We’ll also have a couple of iPads with us if people are interested – we think this class of device has great potential in Labs.

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

It’ll be interesting to see what the iPad and devices inspired by it do for the world of ELNs. Clearly Marc’s got a very cloud-centric perspective but the success of Salesforce.com (which he launched when Enterprise software was very much a 3-teir world client/server affair) does mean he’s worth listening to.

There’s some seriously interesting times ahead for all of us and being able to have a separate corporate voice will hopefully make it easier for me to engage thoughtfully without having to consider the implications of what I write from a company branding perspective.

With regard to “bed behaviour” particularly by Sales & Marketing personnel, I’m afraid I’m one of those naive people that believe open conversation spurs creativity, and if people act badly they’ll just look like idiots to the very people they are trying to “impress”. As long as there’s transparency it tends to self-correct.

However, I realise that only a few of us are willing or indeed able to Blog, so forums such as LinkedIn groups definitely have a role. There are a couple of ELN groups on LinkedIn, one’s pretty quiet and the other is somewhat stifled by rather outmoded policies.

So I’m delighted that a more open ELN group has been setup on LinkedIn – you can join it here and I would strongly recommend you do.

Here’s the group description:

This group was set up to provide a place where all can discuss content free from restrictions.

By joining this group you are agreeing to allow other group members to make comment on your discussions free from any risk of litigation or lawsuit. This means other members are free to make reference to trademarks and express their opinion positive or negative. The only recourse is to answer their discussion. Abusive replies will be removed.

Content from this discussion should not be referenced elsewhere.

Innovation requires uncensored discussion.
So feel free to discuss anything related to this topic in here.

I really like this approach, the only quibble I might have is “Content from this discussion should not be referenced elsewhere” which is going to be really tricky in practice – good ideas and discussion spread, that’s the whole point. But I’m sure we’ll have a discussion about it .

FYI the group was setup by Andrew Lemon who runs The Edge, producers of BioRails which is on my list of “interesting things to look at when I have time”. So guess he’s a fellow supplier although I’m not sure we compete that much – we briefly met at a conference once, but apart from that I have no relationship with him. I’m just pleased that someone is doing something to enhance the quality of conversation in the industry because we urgently need to something to improve the success rate and ROI of ELN implementations.

I think Jo and I are doing a Workshop on ELNs in Biology on Monday afternoon, and I’ve got a presentation in the main conference. None of which I’ve started working on… which will hopefully make them “fresher” and more relevant. I’ll put the presentations up on SlideShare when I’m done.

I’m not sure if we’re holding a formal “Amphora Dinner” this year but I’m sure we’ll all be getting together most evenings whatever happens – grab Jo or I in the meetings and we’ll sort something out.

Anyone for a Twitter hashtag….?

The project is on GitHub – here’s the project’s GitHub page.

The checker script is a completely separate implementation of the signature and repository code, and is a useful way for anyone – Amphora customer or not – to check that things are OK with their data.

An important part of PatentSafe’s value is that it creates an open repository which you can read and take in to court without needing any additional software from Amphora. Everything is completely open as standard, no need for a complicated export step, or any software except a PDF reader, a text reader, and OpenSSL. The open release of the checker script is just part of this.

We only press release once the customer has been through pilot, deployed, and determined they are indeed happy users of PatentSafe. So we tend to press release rather later than some, but it’s all solid stuff.

In addition, we don’t press release everyone but where it’s interesting we will ask the customer if they are prepared to do so. The interesting thing about Solidus is they are a small (ish) company with big-company problems – specifically they need an ELN which ties together their multiple sites – which makes the PatentSafe Starter Pack ideal for them.

The pretty version is on PRWeb here.

Solidus Bioscience Protect their Research and Improve Efficiency With Amphora’s PatentSafe Solution

Biotechnology and contract research company Solidus Bioscience Inc have successfully implemented Amphora’s PatentSafe solution to replace their bound lab notebooks. Solidus are using PatentSafe as a fully electronic lab notebook, with digital signatures. Not only does this fit more efficiently into today’s laboratories but it also allows them to partition and search their data simply and effectively, saving significant time previously spent on laborious manual searches and compilation of reports.

Cheyenne, WY (PRWEB) April 16, 2009 – Amphora Research Systems is pleased to announce that Solidus Bioscience Inc. has implemented PatentSafe for their e-notebook initiative. Solidus, with Research Labs in both New York and California, currently offers an in vitro toxicity screening service that determines compound and metabolite toxicity using a novel platform that supports arrays of miniaturized 3D cell cultures and metabolizing enzymes. Solidus has opted for Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack option, which is targeted specifically at startup companies and small biotechs, to document contract studies and new product development.

With their research team split between the East and West coast, Solidus were keen to implement a solution which would help their scientists to co-ordinate and collaborate effectively. Having access to all the research information and project reports via the secure PatentSafe server is something that has allowed Solidus to work more effectively as a team.

Being able to put our experiments straight into PatentSafe has made life much easier for the scientists, giving us back the time we used to spend on cutting and sticking into our paper notebooks. Protecting our intellectual property is very important to us, and we feel that PatentSafe helps us document our work more efficiently and completely.

Solidus carries out a mix of contract research and testing for client companies and internal discovery work of their own. Using PatentSafe’s simply configured metadata it is now easy for the researchers to quickly access work done for a particular company or for a development project by everyone in the company simultaneously.

Jessica Ryan, a leading research scientist at Solidus said “Being able to put our experiments straight into PatentSafe has made life much easier for the scientists, giving us back the time we used to spend on cutting and sticking into our paper notebooks. Protecting our intellectual property is very important to us, and we feel that PatentSafe helps us document our work more efficiently and completely.”

She continued, “The PatentSafe Starter Pack was ideal for us. The small financial outlay meant that we were able to move quickly from deciding the PatentSafe software was a good fit for our business needs, to implementing it and seeing the benefits we were after.”

Having the option run the software remotely on a secure hosted server meant that Solidus did not need to worry about setting up and maintaining additional IT infrastructure. Deployment and training was simple and painless.

Allison Coles, CSO and co-founder of Amphora said, “Contract Research Organizations (CROs) have a particular set of problems. Not only do they want to be able to search, share and secure their work, but they need to be able to divide it simply, so each client can have a copy of their own work. Previously CROs would need to run a set of notebooks for each client company. Using PatentSafe it’s simple for them to pull together the all the relevant work for each company, at the end of the contract, or whenever you need to. This removes a lot of time consuming admin from the researchers and lets them work in a more efficient way.”

The Starter Pack Subscription of PatentSafe is specifically aimed at biotechs with up to 10 scientists. The Starter pack offering brings the Enterprise-class capabilities of PatentSafe to companies who find themselves with Enterprise-scale problems but until now haven’t had the infrastructure or financial ability to do anything but struggle on with the Paper Lab Notebook. Now they can have a quick, easy, and cost effective solution that can grow with them and their success.

• Customer looks at ELNs, gets vendors in to chat to.
• Customer likes what we do.
• Competitor goes in very aggressively making promises they can’t keep and offering a “free trial”. Salesperson makes no effort to understand the customer’s needs, just keeps nodding and pushing the trial.
• Customer tries free trial. Vendor unable/unwilling to provide any support – they don’t understand the customer’s problems anyway.
• Product doesn’t work for the scientists (as we predicted) and promises made aren’t kept.
• Having tried one, customer’s scientists decide they don’t need an ELN.

The end result is that a whole bunch of scientists are stuck using Paper Notebooks when they could be benefiting from a better system. But the purchasing and sales process got in the way. I expect the Sales person got a commission but that’s the only good that came out of this. This is scorched earth policies.

All ELNs are not created equal. All ELN companies are not equal. We do different things in different ways, and have different strengths (and weaknesses).

As an aside, our sales people can’t make unsustainable promises (and in fact, you’re more likely to hear uncomfortable truths), and their compensation scheme is heavily biased to successful deployments and happy customers. I suspect our compensation scheme is “highly unusual” though and most companies would struggle to put something like it in place.

So anyway, I’m a little frustrated – perhaps I am niave but I’d like to think that we and our fellow vendors have unique viewpoints and capabilities, and it’s in the sales/purchasing process that we help the prospective customer understand what we can do for them and how we fit. Hopefully the right customers buy the right products.

In this case the sales process has created a lose/lose/lose situation. Which is pretty sad really…. and I don’t know what to do about it. Having a more aggressive salesforce isn’t something I’m prepared to consider – makes us as bad as everyone else. Similarly, free pilots don’t work – you don’t get enough attention within the customer organization unless you charge something (even a token amount).

Time to go and write some code, for the therapeutic benefits if nothing else. That prospect will no doubt come back into play in a year or so, and we’ll hopefully engage with them then…

I’ve watched the lifecycle of these large projects, and the success rate is abysmal. They really are the ERP of research – warts and all. The optimistic customer and slightly smug vendor are seen two years later much quieter – and the project manager has often moved on, leaving the debris to someone else.

Unfortunately the ELN market isn’t large enough to get the kind of attention that ERP does, so getting “Lessons Learned” is tough – although we do try in the workshops with give, and I know that John Trigg at Phase Four has a lot of good stuff to say too.

It’s interesting that the people pushing for ERP-style projects come from the vendor side in some way or another. I don’t think they are deliberately pushing something that doesn’t work, it’s just that they only see the one success, not the many failures – or indeed, the many successes of very simple, effective solutions which might not even involve an outside vendor.

Anyway, I find reading about ERP failures pretty useful when considering how to run effective ELN projects. One good example is this blog post on ZDNet:When will we learn?

With reference to Amphora’s products and approach – this is one reason why we’ve focused very tightly on a specific problem, delivering a solution which can be deployed without too much pain or risk. It takes discipline and I know a lot of people think we’re mad, but the results speak for themselves I think.

In the current economic climate, focus and simplicity are suddenly back in fashion, which I guess means there’s always a silver lining….

You can read the detail on PatentSafe Personal Edition in the Press Release but some background might be of interest and this blog is the place for it!

I have to admit that we aren’t that clever – our product planning process is nothing more than listening to what’s going on, talking to people, and spotting places where we can meet a need.

There’s been a big increase recently in very small R&D companies (in all sorts of industries). One or two scientists working on a specific area, often funded from their own pockets or friends & family – and maybe the a small grant. Interestingly, they are more than likely to be working from more than one location – incubators, universities, shared lab space, garages, etc. Some or all of their researchers might be part time, too.

I don’t know why we’re seeing this increase – it might be because the Internet has suddenly made this business model viable, and of course the inexorable advance of technology has reduced the barriers to entry for whole sectors of scientific endeavor. I suspect there’s also a lot of people leaving larger companies and taking the opportunity to work on ideas they’ve always wanted to explore.

This is all really interesting – this is the exciting part of innovation. We like working with these people, there’s a lot of passion and energy there and it’s a lot of fun.

Interestingly, these very small companies have problems you’d associate with large-scale enterprises. They need decent records of their inventions (because their IP is their only asset, generally). They also need effective ways of working with closely with remote colleagues (because they seldom have a central work area).

Of course, they have small-company constraints – notably, they don’t have much IT infrastructure, and of course if you’re funding things yourself, money really really really matters.

The Paper Lab Notebook really does not work at all well for these customers – but until now they’ve never had an option.

PatentSafe Personal Edition is a full version of PatentSafe, which is hosted on one of Amphora’s servers in a secure virtual environment (we’ve got servers in a number of locations around the world, we use the one “Closest” to the customer). Amphora handle administration, acts as the Custodian, and generally makes everything tick.

So the customer gets an Enterprise-class ELN solution with no real hassle. Just what they need.

We’re fortunate that PatentSafe works well over The Internet. Generally there’s no noticeable difference for people using it over The Internet compared to using it locally.

It really is that simple – call us up, pay a small amount by credit card, and you’ll have your server. Of course, as the customer grows they can move to the PatentSafe Starter Pack, and then a full PatentSafe install.

Lots of fun… if you’re interested drop us a line at info@amphora-research.com.

By the way, you can get a PDF of the press release here – Personal Edition Press Release.pdf

As is our habit, there will be an Amphora dinner the evening of the first day of the main conference. If you are an Amphora customer (or friend!) and will be attending let Jo know.

Anyway, for your amusement some of Amphora’s happy crew are now on Twitter (thanks in part to encouragement from Suw who gave a really interesting presentation at the SMI ELN conference in London last week.

If you’re into that kind of thing please do look us up (I’m simoncoles), and I’m sure you can find us on the other “Social” sites if desired… get in touch!

However, we’re also conscious that sometimes we don’t portray ourselves in the best light especially when other people are press releasing a small pilot in one area of a company as a “Global Rollout”. We’re probably the largest vendor in our space by a large margin but you wouldn’t believe that from the hype sometimes!

So we’ve started to look at press releasing some of our customer wins. We’ve made a bunch of people happy and I guess there’s no harm in telling the world sometimes….

As part of that a press release went out last night regarding Glycomar’s use of PatentSafe, particularly the PatentSafe starter pack which is ideal for their circumstances.

Without further ado, here’s the press release which pretty much says it all….

Amphora’s PatentSafe Solution Selected by Glycomar

Amphora Research Systems , a key provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) products for the biotech industry, announces the purchase of Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack for researchers at Glycomar – a marine biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialisation of new anti-inflammatory drug candidates based on the glycobiology of marine organisms. Glycomar is using Amphora’s PatentSafe solution as a fully-electronic ELN, with digital signatures for legal patent evidence. By using PatentSafe not only do they create secure records for patents but also they have the benefit of a searchable, sharable repository of the company’s research.

(PRWEB) April 18, 2008 — Amphora Research Systems (http://www.amphora-research.com), a key provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) products for the biotech industry, announces the purchase of Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack for researchers at Glycomar – a marine biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialisation of new anti-inflammatory drug candidates based on the glycobiology of marine organisms.

Glycomar is using Amphora’s PatentSafe solution as a fully-electronic ELN, with digital signatures for legal patent evidence. By using PatentSafe not only do they create secure records for patents but also they have the benefit of a searchable, sharable repository of the company’s research.

April Macleod from Glycomar said “Being a small Biotech, most Electronic Lab Notebook solutions were too involved and expensive, but Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack option is perfect for our situation and can easily meet our needs as we grow”.

Simon Coles, CTO and co-founder of Amphora, explains: “There’s a real need for a practical, approachable ELN solution for the hundreds of small Biotechs who need the significant productivity gains that come with an ELN, with full protection for their patents. Most ELN solutions on the market were built to serve the needs of Big Pharma, but the PatentSafe Starter Pack is focused exactly on the smaller Biotech companies. We have designed the system so that it is a “plug & play” set up, we were able to get Glycomar up and running on the system within a couple of hours. Because of the way PatentSafe fitted into the scientists’ existing working patterns, rolling out the system was smooth and pain free for both parties.”

Thanks to PatentSafe, scientists can work using whatever tools suit their research needs best and still collaborate easily on their projects. Scientists no longer have to ‘cut and stick’ computer printouts into their traditional bound laboratory notebook, saving typically between 15 minutes to an hour per day. Furthermore, the entire PatentSafe notebook can be searched and shared with colleagues and all work is fully protected for patent and IP purposes. PatentSafe is quick to learn and affordable to deploy, and can be used in conjunction with traditional paper-based methods or in fully electronic mode using secure digital signatures.

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I was interviewed by IQPC’s Pharma IQ Community about this – you can read the full interview on their site, but here’s the highlights…. the questions were pretty insightful and forced me to write down some stuff I don’t think I’ve written elsewhere (I’m not too good at writing stuff down unless I have to!).

The interview was conducted by Emma Cobbledick, Editor, The Pharma IQ Community Newsletter

E: Hi Simon, thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. It’d be great if you could let our readers know a little bit about Amphora’s history to start us off.

S: Amphora grew out of a consulting engagement with Eastman Kodak in 1996. Kodak identified some specific business issues which required a fully-electronic ELN to be used by their scientists, enterprise-wide (and at the time Kodak’s R&D was huge). The company I was working for at the time were engaged by Kodak and I was the project manager. Things grew from there – with Kodak’s encouragement we turned the project into a product which we sold to a few other larger companies, and then in 2003 we did a Management Buyout and released a new generation of products more suited to today’s users and technology platforms. Amphora is based in the US & UK, and we have customers all around the world.

E: You recently received the Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Penetration Leadership, presented each year to the company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing market share within their industry. What criteria were you assessed on?

S: You can read the award citation for the detail, but to summarise they were looking at how Amphora was executing in the market place: our products and their focus on customer needs, how we take products to market, and the outcome of that in terms of market share. It isn’t just about the current situation; they are also looking at how we’re positioned for the future.

E: And which of these in particular did the judges think Amphora really excelled at?

S: We seem to have hit on the right product set and sales approach which allow us to solve the Lab Notebook problem quickly and efficiently in a wide variety of organisations, for a price they can afford and delivered in a package they can deploy. Turns out that’s been one of the biggest problems for the ELN market as a whole and is one of the reasons why things are only now really beginning to take off. Interestingly, what we’ve found actually works is entirely different to what we all thought (myself included) back in the late 90′s.

E: What would you say was unique about Amphora products insofar as the customer is concerned?

S: From an end-user perspective, we try very hard to stay out of the user’s way. The science is the focus, and ideally the notebook should take a back seat allowing the scientist to work however they wish. We’ve got some users who don’t even realise they are using PatentSafe, which we’re very proud of.

From an IT and administration perspective, we tend to build very open, scalable systems and we’ve spent a lot of time engineering out some of the problems that cause issues in the field. We’ve got a lot of smaller customers and they don’t have the time or experience to tend complex IT systems, and once you’ve built something that can survive in that environment then that really helps the larger companies control their TCO too.

From a legal perspective we’ve spent an awful lot of time on our Patent Evidence Creation & Preservation system and we feel it is uniquely suited to the task. This is one area where a lot of diverse experience is hugely important, which we’re fortunate to have.

E: How do you view your position in the ELNs market and has the award changed that at all?

S: We’ve always been very focused on solving the “Replace the Bound Notebook” problem; sometimes that means our products will be used alone, sometimes in conjunction with other “ELN” systems from other suppliers. So I’d view our position as solving a particularly tricky part of the ELN problem space, and we are delighted to be able to work with other vendors where our customers need some discipline-specific functionality on the desktop.

I’m not sure the award has changed much in reality, although historically we haven’t spent a lot of time tooting our own horn – in a lot of early markets all you see is lots of loud marketing fluff, almost as a substitute for making sales. We’ve preferred to focus on figuring out how to solve the problem and making the sales, gaining experience all the time. What the award has done has drawn attention to that – I suspect people had trouble figuring out what we were about before, because we weren’t doing the normal marketing thing.

E: If you were to offer advice to a company considering getting involved in ELNs, what would be the first thing you’d tell them?

S: The first thing I’d do is stop using the phrase “ELN” to describe your project; the term is terribly ambiguous and means many different things to different people.

Before you get involved in products and vendors, take a clear look at what you are trying to do. Try to keep it as simple as possible; a major cause of ELN project failure is people get distracted by all the wonderful possibilities that you could do in eR&D nirvana and they end up with something that they can’t afford, or if they can afford it they can’t roll it out.

Most successful ELN projects are surprisingly simple and will build on that initial success over a number of years. “Conventional wisdom” about what “should” be in a “proper” ELN seems to be based on the wishes & dreams of a few pundits, rather than on business need. Unfortunately, project managers seldom get credit for solving the business problem in a quick & simple way!

John Trigg (of PhaseFour Informatics) and I have been doing a workshop on ELN Project Implementation for a number of years – I do it as a non-commercial hobby. There’s a number of concepts which have stood the test of time which really help people focus on what their problem is and how they can increase their capabilities with minimal risk and cost going forward.

E: Sounds like sensible advice, what’s the most interesting development that you know of, in terms of the ELN industry and ELN usage?

S: I think there is finally a consensus that you can’t get a single “ELN” system which will meet the needs of everyone in an organisation. Science is a huge field which is constantly changing and there’s no way a single product can intimately support each group of users. So we’re seeing many more “ELN Systems” being deployed (with great success) which comprise more than one product called an “ELN”, focused on different groups of users. Customers are seeing that this approach is cost effective and lower risk, and vendors are increasingly seeing this isn’t a zero sum game – indeed, they will suffer in the market if they don’t focus on their strength and work well with others.

E: And what do you think is the biggest obstacle on the road to a paperless lab today?

S: Complexity. This is a hard problem space and one that’s very prone to being over-engineered into an unjustifiable wish-list of functionality and organisational initiatives. Combine that with a healthy dose of marketing and an enthusiastic sales person, and you have a recipe for project failure. Discipline is the key to success in ELN projects.

• Money is tight
• Productivity is all-important
• The need for an ELN is perhaps greater than in a more established company
• Their IT infrastructure is often a bit ad-hoc, but their use of computers in research (e.g. on the scientist’s desktops) is often very advanced (making a Bound Notebook particularly inappropriate)

Boosting researcher productivity very early in the life of startup delivers significantly greater benefit than doing it in the later stages of a company’s life:

• The first few employees are often the “Key” people in any organization. Their time is disproportionately valuable.
• If the existing employees can get more done, it means bringing on extra people can be delayed. Which means you reduce cash drain, reduce risk, and can afford to be more selective about who you bring on.
• When you do bring on people, the existing body of work (both the results themselves, but also the procedures used) is tremendously valuable for training.

Startups are often based in multiple places, and there seems to be a growing trend for the company not to have a central office at all – we’ve got a number of customers who have employees at different research institutes. Having a single, Internet-accessible (but secure!) is crucial not only for collaboration but also getting properly witnessed records for patent purposes.

And of course, getting decent notebooks in from the start makes investors much more comfortable – progress is easier to see, and they know that IP is being generated and can be defended. When the major asset from any of these endeavors is the IP, it really helps investors to know that it is all written up safely!

So we’ve come up with the PatentSafe Starter Pack which is a subscription offering (which makes it easier on cash flow) delivered in a box (well, sometimes two boxes) which are just plugged in and you can start working. Alternatively, it is available as a hosted offering if you’ve got multiple sites.

The starter pack will produce both paper or electronic records (keeping the lawyers happy) but the scientists can of course work electronically regardless (keeping the scientists happy) and everything is available in single, searchable database.

It has taken us a while to get here, and coming up with a way to deliver PatentSafe at an affordable price and packaged in a way that can be quickly deployed has been quite a challenge – perhaps more of a challenge than our larger deployments (and we do have some very large multi-national deployments). Fortunately we’ve got some experience from our low-cost pilot program this is to some extent an offshoot of that.

Speaking of pilots, the economics of this program are such that we’re not going to offer a pilot; we’re going to offer a money-back guarantee instead. Our pilots tend to go straight to purchase anyway, so it seems a little silly to offer one in this case, especially as the cost of the pilot would be more than the first year’s subscription.

The Starter Pack is a different product from our normal PatentSafe offering, in that it is restricted to a small number of users, available in certain geographies, and we provide the server etc. This keeps our costs low which is why we can offer it at such a low price. Larger and more established companies will find the restrictions we’ve had to put in place to get the costs down will mean the Starter Pack doesn’t meet their needs – which is fine, that’s why we have the normal PatentSafe offering.

Because this is a very keenly-priced package and there’s been a lot of discussion about why we should do this (particularly from our Sales force!). Fortunately we’re privately held so it ultimately comes down to “Because we think it is a good idea”, but for the curious, this is some of the rationale:

• Just because you’re small doesn’t mean you haven’t got an ELN problem, so there’s a definite need to be met. Because of our product architecture, cost structure etc. we’re one of the few vendors who can sensibly serve smaller companies.
• Working with smaller companies is to some extent an investment – some of them will grow or be bought, and if we serve them well they will buy more from us.
• Smaller companies are an awful lot of fun to work with, there’s lots of energy and enthusiasm. Watching them grow is a real pleasure – we’ve known some of our customers when they were all in one room, and now they’ve got whole buildings full of people.
• People move around an awful in the Biotech workforce, that we’re getting an awful lot of customers from word-of-mouth recommendations. We literally are finding people who call us as they are going through the process of setting up a company, or call us when they realize their new job doesn’t come with an ELN.

So it should be an awful lot of fun… and I am sure we’ll meet a lot of interesting people along the way!

PS: If you are interested in the starter pack, you need to make contact with one of our sales people (fill out this form) and if you meet the criteria they can make an application on your behalf – if that’s approved we’ll put one in the post!

PPS: Yes, this program is inspired by Sun’s Startup Essentials program.

Hopefully the ensuing conversation will raise the general level of awareness of the issues involved. Ideally we’ll be able to turn the content up and marketing-speak down….

Couple of representative links: Ars Technica’s guide on how to steal an election (scary reading), and Scott Adams’s tongue-in-cheek but thought provoking post on whether it really matters anyway (which I suspect will offend the easily offended).

If you attended the workshops and would like a copy of the the presentations and handouts, email me.

My presentation on ELN integration techniques from the IQPC conference is now available on the main Amphora web site, here.

One additional request – if you’re currently running an ELN project, why not start a blog and let us know how you’re getting on?