So, I finally get around to writing about ENC, a couple of weeks late, but this is the sign of the times at Mestrelab, things are just TOO busy. I am writing from Shanghai, so I guess I will update information on this China trip in a couple of weeks, to keep the delay up (Probably from Utah, ASMS).

ENC was a good conference considering the difficulties many people had in getting there. In my case, it was really touch and go. I was sitting in my office in UK on Friday morning and decided just in time (about 10 am) that I was not going to be able to fly from Heathrow to Orlando on Saturday morning as planned. I managed to get on a flight from Madrid to Miami for the following day, and then had to deal with the small matter of getting from Herefordshire to Madrid. I was very lucky. I got an Eurostar ticket 15 minutes before they put up the ‘Sold out’ sign. I then had to get a hire car in Paris, because, what do you know, there was a railway strike in France which made it impossible to go by train to Madrid. With so many Brits trying to get out of UK, there were no hire cars in Paris, but I managed to get one (or rather Cristina managed to find me one) in CDG (this meant having to go the wrong way when I got to Paris, but that was a small problem). So, with all this organized, I drove my car to Heathrow, took the train into London, a taxi to St Pancras and the Eurostar to Paris, a taxi from Paris to CDG, where I collected the hire car, and then drove the car (frustratingly having to go past Paris about 2 hours after arriving at Gare du Nord) to Biarritz, just North of the Spanish border. There I returned the car and took a taxi to San Sebastian airport, just a few kilometers away (car hire companies really need to take a look at One Way fees within the EU, driving the car all the way to Madrid was ridiculously expensive). In San Sebastian (by now 8.00 am on the following day) I took another hire car and drove it to Madrid, where I arrived at the airport 2 hours before my departure time! (the drive in Spain was fairly surreal, surrounded by speeding foreign cars all on their way to Madrid airport, I stopped in a petrol station in Burgos where the attendant, who only spoke Spanish and probably gets 10 local customers on an average Saturday morning, had the shop full with 20 Red Bull craving English, French, Dutch and even Swedish people!). 10 hours flight to Miami, 3 1/2 hours by hire car to Daytona Beach et voilá, after 43 hours, I was in the hotel room, ready for our User Meeting the following day! (Well, I am not sure I was ready for the user meeting, but I was there)

But enough of that, and back to the ENC. I think the conference was a success in very difficult circumstances, and the organizing committee managed to make it all work, using web meeting tools so that presenters from Europe could deliver their talks. The organizers, commanded by Carla Marchioro, really did a fantastic job! (We need to be careful with this, otherwise they may decide doing these things by web meeting in future is good enough, and that really would not do!). The suites felt a bit quieter than normal, and that was a shame, but the atmosphere was still good and for us it was very successful from a business point of view.

Our user meeting was very well attended, 30-40 people, which we were pleased with considering there were other meetings being held simultaneously, many people were still travelling, many did not make it at all and that the Daytona Beach was beckoning outside the window! You can take a look at our presentations here. I was very encouraged by the great interest people were showing in GSD (Global Spectral Deconvolution – take a look at this poster for more info), our new algorithm for fully automatic deconvolution of whole 1D NMR spectra. It is amazing to see how quickly our users are coming up with applications for this algorithm. If you have not tried it yet, I strongly suggest that you do, it is available within the standard Mnova NMR distribution (version 6.1, download a free evaluation here if you don’t have it yet). Stan Sykora’s talk on our (his and Mestrelab’s) efforst in Automatic Structure Verification was also received with great interest (also available on the link above).

We also had a lot of interest on our new Script Market idea, to be launched in the next couple of weeks (more on that on a different post, and announcement duly to come on the Mestrelab web page).

The rest of the week was really busy, full of meetings with customers, other people interested in the software, potential collaborators, etc. The community is really very lively and full of ideas, and we left the conference with many more things to do than when we arrived (just what we needed!)

So, this is all for now. I will try to post some ENC pictures later this week, and give an update on our adventures in China as soon as I can!

Santi Conferences, Uncategorized Automatic Structure Verification, conferences, Daytona ENC, ENC, GSD, Mestrelab User Meeting No comments Leave a comment

2007 was not only the year of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, and of Slovenia to the Euro, but it was undoubtedly a year of changes in leadership (Just take a look at this list, which is only the main, or best known, leadership changes in that year: Ban Ki-moon took over Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General, Nancy Pelosi became the 1st Female Speaker of the US House of Representatives and, more importantly, the first democrat speaker for a while, Nicolas Sarkozy took over Jacques Chirac as President in France and Gordon Brown over Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister, Yasuo Fokuda took over as Prime Minister of Japan from the resigning Shinzo Abe and President Vladimir Putin did the same in Russia over resigning Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkhov, paving the way for Dmitry Medvedev to become the new President, John Howard was finally defeated in an Australia Election by Kevin Rudd and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became the new President of Argentina). And Mestrelab set off at the beginning of the year with the intention of continuing to work towards a change of commercial leadership in the NMR, and eventually Analytical Chemistry, software market. And to do so, we continued to work on our already not so secret weapon, Mnova, which we were convinced would at least establish a clear technical leadership in the industry.

But even before that, during February, and just after Estonia had become the first country to stage a General Election over the internet, showing the shape (and more importantly, the place) of things to come, we acquired an interest in the internet World ourselves, with our acquisition of a stake in eMolecules, the Southern California based search engine and ecommerce chemistry tool which is set to become the Amazon of chemistry. This was very exciting for us, as we were and remain convinced that eMolecules will bring great value to the same customers we are servicing with our software.

So, with a stake of eMolecules under our belt, Carlos, Nik and I set off for Daytona Beach, and the 48th ENC, ready to finally launch, and unveil, Mnova. The first commercial version of Mnova, 5.0.3, was enthusiastically received by most ENC attendees who visited our booth, and this greatly encouraged us and reaffirmed us in our conviction that we were following the right path with its development. NMR spectroscopists loved the flexibility afforded by its multipage interface, its multiplatform nature, the possibilities open by its architecture and by its unmatched scripting capabilities. During this ENC, we also signed a distribution agreement with Varian for Mnova, which we saw as further recognition by one of the main players in our market of the fact that Mnova was starting to be regarded as the best software tool available. Daytona was therefore very encouraging on that front, although of course, the sight of thousands of 4×4 trucks sporting massive fridges and sound systems being driven into the beach everyday by people who obviously don’t like to walk or be in contact with the sand, even on the beach, was fairly discouraging for Europeans long engaged in the climate change debate. Of course, the discovery, simultaneously to the ENC, of Gliese 581c, an Earth-like planet potentially capable of sustaining life in constellation Libra was a great relief for us.

After ENC, we attended an excellent EUROMAR and Iberoamerican meeting at Tarragona, Spain, where we also had an exhibitor booth, and then the first SMASH meeting held at Chamonix, in France, an spectacular setting used again in 2009 (and it seems as if planned for 2011) and on which I have blogged elsewhere. Chamonix saw the consolidation of our tradition of holding User Meetings at SMASH, with a meeting attended by over 60 people, who outsized the room we had booked for its celebration. Mnova kept proving extremely popular, and our software sales took a huge hike, still well below those of Harry Potter’s last instalment, ‘The Deadly Hallows’, which sold 11 million copies during its first 24 hours in the market and left us thinking ‘if only’ . But we were also doing fine, and industry were starting to take us really seriously, with the end of 2007 seeing Worldwide adoption of the software for general deployment by a couple of very prestigious, multinational pharmas and biotechs which I don’t have permission to mention. All this meant we could keep growing the team with confidence, and we did so with the addition of Pablo, a new Applications Chemist, and Santi, a beautifully named software developer. NMR For All also kept going strong, although of course, it paled into insignificance when compared to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Marktoum’s largest ever charitable donation of €7.41 bn (this was of course when things in Dubai were going better).

So, with Mnova well established, eMolecules on the road and our first corporate deals under our belts, and whilst witnessing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy, the signing of the treaty of Lisbon and the accession of 9 former Easter countries (well, 8 plus Malta) to the Schengen Treaty, and with a careful eye on the UN Climate Change Conference held in early December (déjà vu) in Bali, we waved goodbye to 2007 and marched, full of enthusiasm and hope and with an strengthened Mestrelab, into 2008. And that will be my next post.

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.

Santi Celebrating, Conferences Daytona ENC, Mnova 5.0.3, Mnova launch No comments Leave a comment