September 2009 Parents Benefit from Latest DERI Innovation at NUI Galway

Atom, an innovative new internet tool from NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), is allowing parents easy access to information on activities, classes, camps, events, or services for their children. The technology has been licensed to the family listings website, www.mykidtstime.ie. A circle-based browser, Atom allows the user to quickly and intuitively browse different categories in a way which mirrors the brain's activity. The Atom browser is available in the 'look and book' service offered by www.mykidstime.ie and facilitates the way that parents interact with the listings data. The Atom Interface has two patented techniques for manipulating increased amounts of data and intuitively supports users through its easy-to-use functions. Originally created by DERI, the Atom browser was further developed and refined through research and development with Mykidstime, supported by the Enterprise Ireland innovation voucher scheme. Jill Holtz, co-founder of Mykidstime.ie, is pleased with the project's success: "With the help of DERI and with the support of Enterprise Ireland, we have been able to implement a really useful tool on our website which helps parents to find the information they are searching for even more quickly and easily. It is fun to use and the feedback so far from parents has been very positive: they like the tool and the way it improves their experience on the website. It is important to us to continue to innovate within our website but most importantly to improve the end user experience". John McGuire, Commercialisation Executive in the Technology Transfer Office in NUI Galway, commented: "This is pure technology transfer in action, from University to the market. It is also an example of a smaller entrepreneurial enterprise benefiting from research carried out at third-level institute. Hopefully this technology will be of use to many other organisations". -ends-