5 years of Mestrelab (Year 2): India, ENC, Mnova development and much more
So, we made it into 2006, and the year started with Mestrelab’s first incursion into India, with a trip to Mumbai and Hyderabad, a stand at the Advances in Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology conference and visits to a few companies in the area, some of which are still our customers! At that same time, Ehud Olmert was replacing Ariel Sharon due to illness and Hamas were winning the Palestinian election.
Introducing... the one and only Stan Skyora
The year also started with our agreement of a development collaboration with Dr. Stanislav Sykora, which has now been successfully going for nearly 4 years and which has yielded many very pleasing results, such as, amongst others, our spin simulation system, our Bayesian DOSY toolbox and, just lately, our GSD (Global Spectral Deconvolution) algorithm and module. We continue to work with Stan on several areas of great interest to the community and we are hoping to be in a position to make some announcements very soon.
This year also saw our first ENC, at a very rainy Asilomar. We had a 10×10 ft table at the Nautilus room, and again our stand was hugely busy, leaving Carlos and I very little time even for going running (of course, the lures of Suraj’s suite also have quite a lot to answer for that 
).
Felipe, Isaac, Nik and Maruxa
From a software development point of view, this was a transition year. Carlos was still working hard on MestReC, but Nikolay, now in Santiago, Isaac and later also Maruxa and Felipe, who joined us during the year, were already working on our future software, Mnova, which condensed many of the ideas and feedback we had being elaborating in the previous years. Even though, ENC saw a couple of posters from Mestrelab, most notably with our new Whittaker Smoother baseline correction algorithm, published in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance (J.C. Cobas, Michael A. Bernstein, M. Martín-Pastor, Pablo García Tahoces, J. Magn. Reson, 2006, 183, 145-151).
After watching Italy win the Football World Cup and learning with misplaced relief of the permanent ceasefire announced by ETA in Spain, we also attended SMASH 2006 at Burlington, VT, were we had our first ever User Meeting attached to the SMASH conference (this has now become a Mestrelab tradition), and we sponsored and had a booth at the Spanish Bi-annual NMR Meeting, held in St Joan d’Alacant, on the Spanish Mediterranean Coast.
Apart from all this, we continued to work on the much anticipated release of Mnova, which was falling back into 2007, although towards the first Alpha version of Mnova was offered to around 100 users to start comprehensive testing of our quickly developing new software. However, we cannot mention this year without remembering one more event, in October, when we had the honour and personal pleasure of meeting Prof. Richard Ernst, Chemistry Nobel Prize, at an event organized in Santiago de Compostela. You can see some photos of this event, which we were very proud to take part in, below.
Santi Dominguez giving our software to Richard Ernst
Carlos Cobas, Richard Ernst and Javier Sardina
And so 2006 finished, with Mestrelab boasting 7 people in the payroll and eagerly anticipating the release of Mnova which, being in 2007, falls in the next post. Still on this post, however, before the year was out we witnessed the sentencing and execution of Saddam Hussein in postwar Iraq, the first successful Nuclear Test by North Korea and the Somali and East Timor’s crises. And, of course, a new terrorist attack by ETA at Madrid Airport, which abruptly ended their ceasefire. The end of the year also saw the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion (these guys were definitely growing quicker than us, amazing to think Mestrelab was founded just before YouTube) and the release of the PS3 and the Wii, just in time for the Christmas consumer craze.
We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!
We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.
