Zet Universe originally was envisioned by our founder, Daniel Kornev, during the development of the Productivity Future Vision 2019 video made by Office Labs Envisioning Lab between 2007 and 2009.

First prototype was created in several May nights in 2009. It took 2.5 years for our founder to make a decision to leave corporate world and establish Zet Universe, Inc., as the company, to productize those original ideas, and since that time we've shipped several versions of the product. As we are moving forward with the new iteration of the product, we find it invaluable to look back at its history.

Today we are excited to share several product demos, never shared before, created between 2009 and late 2013.

Special thanks to Alexander Popov for his narration in this video.

When we started this journey almost 5 years ago, it wasn't clear to us just how long it could be. Building a product like Zet Universe means fighting with lots of challenges, and one of them is UI performance.

While we are hard at work making new milestone of Zet Universe faster than ever, we would like to share our progress in increasing performance of navigating in the infinite zoomable canvas, as it is seen in these two videos, made by the end of the first and by the end of the second year of this journey.

From the beginning, Zet Universe was envisioned as a knowledge management and analytic platform, that could be used to solve different problems, from organizing personal information, and learning new things in the spare time, to researching different topics, analyzing competitors, tracking work projects, and more.

One of the biggest values Zet Universe possesses is its ability to work in an offline mode, and work locally. It's different compared to other famous analytic platforms, such as Palantir Gotham, or Quid, and others, as these platforms typically require you to have a constant network connection and (except Palantir Gotham) require you to have a high speed connection to their cloud computing services.

Zet Universe, in contrast, allows you to have your projects data with you, residing on your computer, as you are on the go, riding on a car to your client, or getting to a new destination by train or a plane. Zet Universe contains a powerful semantic infrastructure that is capable of extracting and analyzing data from your own projects while working from your own machine.

In order to make this possible, Zet Universe requires some good hardware to work, ideally with no less than 4GB of RAM, Intel's Core processor, and SSD drive. But good hardware is only part of the equitation, as we also have to make Zet Universe's software tailored to its specific tasks.

As you, our Insiders, work with Zet Universe, we learn more and more about our current product design's strengths and weaknesses, and as you tell us more and more about your needs, we get better understanding of how we should improve the product to make it being more relevant for you.

This blog post is a story of our Scaling Up Effort, and in this series we will discuss two areas of this effort, Storage Layer and thumbnails cache.

Hi all,

We are coming very fast to the end of January, and it means there's only one more build to share with you this month, and this build is available to you starting today.

Unlike the previous build which had only a change in the search syntax (albeit an important one!), in this build you'll have a unique chance to take a look at the behind-the-scenes of your projects information space - the ontology.

UPDATE - grab an updated January 2016 build, 5857.11090, to restore Dropbox functionality in Zet Universe. See details below.

Hi everyone,

First of all, I'm very glad to wish you a Happy New Year! It's exactly 5 months now since we've started the program (July 13, 2015), and it was an amazing ride with you, Insiders. As people like to say, we are just getting started! As you might have noticed, we've been keeping silence since the very end of November 2015, and for a good reason. Our top priority goal was to restructure our underlying plugin platform, extract it into a separate package, and move all of our currently available plugins to our new platform.

Well, we've done that! We've also made a few improvements in this first build of 2016, build 5857.11090, though, and I can't wait to tell you about them.

Hi Everyone,

Today, albeit late, we have a new build for PCs going out to Zet Universe Insiders - Build 5766.40220. I have to apologize for releasing it later than usual (hey, it's almost end of the work week, and we tend to ship builds each Monday). However, we've got stuck with a very serious bug that made touch scrolling in the Navigation Pane unusable, and as we've been trying to fix it, we've got another one related to Windows Shell APIs, and we've lost three days fighting these bugs. We believe it is super important to ship new builds in a predictable manner, and yet we believe that our builds shall pass our internal stability and reliability requirements, and until we're fine with them, we can't ship the new bits to you, and if it means we'll have to postpone the build, we'll do that.

Speaking of the new build, I hope you were able to read the blog post about the last build and our updated product plans we've published on Wednesday last week. If you missed it, I encourage you to re-read it again, as the changes to the product plan are big enough. In short, we postpone some of the exciting features like semantic steering and rules engine, in favor of solving your more immediate needs like being able to add notes, preview your documents and start conversations around them, and define tasks right in your project spaces in Zet Universe. 

It's worth mentioning that we've got two separate requests for Notes Layer via our UserVoice Forum, and today, as it was teased in our Facebook Group, we are anxious to give you the first glimpse at one of these amazing features - Notes.

Hi everyone,

Since the release of the Fifth Flight (build 5701.958) we've continued to make steady progress, and as it will be explained in the next post, we are working hard to enable support for building connectors to the 3rd party data sources like FTP, SharePoint Document Libraries, and more. This build is BIG for us, as we've made several important product decisions regarding support of multiple data sources from the same account, as well as on the filtering user experience. That's right, starting with the today's build, for instance, you'll be able to add more than one Dropbox folder to your project space. 

As usual, today's build, also known as the Sixth Flight (build 5708.446) is a week newer than the last one, so besides the functionality that makes it possible to add several data sources of the same application, what you'll see in this build will be mostly small improvements and fixes, as well as a few known issues.

We are continuing the series of posts describing Zet Universe Interface Language. In this post we will cover the basics of things movement and navigation inside Zet Universe space.

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Star Trek: The Original Series

User interface uses a language as the medium to translate the desire of the user into actions that are recognizable by the underlying system.

Zet Universe provides such a language by using the following metaphors:

• Space
• Things
• Actions

Well, some folks asked me on what’s the relation between the famous Productivity Future Vision video produced byOffice Labs, and Zet Universe, the project I’m working on now at Neocyte Labs. Guess it’s time to give some explanations.

First of all, I need to say that I’m a bit crazy IT guy who strongly beliefs that he can change the world. This belief is based on several success stories I’ve read since I was a young kid – stories by Mark Twain, Jack London, biography of Bill Gates and videos and blog posts about Steve Jobs success; and several great teachers from middle & high schools, in university and in business school.

And, I have a dream: for a long time I want to have all the knowledge of the world in its digital form to live inside the virtual world.