

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