We had a great conference, with many very interesting meetings, a busy suite and a well attended user meeting. We also learnt a lot from our trial run with the breakfast workshops, which is a concept we will repeat at ENC, but with some changes!

First of all, I want to thank all those who visited our booth or attended any of the events, we really appreciate the support!

And now, let’s go bit by bit, since there is an awful lot to tell you about!

USER MEETING (click this link to view the presentations)

For us, the conference started with our user meeting, held on Sunday, 10th March, at Curlew. The meeting was well attended and there was a lot of exciting stuff going on, including the launch of version 7.0 and of our brand new Mnova Spectral Database, as well as an excellent presentation on Reaction Monitoring by NMR in the pharma industry, presented by Dr. Mike Bernstein, formerly of AZ Charnwood and now a member of the Mestrelab team! Chen presented the new assignment functionality in 7.0, which has been very significantly improved, Stan updated us on progress with Automatic Structure Verification and Jeff Seymour on new features and progress in NMR prediction. A very full program and, more important for our users, a lot of new features and functionality!

Some of the presentation from the user meeting are available from these links in video, and some as PDFs. Do take a look!

• What is new in Mnova – Santi Dominguez (contains video)
• Continuing improvements in NMR prediction accuracy. – Jeff Seymour (pdf)
• Automatic Structure Verification (title to be confirmed) – Stan Sykora (pdf)
• Improvements to the assignment module in Mnova – Chen Peng (contains video)
• Reaction Monitoring by NMR in pharmaceutical R&D – Mike Bernstein (pdf – video to come)
• Introducing the new Mestrelab Spectral DB – Santi Dominguez (contains video)

BREAKFAST WORKSHOPS (click this link to view the presentations)

In addition to the user meeting, we run 3 breakfast workshops, from 7.30 to 7.50 am, before breakfast! These were well attended considering the time of day, and in them we covered 3 areas with very specific applications where we have been doing a lot of work lately:

• Monday 11th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Concentration calculation in Mnova. Single and batch mode in automation
• Tuesday 12th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Ligand binding screening by NMR with Mnova – available in video here (containsvideo)
• Wednesday 13th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Conformational analysis by RDCs using Mspin

Our suite was busy throughout the day and very well attended in the evenings, as you can see from some of the photos, thank you to all those who visited us through the week!

MESTRELAB CONTEST

William D. Brubaker of UC Irvine

And, of course, we also ran the Mestrelab Research iPad contest, which required those taking it to complete a workflow with Mnova, with an iPad going to the fastest person and another iPad being drawn between all the participants.

The fastest, with a time of 2’32″78 was William D. Brubaker of UC Irvine, with very good times too for Jonathan King (UC Berkeley), Hugo Azurmendi (Virginia Tech), Xiaoxue Zhong (Stanford) and Gonzalo Hernandez. The lucky winner of the draw was Xudong Guan, of City College of New York. Congratulations to both of them and unlucky for the rest, maybe next time!

LATE NIGHT PARTYING

We also started a new tradition, taking advantage of the big lounge at our accommodation, with parties each night after the suites closed. We started on Monday night with about 15 people and a finish time of 3.30 am, and then continued to grow until Thursday night, when we were probably around 70-80, and when the Monterrei Police Department had to come to shut us down, at around 4.00 am, after Asilomar Security failed to do so! It was very exciting to be in trouble with US Police for something different to speeding! We look forward to more parties in forthcoming years!

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ENC at Asilomar is coming round again. Exciting! We are already looking forward to those late nights at Suraj’s and to our early morning runs deteriorating into early morning crawls!

We are very busy with preparations for the conference, and this time we have a lot in stall for you:

Our User Meeting will be held at 12.30 pm on Sunday 10th of April, at our Suite, Curlew. Here we will present our latest progress with the software, some new plugins and functionalities, and a few other things! The program reads like:

• 12.00 – Lunch
• 12.30 – Welcome and Introduction – Santi Dominguez
• 12.40 – What is new in Mnova – Santi Dominguez
• 13.10 – Continuing improvements in NMR prediction accuracy. – Jeff Seymour
• 13.40 – Automatic Structure Verification (title to be confirmed) – Stan Sykora
• 14.10 – Break
• 14.30 – Improvements to the assignment module in Mnova – Chen Peng
• 15.00 – Reaction Monitoring by NMR in pharmaceutical R&D – Mike Bernstein
• 15.30 – Introducing the new Mestrelab Spectral DB – Santi Dominguez
• 16.00 – Q&A and close

In addition, we are going to have some super short, super focused breakfast meetings, also at Curlew. The idea here is to give you a flavour of how automation can be used for some very specific applications.

• Monday 11th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Concentration calculation in Mnova. Single and batch mode in automation
• Tuesday 12th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Ligand binding screening by NMR with Mnova.
• Wednesday 13th April, from 7.30 to 7.50 am: Conformational analysis by RDCs using Mspin

Throughout the week, we are also giving away 2 iPads in the Mestrelab Contest! Don’t miss out on this! Just visit us at Curlew and try to complete a workflow in Mnova as fast as possible! The fastest person and one lucky loser will get their iPad on Thursday night! More than 50 people already tried this at our Mestrelab Contest in SMASH 2010!

And much more! Come to see us for a demo of Mnova, a free beer or to take away our latest Mnova tshirt! Or just for a chat, to tell us what you think of the software or to complain about something that has been annoying you for years! We are looking forward to talking to you! At Curlew!

Register now for free.

Registration for the user meeting and the breakfast meetings is free; do it now at our ENC event web page.

Santi Conferences, Mestrelab, Trips and business development conferences, ENC, Mestrelab, Mnova, user meeting 2 comments Leave a comment

Things are getting busier and busier at Mestrelab, and this year we are looking forward to being at quite a few conferences where our users can come and meet our growing team, discuss applications, ask for automation customization, attend presentations or just join us for a beer (or two).

Should you be keen to do any of these, these are our oncoming planned conferences:

• 22nd March: Reaction Monitoring using NMR and Vibrational Spectroscopy Symposium: Current Industry Perspectives at Sandwich, KT, UK.
• 27th-31st March: ACS Spring National Meeting, Anaheim, CA, US.
• 30th-31st March: Data to Knowledge, Alderley Park, CH, UK. At this conference, we have a 10 minute oral presentation where we will cover some of the latest and brightest developments in our software.
• 3rd-6th April: GERMN, Sitges, Spain
• 10th-14th April: ENC, Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA, US. Here, we will hold a user meeting, as well as several breakfast workshops to discuss different very specific applications, such as qNMR, NMR screening, etc. We will also be running our iPad contest at this conference, so do not miss out on your chance to win an iPad.
• 2nd-6th May: AUREMN Biannual Meeting, Angra dos Reis, RJ, Brazil.
• 5nd-9th June: ASMS National Meeting, Denver, CO, US
• 1st-3rd August: CoSMoS, Chapel Hill, NC, US
• 21st-25th August: EUROMAR, Frankfurt, Germany
• 22nd-26th August: ACS Fall Meeting, Boston, MA, US
• 18th-21st September: SMASH, Chamonix, France. Here we will again hold a User Meeting on the opening day, as well as having the stand. And, once again, our iPad contest!

As you know, for us it is very important to meet as many customers as possible, to know what you think about the software, what we can improve, what else we should work on, and any other ideas that you have. Also, we have a lot of new things to show you this year, new products, new functionalities and new ideas. It would be great to share them with you early on and get your feedback.

So come to see us!

Carlos Conferences, Trips and business development No comments Leave a comment

• Greatly simplify the workflow of the analytical data users they are supporting in their organization
• Significantly improve efficiency in the handling, processing and analysis of analytical data within their organizations.

The fact is that at these conferences we hear the words: ´Could I…´very often, and the answer now is, most of the times, yes. If you are wondering how these Mnova tools could help make your analytical department a more effective place, you can start by taking a look at this graphic below, which I will discuss in more detail in the next post, but which shows how you can take the majority of your analytical data from acquisition to its final goal (be it registration, publication, or any other) with a very streamlined workflow which imposes minimal time and interaction demands on your users.

This is just an example of what an automated workflow would look like after combining several of the Mnova plugins and a some scripting

And this next graphic shows what this would look like from the point of view of the final user, i.e., the chemist, who is looking for optimum results and maximum information from minimum interaction:

From the final user view point, 4-5 clicks can result on the whole handling of an analytical dataset and its corresponding proposed structure!

And how easy is it to achieve this with the current Mnova? Very! You can even ask us to do the work for you, but more on that on my next post!

Santi Celebrating, Conferences, Mestrelab, Products, Reviews and Publications, support, Uncategorized ASV, Automatic Structure Verification, automation, scripting, SMASH 2010, Spectral DB, workflow tools, workflows No comments Leave a comment

We have just finished the SMASH 2010 conference, and I am keen to post on it as soon as possible. This year, SMASH was held at Portland, OR, in the US. It was an excellent conference, with a varied and very well received program, chaired by Andreas Kaerner and Brian Marquez, which you can check out here.
One very exciting development in the conference was that, for the first time this year, SMASH was organized jointly with CoSMoS (Conference on Small Molecule Science), at the same venue on the same dates, and with joint sessions on the final day (Wednesday 29th). This makes perfect sense, not only for chemists, who regularly use a combination of NMR and LCMS to do their everyday job, but also for us, who have software plugins to handle data from both techniques, and who therefore had the opportunity of getting to 2 different audiences simultaneously. This is a very welcome development and I want to congratulate the organizing committees of both conferences for raising above technique rivalry and pulling this together.
From the Mestrelab point of view, this was an excellent conference, with several exciting things to be highlighted:

1. We had an excellent user meeting, with a total of over 50 attendees.
   

   Chen and Santi with the iPads, about to give them away to the fastest and luckiest at the 'Speed Analytics'

2. We showcased not only a new version of Mnova, 6.2.0, but a newly released product (our Spectral DB, currently on late beta and available to try out if you want to do so, just let us know) and a quickly advancing project which is not yet ready for release or external testing, but which is giving better and better results (our Automatic Structure Verification module, now incorporating NMR and LC/GC/MS)
3. For the first time, we held the new ‘Mestrelab Contest’, in which our users (or any other attendees) got the chance of winning 2 iPads, by completing a workflow in Mnova as fast as possible (one iPad went to the fastest person, another one was drawn amongst all those who took part). The contest was great fun, over 50 people took part, and we had a great time running it, so expect it to feature at future meetings! Andy Phillips (AZ) won the contest, with a time of 3’58” (nobody else got under 5′), and Ana Paula Espindola (UT Southwestern) won the draw. Congratulations to both winners.

Over the next few days, I will blog on these items above, to give you more information and maybe, to set out a contest for those of you who did not come to SMASH, but still want to try your hand at ‘speed analytics’

Santi Conferences, marketing, Trips and business development, Uncategorized conferences, Mestrelab at SMASH, Mestrelab contest, Spectral DB, user meeting No comments Leave a comment

This post is a long overdue return to the Mestrelab World of Sports. We started the company in the first place because we were very interested in NMR peaks, then we added an MS plugin to Mnova as we were very interested in MS peaks, and, to carry on the same vein, Carlos and I undertook some close-up studies of Pyrenean peaks last week. In fairness, I think these peaks where the first ones we became interested in, many years ago, before either of us knew NMR even existed.

The fact is, we have followed cycling all our life, and when it comes to cycling the biggest event is the Tour de France, a gruelling 3 weeks of excessive exertion with a fascinating 108 year history which can be traced to the Dreyfuss affair and which you can read here (it is a truly interesting tale of human enterprise and courage, even if you are not interested in cycling, I really recommend you read it).

This year, La Grande Boucle, another name for the Tour de France, celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first inclusion of the Pyrenees in its course, by spending longer than usual riding over the mountain chain which separates Spain from France. To us, lifelong cycling fans, this meant a combination of beautiful scenery, fantastic cuisine, great wines, hopefully good weather and many legendary climbs, so Carlos and I, with our childhood friend Nacho, headed for the Pyrenees with our bikes and our new Mestrelab Cycling Kit (One small confession, they headed out a couple of days earlier, I joined them a bit later)
For a week, with 2 bases at Arreau and then Luz St Sauveur (great place for an adventure or family holiday, BTW), we followed the Tour and took on some of the most famous, legendary, evocative and terrifying climbs in World cycling. Nacho and Carlos did Col d’Aspin, Aix 3 Domaines and Col de Peyresourde, I then joined them for Col d’Aubisque, Luz Ardiden and, leave the toughest for last, Col du Tourmalet. Last day, on the way home, I went over Tourmalet again on the way to the airport (nearly managed to miss my flight!!!) to compensate for the initial climbs I missed.

I could not recommend this area more. The scenery is beautiful (if you are ever there make sure you visit the Cirque de Gavarnie), you can have some great food (check out Hotel des Templiers in Luz St Sauveur and Viscos in Argelles Gazost, at the foot of Soulor/Aubisque, but in both cases book the previous day) and all kinds of outdoor activities can be undertaken (trekking, rafting, canoeing, abseiling, bungee jumping, rock climbing, etc.). If you are into cycling, then it is as good as it gets, with both the huge mountains or easy accessible rides on beautiful cycle paths!

So, after many hard climbs, and weather that ranged from good to bad to terrible, the main lesson was that starting and running a company is not really very hard and, whatever our customers and users expect from us, it has to be easier than climbing the Tourmalet on a bike in the driving rain!

Santi Mestrelab, Reviews and Publications, Trips and business development Mestrelab World of Sports, Tour de France No comments Leave a comment

Shanghai was exciting as ever, and we spent most of the week in the Zhangjiang High Tech Area, in Pudong, which many Chinese call Pharma Valley. There we visited many companies, both divisions of Western companies as well as Chinese CROs, as well as holding a presentation/user meeting, which was very well attended, with over 30 representatives from companies in Zhangjiang. It was also pleasing to see that the uptake of our software by Chinese Universities continues to be very fast, with the number of users in China growing rapidly.

Of course, being Galician my stomach is very close to my heart, so I have to comment on culinary matters. Whilst running around the Zhangjiang area, we had several lunches and dinners which never cease to surprise me. If any of you guys are travelling there in business, you need to check out some of these restaurants. First of all, the food is nothing like the Chinese food I have had in the West. It is a lot more interesting and varied, and in Shanghai there is a lot of local cuisine specific to the area, with a particular mention due to a kind of dumpling called Xiao long bao (well, that is more or less how you pronounce it, if you are looking for it in Chinese menus it would look something like 虾肉小笼包 or 蟹黄小笼包, whether it is crab meat or beef – both are excellent. You can see a couple of photos below). All in all, we had several excellent meals, generously accompanied with TsingDao beer, for normally less than $30-$40 for 3 people, despite been in the commercial hub of the country and one of the main commercial cities in the World!

I also took the opportunity to visit the Expo. I must say that, although a lot of it is spectacular (special mention there to the Chinese Pavilion, which we could not enter, but which is pharaonic it is proportions and very becoming in its design, and to the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, with the World’s largest cinema screen, which visitors traverse on a conveyor belt in what is called screen immersion technology. I have to say this is very cool! Again, there are some photos in the photo gallery if you want to check them out) I don’t think the Expo is for me. A lot of queuing and waiting to see some introductions for a lot of different countries, it is an exhausting day. And, judging by the very weird Spanish Pavilion, you may come away with a very peculiar idea of what some of the countries are about. I guess, however, that if the only chance you have to visit these countries is through their pavilions at the Expo, then this may be an interesting and exciting cultural experience.

Whilst in China, I also decided that we definitely need a version of Mnova in Chinese, and this is now in the works. It will be released soon, I hope, as soon as we get our translations from the NMR people at TLWB, our very hard working Chinese distributors.

So, watch this space, I am hoping that we will very soon be announcing some more deals for our software in China as well as our Mnova Chinese version! And, of course, if you go to Shanghai, in particular to Zhangjiang, don’t go away without checking out the Xiao long bao (specially the crab meat one, delicious!)

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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.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

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Last Sunday we arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the AUREMN Conference. After a visit to the Christ of Corcovado, the very imposing 38 m figure of Christ sitting on top of a 700m high tropical jungle easily climbed in a 20 min funicular trip and affording the visitor incredible views of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, we made our way by coach to Angra dos Reis for the AUREMN Conference.

Santi (left) and Carlos (right) in Leblon, Río de Janeiro

The conference was fabulously organized by a very hard working group, headed by Daniel Figueroa and the omnipresent and ever incredibly helpful Sonia Cabral de Menezes. These guys managed to put together a conference with an excellent scientific programme, a fantastic location, Hotel do Frade, a kind of lodge in an island paradise, an excellent social program (you can see here photos of the beach, the boat trip on the last day and some of the parties going on) and the most helpful organizing team you would ever wish to meet. Everything was spot on, even on details such as making sure vendor areas had internet provision, something essential to us but often overlooked by conference organizers. This meant that we had a fantastic time and a wonderful experience of Brazil, whilst attending some high quality talks in an environment fully conducive to our business. A huge well done goes to the organizing team and a strong recommendation to anyone who has chance to attend this meeting in future to do so.

Our stand was very busy during poster sessions and the breaks. We met many of the people in the Brazilian and South American NMR community, and were immediately impressed by the variety of work these guys are doing, their openness to new ideas and their enthusiastic welcome of Mnova. The trip was hugely positive and we are very optimistic about the progress of our business in Brazil. We also made many friends, I wish I could mention them all here, but there are too many and therefore I prefer not to name any, as I would not know who to omit. You all know who you are, though, thank you for your friendliness and for helping us fall in love with Brazil and feel welcome by the AUREMN and the Iberoamerican NMR group. We look forward to many returns to your conferences and to working with many of you in the near future. In a new post, I will follow up with my thoughts about the scientific programme …

In the mean time, just a quick special mention to O Rio de Janeiro. We were very lucky to be able to spend time there with real cariocas, as I have family there. This gave us a great insight into the city in a very short period of time. Rio is the most beautiful natural environment for a city, with a stunningly beautiful bay, great beaches (Ipanema, Copacabana, Leblon, an spectacular jungle which encroaches into the city at every opportunity and the most uncunningly perfect vantage points at Corcovado and Pao de Açucar. The people are friendly, the food great and the night life excellent (check out the area of A Lapa and the incredibly beautiful restored XV century building housing the supercool samba house ‘Rio Scenarium’.

Overall, this has been a week we will never forget

Carlos Trips and business development Mestrelab Brazil, Mestrelab South America, Mestrelab Trips, Mnova in Brazil 6 comments Leave a comment

Wednesday and Thursday was spent in Beijing, where we arrived late on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, TLWB had organized another presentation open to all those interested. We had 90 people registered and, in the end, over 75 turned up. Once again Mnova NMR, NMRPredict Desktop and the alpha version of the Mnova MS plugin (more on this very soon in this blog) were all received with enthusiasm by the attendees, representing many of the Universities in the city and some of the biotechs and CROs. As a result of this presentation, a couple of meetings were organized for Thursday.

Wednesday night, we went for dinner to Zhi Li Hui Guan,  a fantastic restaurant in central Beijing, just by the western gate of Tsinghua University. This restaurant is trying to recreate the cooking style of North Eastern China in the XIX century, in the period of the Qing Dynasty. The restaurant is truly spectacular, with a beautiful building, some dishes out of this World (everything was excellent but, for presentation and excellence of preparation, I have to highlight the ‘beef in a box’ (unfortunately I do not know the name of this dish, I just looked at the photos in the menu!). This is brought to the table inside a wooden box, and it is a dish designed for and only enjoyed by, top government officials of the time. The box is beautifully decorated and must be opened in stages, affording to that who opens it longevity (this is represented by a very long  which must be removed before the box can be opened) good fortune, a first layer containing 6 dishes with different sauces, and prosperity, the bottom layer, which holds the most tender beef you can ever hope to taste. A truly amazing dish and a great restaurant. If you are in Beijing, don’t miss it.

Mike, Santi and Hongyu Liu in Beijing

Beijing people are extremely proud of their city, and with good reason, it is as spectacularly beautiful as it is congested. I benefited directly from the pride and generous hospitality of one of them, our driver Mike (this is his Western name), who was taking us back to the hotel to collect our stuff after presenting at the last CRO of the day. Mike was shocked when he heard I had not had time to visit the city or do any sightseeing, and he took it upon himself to take us to Tiannamen Square and around the Forbidden City, where we took some photos, and then running us to the spectacular Terminal 3 of the Beijing Airport, delivering us there 45 minutes before the departure of our flight to Qingdao. Thank you, Mike – he is, by the way, with me and Mr. Liu in the photo to the right.

I found some more interesting facts about China in Beijing. The first, I was amazed by how early children get up and attend school. I went running past a primary school at 6.00 and the kids were exercising in the playground, ready for a long day of education (6.00 until 18.00, I believe). This is of course one of the reasons why Chinese American returnees (many of them are coming back to work in the pharmas, biotechs and CROs of the large Chinese capitals) are finding it very hard to convince their children to come back with them. This is also one of the reasons why China is having no difficulty acting as a conveyor belt in the mass production of highly qualified scientists.

I found the standard of NMR knowledge to be very high at both presentations we gave, with most organic chemists there used to concepts such as apodization of 1D or processing and analysis of 2D correlation such as 2D NOE.

Another interesting fact is the high quality of the labs and facilities, i.e., the research and development infrastructure. Most of these have been created in the last few years, and this means that they all enjoy very modern facilities, normally purpose built by the government and then either sold or rented to these companies. These facilities are normally outside town, but most companies run coaches all over the city, collecting their employees to take them to work and delivering back to the cities at the end of the day.

This is all from a very quick visit to Beijing. Just a few comments on Qingdao, where we spent Friday training the TLWB stuff. I was amazed by Qingdao, which is the city where the sailing competitions were held in the Olympic Games. It has a population of 5 million, very beautiful beaches, excellent accommodation at very reasonable prices (how about a huge kingsize bedroom for €60 per night with breakfast and internet included in the Haiqing Hotel, the hotel used by many of the Olympic delegations during the Games? BTW, every single hotel in China appears to have free internet access, this is something that hoteliers in the West should really learn from). Qingdao is also famous for its breweries, probably as a consequence of having been a German colony in the XIX and early XX century, and has a beautiful German quarter, with alpine and Bavarian style villas in leafy streets surrounding some excellent beaches. I think this would be a fantastic place to spend a beach holiday, and a very economic alternative to the European resorts (Cote d’Azur, Costa Brava, Riviera, etc.) If you made it there, do not miss Yangguang Jiari a fantastic fish restaurant where you pick your food prior to cooking from tanks and ice buckets (see Qingdao photo gallery). 

Santi Trips and business development Mestrelab Beijing, mestrelab china, Mestrelab Presentations, Mestrelab Qingdao, Mestrelab Trips, mnova china No comments Leave a comment