So, here I am, sitting at my Beijing hotel, late in the evening, ready to fly out to Brazil tomorrow. This visit to China has been a whirlwind, and I have not had time to update the blog, as the opportunity to do so had to compete with, and finally lose to, the chance to get some much needed sleep. The trip has been great, and I have found out a lot of new stuff. I will try to update a couple of times in the next couple of days, with short articles on the time spent at each of the cities I visited.

From right to left, Chen, Hongyu Liu, of TLWB, and Santi ready for business in Shanghai. Click on the photo to view the Shanghai library

Shanghai continued to impress me as a truly bustling Asian metropolis, a city of business and commerce. There I met Mr. Hongyu Liu, the General Manager of TLWB (see previous post), who is a very hard working and organized individual with the hunger for success and commitment to achieving it that one can expect from entrepreneurs in recently prosperous economies. Hongyu also happens to be a thoroughly nice and likeable guy, a great host and a very democratic manager to his team of young and smart employees. I expect great things from these guys.

The week started very well, with a visit to the restored Shikumen district of Xin Tian Di (New Heaven), in the heart of Shanghai, the ‘in’ place for eating, drinking and partying in Shanghai, with a mixture of Western and Oriental style establishments, although perhaps with too much of a bias towards the Western. It is also the location of Paul’s, a very stylish French boulangerie and teahouse with excellent coffee and cakes. After a very nice evening there on the first day, we then worked through the Sunday and finished with dinner at Herbal Legend, in Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, very close to the excellent Parkyard Hotel (Bibo Lu). If you are visiting Shanghai in business, I strongly recommend both. As far as industrial area eateries go, ‘Herbal Legend’ is exceptional, with very good service, life Chinese music most nights and a huge menu of very high quality prepared by Chinese herbal medicine experts, so this is not only good eating, but also good for your health!. On the Monday we visited some companies in the Hi Tech Area, where our software was received with excitement and, on Tuesday, we held a presentation at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, organized by TLWB and attended by more than 40 scientists from different companies and educational and government institutions. The presentation was a great success and gave us very good traction in the Shanghai area, as well as providing an opportunity for me to try out my incipient Chinese. You will be able to see some photos of the presentation and of some of the attendees by clicking on the photo above or on this link.

After this, it was time to make for the airport ready to fly to Beijing, the next stage of the trip. More on that a little later. But first,a  couple other interesting facts about China and particularly the Chemistry and NMR community there and, like many things in China, it is all about numbers.

It turns out that there are more than 1,000 organizations (public and private) doing NMR within China which, for such a technology and capital intensive technique, is a very impressive number and shows how far these guys have come so quickly.

The second is about the Chinese government approach to CRO, pharma and biotech. We visited AQ Biopharma , a biopharmaceutical start up which is sharing a building with a further 60 start ups. All the facilities are owned by the central government, and rented out to these companies in very advantageous conditions. Each of them gets a lab (different sizes available) and an office. On the ground floor of this 6 storey building (and, by the way, there are several of these buildings in one road, at least 4-5 housing around 60 start ups each) there is a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer and some LC/GC/MS equipment, together with NMR and LC/GC/MS experts, available to all users in that building. I have seen similar set ups in the West (for example, the Nexus facility at Santiago de Compostela University) but the amazing thing here once again is the numbers involved. If there are about 300 of these start ups in one road in one city, what are the chances of some of these succeeding?

All this is fuelled by a ready supply of chemists and biochemists, which are being churned out by Chinese Universities at a rate of knots, as these are still very popular subjects for University hopefuls, unlike in the West, where the scarcity of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics graduates is posing a problem. And these scientists are very keen on improving their language skills, one of their self-acknowledged challenges. The Pudong Language School is a building of pharaonic proportions which was already open at 6.30 am, when I ran past it. This is not going to stop us from releasing Mnova in Chinese, though. Mnova is already available in Japanese, Russian and Spanish, as well as English, and it is prepared so that it is very easy to ‘localize’ to other languages. If any of you have any other suggestions on possible languages Mnova should support, please use the comments to let us know.

OK, next post, Beijing.

Santi Trips and business development, Uncategorized Mestrelab, mestrelab china, mnova china, shanghai 3 comments Leave a comment

Hi everyone!

My name is Dani and I am a part of Mestrelab’s team since the very beginning of 2009. I am not a chemist, nor a developer; so what am I doing here?

I work on the marketing department; in fact, I am Mestrelab’s marketing department. And I have to say I really like this job because I am not expected to create big-old-uneffective campaigns. No, my job here is to improve the communication between Mestrelab and its customers and partners so that we can focus our efforts on our clients’ needs.

And this is why we have recently created a newsletter, and this blog where we’ll all post about the things we are working on. This blog is new, we hope you want to use it to comment whatever you want, specially about how we can improve your Mestrelab experience; but the newsletters are already on the street and they have given us some very good feedback which we are going to use in our future developments.

New webpage

Next thing you will be able to see is our new website. We are working on it to have it ready by the 1st of May by the beginning of July and what are you going to find on it?

• Customer training. Wouldn’t it be great to have helpful articles about Mnova possibilities? We are going to improve our resources section so that all the tips and guides we prepare are easier to find. We are also going to create some starting guides for new users so that they can begin to make the most our of our tools from day 1.
• E-commerce. Yes, we are a company and we want our customers to buy our products so, why don’t we just make it easier?
• A new design, more beatiful and more accesible. Because we want our website to be as our products are: easy and powerful. We’ll try to make it the most accessible as possible and use RSS feeds and other kind of solutions to keep you up to date (aren’t you using RSS while surfing the net, do you want to know how they can improve your productivity?)

So, is this it? No, this is just our first step: we are thinking on how we can develop a community where you, our users, have the voice to tell us how you want our new products to be; to tell other chemists out there the best practices you are using; to check if your licenses are expiring… Internet gives us some tools we definitely should use to create a stronger relationship with our clients, and this is what we are working on.

Any ideas?  Please feel free to use the comments or just email me: dani.fraga[at]mestrec.com

Dani Uncategorized conversation, feedback, marketing, web 3 comments Leave a comment

Welcome to the new Mestrelab blog! I feel that, before getting on with posting, I should try to explain why we have decided to create a new blog and make the commitment of maintaining it from here on.

Our motivation is not that we feel there are not enough blogs yet on the internet, nor that we had nothing to do over the Easter weekend. Rather, this blog is being born because of the many questions we are getting from our users, on our travels, about Mestrelab, about how the company is doing, about what we are working on, about our commercial activities, and about many other things which we expected to only be of interest to us. There are many ways to answer these questions, and a blog is a good way to do it, not only for those asking, but also for those who may want to know or be interested, but never get the chance to ask.

Of course, we already have Carlos’s blog, but that is a more scientific blog, created to discuss aspects of Analytical Chemistry which are of interest to Carlos and to our users, and we want to keep it that way, to avoid wasting anybody’s time. The Mestrelab blog is different. It is not scientific, but more lighthearted, somewhere to visit on a break from science, research or, god forbid, corporate meetings. It is not a one person blog, but rather a vehicle for anyone in Mestrelab to share their thoughts, for us to report on company progress and ideas, to tell stories about our trips and conferences, and to highlight aspects of our products which we may think our users may be interested in reading, or hearing, about. Also, the blog should be a good way to have an open dialog with our users, to bounce off some of our ideas before we get on with implementing them, and to gather feedback, and we hope that many of our users will contribute with comments to keep it alive and, more importantly, make it interesting (with the exception of Shakespeare, Brecht, Joyce and a few others, dialogues are generally a lot more interesting than monologues).

So, if you have something to tell or ask Mestrelab, in public, and you cannot wait for the next conference, here we are! We look forward to hearing from you.

Santi Uncategorized conferences, events, Introduction No comments Leave a comment