Lower the price-point for academic use
Ultimately, I think TheBrain is overpriced for student-use... The TeamBrain isn't even out of beta-testing, and with the student discount it is priced at $240 a year for the team-based product, or the individual version is $240 up-front and $159 a year.
I think you folks are missing an opportunity to build a following –a customer base. Many other companies seem to understand that if they can get people hooked on their products while learning in academia they can get them hooked for life.
Medical school is extremely collaborative -at least mine is. It's not competitive like undergrad when people are fighting to get INTO medical school. We realize we need to be working together to make life a little easier for all of us. We are drinking information from a fire-hose. It was 28.5 credit hours first semester, and ONLY 24 second semester. Our class literally uses GoogleDocs to prepare/collaborate on a study document for every single exam. We have 240 students in our class. At any point prior to an exam up to 50 people are concurrently viewing/editing the study guide, and it is much more complete and accurate than anything one person or a small group of students could have put together.
I would love the opportunity to work with your company in an educational proof-of-concept/marketing capacity to show how students can collaborate using TheBrain to learn more effectively and become better students who are more prepared to be better professionals during their careers. I can’t get 240 people on board at the $240 a year price-point with only 30 days to convince them TheBrain’s power.
For students the power is in the ability to explore "TheBrain" like you are exploring your mind. Ultimately, you end up using it like flash-cards while you are exploring. You visualize what you will see when you click on the drug, Miconozole. Then you click on it to see if you were right. It helps you see relationships among topics. For instance, many microbes can get into the CSF. You could find them all by flipping pages... Or in TheBrain, if you click on CSF on any of them it brings CSF to the forefront and everything that gets into CSF around it. Our professors have been teaching this stuff for 20+ years. They get all the relationships and have them mapped out in their minds... We are trying to learn in 2-D. They are asking 3-dimensional questions on exams... You gotta learn in 2-D then page-flip until you tie everything together in 3D...
As far as I can tell, all other mindmap apps for the iPad, etc. are not mindmaps, they are static, one directional -hierarchical flowcharts or trees marketed as "mindmaps". The true "mindmap" (I think anyway) is TheBrain (probably because I got spoiled by it long ago) because it is dynamic, and a giant web of thoughts in a ball (3 dimensional, not two dimensional).
I swear one of these days you will be wearing virtual reality goggles and reaching up in the air to grab Miconozole, and when you do you will see everything it treats in the air all around you (in the forefront), and in a 3 dimensional view you will see everything attached to these things Miconozole treats (faded in the background, behind each of them). You will be able to point at one of these things and bend your finger to bring it to the forefront (or grab one of the things Miconozole treats with a clasping motion --or something that catches your eye two levels deep by bending your middle finger). The possibilities are incredible. This will be the company to make it happen if they can hang around long enough for technology to catch up with what they have created. I've been thinking that for 10 years... I don't think any other company "gets it".