I have a feature suggestion that may appeal to current and potential “Brain” users who are students, authors, professional researchers, and the like. I suspect that the feature in mind would make TheBrain very appealing to a healthy slice of the tens-of-thousands who use the popular open source research tool known as Zotero. I believe that TheBrain’s utility would be hugely multiplied if were able to interface with Zotero's API. Generally speaking, TheBrain could use Zotero’s data in the same vein that it now uses the Windows’ file system.
For those not familiar with Zotero here is some info I liberated from one it’s fact sheets:
Zotero is a free "next-generation" research tool developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use program to help you collect, manage, and cite your research. It can be used both stand-alone and as a browser extension.
Features:
Automatic capture of citation information from web pages, library catalogs, online databases, and digital archives.
storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
flexible note taking with autosave
Fast, as-you-type search through your materials
Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches and tags
Citation formatting and bibliography creation
integration with Microsoft Words and other applications and web tools
Free and open source
Take a gander at the Zotero website and imagine the possibilities if TheBrain were able to read/write/hyper-link to Zotero.
Zotero is open source and provides a robust API which TheBrain Inc. could leverage. Zotero support 3rd party add-in.
http://www.zotero.org
http://www.zotero.org/blog/announcing-zotero-3-0-beta-release/