i-Lighter — marker and annotation makes online research easier

By Vivek | December 6th, 2006 at 07:16 am ET         

i-Lighter is all set to officially launch December 8th. Earlier this year at DEMOfall, i-Lighter had presented its web-tool that enables users to highlight, annotate, and save text, tables, and images on any web page easily and quickly. Since than, i-Lighter has seen very good response from it initial users and provided some very valuable tips. Taking from there, development team at i-Lighter has worked really hard to come up with one of the best FREE collaboration enhancement tools.

At midnight December 7th, you will be able to download the IE version of i-Lighter and the Firefox version will be rolled out the week after. I have tried out current release of i-Lighter which installs an drop-down menu button in your toolbar, and an desktop client through which you can retrieve your marked documents. Before you can start highlighting text, you will need to login to i-Lighter account. After that, just to click on ‘Start i-Lighting’ to start saving selected web content. If you want to add notes to the areas they have highlighted, you can easily do so by adding i-Notes. As soon as you highlight or add any information on a webpage, it gets transmitted to your account located on the i-Lighter server to enable access to the content from any machine having i-Lighter client.

When you want to view any content you have saved you can bring up the i-Lighter desktop client which will quickly retrieve at content associated to your account. Content can be organized in folders that can either be set to be public or private. You can send selected content to Word document or email it to your contacts from the desktop client itself. i-Lighter has also provided various other handy options like the ability to easily add content items to your blog, search through pubic and private folders, and print selected items.

As part of future plans, i-Lighter is looking to launch mac versions of its product, and enable users to generate PDF files from their content items. i-Lighter team is also working on developing an offline version, which will sync back your content once you get online. Next January i-Lighter users will be to view i-Lighted content without installing the i-Lighter client, which will work out well especially with mobile users.

i-Lighter has seen tremendous response from the education area including teachers and researchers who consider i-Lighter as an perfect product for their daily work. These people are able to collaborate efficiently and not end up getting lost in the mountains of information available. i-Lighter is already negotiating with major publication companies to provide a white label i-Lighter client. As part of this offering, all the content generated from the protected books and publications of these companies will get stored onto their own servers.

In some ways i-Lighter is similar to the features provided by Evernote about which i had written earlier. However as compared to i-Lighter which is FREE product, you need to spend $39.95 to get the multiple machine sync at Evernote.

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i-Lighter