Zekira is a software app that helps you overcome information overload.  If you have more computer information than you can keep track of, you're in the right place -- Zekira is designed for you.  It's being developed by five Silicon Valley veterans who are passionate about the problem, and it will run on Mac and PC.  Your donation will help us finish the product faster, and will help prove that there's demand for a product like this.  In return for your support, you can get a copy of Zekira, help us choose the features in the product, and get public credit on our website and within the app.  But most importantly, you'll help solve a problem that drives us all nuts.


The Problem

Those of us who deal with huge amounts of information -- constant meetings, huge numbers of contacts, thousands of e-mails -- have a problem with information overload.  We need to remember more than anyone can hold in their head, and we start losing context:

• The phone rings and you recognize the name of the caller, but can't recall how you know or met them.
• You're going into your fifth meeting of the day and can't remember the context for it.  What was the agenda?  What are you expected to do in the meeting?
• You hear of a business issue, and you know someone you met a while back had the perfect answer to it.  But you can't remember the details, their name, or their contact information.

You know the information is somewhere in your computer files and archives, but it takes too long to find it when you need it.  So most of us just muddle through, and we lose a lot of productivity along the way.  What's worse, the more successful you are in your career, the more info you have to remember, and the bigger the problem becomes.

Zekira™:  The First Context Engine

Zekira attacks information overload by indexing the archives of your life (including messages, documents, notes, meetings, and contacts).*  Your info goes into a custom-built database that identifies connections between information rather than just keywords.  We let you search by any bits of information you can remember, and your results are presented in graphical form showing how the information relates to other items in your archives.  You can easily navigate connections and re-create the context around even half-remembered items.  The video above includes a brief demo of Zekira in action.  Here are some screen shots:

Zekira sorts your information into four piles: Events, Documents, Messages, and People.

You can filter your information by keyword, name, document type, and date and time.  This image shows the date/time filter.

Hover over an item to preview its contents, or...

...click on it to see everything related to it. In this case, we clicked on someone's name to find messages, documents, and events related to them.

Zekira is currently in early beta testing.  The first version of it runs on Mac and Windows.

Here are a few examples of what Zekira can do:

--Look up a person's name and immediately find everything related to them: any document that mentions them or that they authored, any messages you've exchanged with them, and any meetings you've attended with them.

--Find the context about a meeting, including e-mails discussing it and attendees.  If the meeting is in the past, you can automatically find notes or whiteboard pictures you took during the meeting.

--If you have old Office documents or Outlook files, Zekira is a great way to make them useful.  It will even index old PC Outlook files stored on a Mac.  Easily search for a name, date, subject, or document type, and follow the connections between items in your archive.

You can find a longer demo of Zekira here.

Our Team

Zekira is being built by five longtime Silicon Valley veterans who are passionate about solving this problem.  It's a labor of love for us, not just another project.  You can find more information about us below, and you can meet us in the video.

We Need Your Help

Zekira is a big project.  We've been working it for more than a year, working nights and weekends and paying the bills out of our own pockets.   We'll ship the first version of Zekira this summer (and we will ship it, no matter what happens with our campaign here).  But we have ambitious plans for the future of the product, including taking it mobile.  We could move a lot faster with a bit of financial support.

Zekira is a very unusual product in Silicon Valley startup terms.  We're creating a very large and sophisticated software program, while most startups make little utility apps.  And we're deploying first on the Mac and PC (because that's where most people have stored most of their data), while the typical startup deploys first on iPhone or the web.

Our differences are scary to venture capitalists and angel investors.  We've shown Zekira to a lot of them.  They almost all love the product (most of them ask to be beta testers), but they tell us they're not comfortable funding us until we prove that people want the product.

That's where you come in.  Your donation will solve two problems -- you'll help support the development of Zekira, and you'll prove that people want a solution to information overload.  That will give us the support we need to jump-start the product.

What You Get for Your Donation

A small donation buys you a free copy of Zekira 1.0 when it ships this summer (you're pre-buying the product at a huge discount).  A slightly larger donation admits you to the Zekira Early Experience beta program, so you can start working with it now, and your feedback can help shape the product.  Other options give you recognition online and your name in the product.  We've also created several consulting and advertising offers for companies that want to help.

How We'll Use Your Contribution

Your contribution will directly support the development of Zekira.  We'll compensate some of our team members to work additional hours.  We'll also pay the license fees for some third-party software modules included in Zekira.  

We've set a goal of $5,000, because that's enough to get version 1 of Zekira out the door sooner.  But any support you can give us will help, and the more support we get, the more features we can add to version 1.

And who knows, if the fundraising here goes well enough, maybe we can skip the investors and work only for you.  We'd be just fine with that.

Other Ways You Can Help

If you can't afford to make a donation, you can support Zekira by spreading the word:

• If you know anyone who's plagued by information overload, point them to us
• Post a link on your blog to indiegogo.com/zekira
• Tweet about us
• Subscribe to our blog at blog.zekira.com
• Follow us on Twitter and Facebook (the links are below)
• Use the sharing tools here on IndieGoGo

Thank you very much for your help.  If you have any questions or suggestions, please post a comment here or e-mail us using the link below.

More Information About Us

Here's some background on our team:

Michael Mace was VP of product planning and chief competitive officer at Palm.  In ten years at Apple his roles included director of Mac platform marketing and director of worldwide market research and competitive analysis.  He also founded an early Macintosh software company, Century Software.  You can read his weblog here.

Steven Glass was VP of OS releases at Apple, and also held senior roles at PalmSource, Net Appliance, and Power School.  He is currently one of the two engineering leads at Plastic Logic, a startup creating e-reader devices.

Rudi Diezmann has been VP of engineering at seven software firms, a mix of startups and large companies, including Xdrive, e-lingo, and SuccessFactors.com.  He is a longtime database guru.  He was an entrepreneur in residence at Adobe, and was an engineering manager at Apple and Cisco.

Michael McNabb was cofounder and VP of technology at AquaMinds Software.  He was manager of sound and music at NeXT, and has worked with Oracle, Be, Intellicorp, and Netscape.  In addition to composing code, Michael is an award-winning composer of music.  Among his works is Mars Suite, the music for Mars in 3-D, a film created by NASA using images from the Viking project.  You can read more about Michael's music here.

Mark Goldstein was a senior engineer at AquaMinds and a product manager at Sony.  He has also worked with Interval and Gibson Guitar.  Like Michael McNabb, Mark is a talented musician, and performs frequently around the San Francisco Bay Area.

*Please note.  Although we are very confident that we'll be able to ship Zekira 1.0, it is not yet a finished product, so we can't guarantee how well it will work or exactly which features will be in it.  You should check our website for more details on compatibility, and in particular which file types we'll support.

**In the offers at right, we won't link to porn, gambling, or anything illegal.  Please contact us if you have questions.