Our technology.

Unicorns and black magic power the Net Minds platform. Well, maybe not so much black magic, though it feels like it.

For a startup like ours, we had to think carefully about how we could build such a massive platform with very little resources and how we'd scale out our build to launch with the necessary feature set, while leaving room for rapid feature deployment. For the sake of scale, speed and maintainability, we’ve made heavy use of open source software and one language to rule them all: Javascript.

How we made the difficult choices

You'd think because technology moves so rapidly today, we'd have an easy time choosing the right language(s), or open source framework. But in reality, more choice makes choosing that much harder.

Before narrowing down, however, we had to choose a paradigm to design around. And that means describing Net Minds in terms of software. Net Minds is 100% focused on helping creative professionals work more efficiently through a collaborative workflow, intelligent data analysis, and superior user experience.

With that in mind, the choice became much easier. And while we've chosen a lot of bleeding edge technology, we've haven't done so at the detriment of our build time or sanity. We've been able to focus on building a solid and scaleable code base where every feature we build from here on out has a home.

Our platform is separated into four categories:

Web application (collection of software components users interact with);
API (interface governing all software and data interaction);
Big data (collection of third-party data, member data, analytics and custom data aggregated by our algorithms); and
Algorithms (equations and scientific theories to process our data used to explain relevant human behavior patterns and predictions).

What's next?

We're currently in development of our next major feature, which is a very cool and very innovative way of thinking about collaborative workflow in publishing. We think this new workflow is going to forever changes how books are written and edited, streamlining the process and allowing for crowd-based collaboration. Stay tuned!