Some brief thoughts from a researcher turned programmer.
1) At first glance, I'm having trouble discerning what this might be used for or who its targeted to. Every discipline has different terminology, so I imagine what might work for Chemists might not work for Engineers. In our lab, we didn't have very many chemicals, but we had certain instruments setup with finite lifetime values.
2) Also at first glance, I thought this was a lab notebook replacement or supplement. Now that would have been awesome. Going back over my _many_ pages of notes over the years was a pain in the ass, especially when it came down to writing proposals and papers. I'm sure there is a huge opportunity in digitizing this to make lab notes searchable, reference-able, more organized, and even more secure.
3) To reach students, I would suggest to hitting up large conferences. If you're based in SF you're in luck because most of the big conferences my colleagues and I attended were in SF, NY, or Boston.
Re: point #2: An electronic lab notebook system (that researchers will actually use) is, literally, the holy grail of laboratory informatics. This particular grail sits at the end of a road littered with the corpses of dozens of failed attempts; all either too complex, too simple, too hard to use, not generic enough, too generic, etc. etc. etc.
Someday, somebody'll figure out how to do it, and when they do, it'll be amazing... but I'm not placing any bets on when it might happen.
Yup. We feel the same way. Electronic Lab Notebooks are a daunting undertaking and we decided to tackle a problem that we knew we could make a dent in the first pass.
Definitely the way to go, especially given that Quartzy (or something like it) is essentially a necessary precondition for a useful electronic laboratory notebook system, so if you did decide to someday go there, you'd have some of the plumbing done already.
hmm... Interesting. Well we basically helps groups manage their orders and inventories, in decentralized settings like research labs. We started targeting life-science researchers, given our background, but we have seen some interesting uptake in unexpected verticals.
For example, the Traffic Directorate for the City of London is using Quartzy for managing their assets. So we decided to go with more general copy but it is important to be on message and we will tweak it to be more clear about who could benefit.
1) At first glance, I'm having trouble discerning what this might be used for or who its targeted to. Every discipline has different terminology, so I imagine what might work for Chemists might not work for Engineers. In our lab, we didn't have very many chemicals, but we had certain instruments setup with finite lifetime values.
2) Also at first glance, I thought this was a lab notebook replacement or supplement. Now that would have been awesome. Going back over my _many_ pages of notes over the years was a pain in the ass, especially when it came down to writing proposals and papers. I'm sure there is a huge opportunity in digitizing this to make lab notes searchable, reference-able, more organized, and even more secure.
3) To reach students, I would suggest to hitting up large conferences. If you're based in SF you're in luck because most of the big conferences my colleagues and I attended were in SF, NY, or Boston.