So true, it isn’t funny.

This is why in PatentSafe we encourage the use of a phrase for signing documents. We can’t change organisation’s password policies (and most large companies use LDAP anyhow) but we can try to enforce sanity in signing pass phrases.

Maybe we needed short but hard to guess passwords years ago when memory was tight and CPUs weren’t able to chew through all possible combinations as fast as they do today. Nowadays having a 255 character string for a password shouldn’t be a problem – and it needs to be long to slow down brute-force attacks.

(there’s clearly features in PatentSafe to detect and/or defend against brute-force attacks but the first line of security should be sensible passwords).

That means they have to be looking inside your box to get the data they’re going to aggregate, to get to that astronomical valuation. That’s why they didn’t just go with the enterprise-y user agreements that Microsoft and Amazon use. They don’t want your money. They want the advertisers’ money.

What’s inside your Dropbox says a lot about you. And that, of course, is what Dropbox users (like me) are afraid of.

If that’s the case, you’d have to be very brave to use DropBox for Science that wasn’t already in the public domain… best stick with solutions focused on solving the ELN problem, which have the appropriate technical and business architecture! We’d love to talk to you

I bumped into an analysis of the Terms of Service of various Cloud service providers on Neowin. It isn’t encouraging reading.

I can empathise with the providers; they are providing a generic service to a large number of users, for free or a very low price. The only way they can execute their business at that scale is to tell people “We get to see your data too, and we can re-use it or give it to other people for whatever reasons we decide”.

Unfortunately, that’s not pretty from an IP perspective. I’m no lawyer but I can’t see how some of these terms and conditions are compatible with securing a company’s IP via Patents or even Trade Secrets (let alone personal privacy).

Caveat emptor!

Interestingly Amphora have found ourselves increasingly providing Cloud-like and SaaS-centric services to our customers. We started providing PatentSafe as SaaS but then we’ve moved into providing offsite backup (using a private CrashPlan service) and other services.

In meeting this customer need, we’ve had to do it with our normal IP-centric Terms of Service – which basically means your data is private to you, and we’re only going to disclose it when you ask us (or, in the extreme, when we get a court order). That’s been hard – it has caused us to shy away from some “Cloudy” infrastructure that I know some ELN vendors have gone for, e.g. the Amazon EC2 and S3 products to name just two. Ultimately that means our costs are higher, but to do otherwise would be irresponsible.

I’d like to say this is a matter of “You get what you pay for” but it isn’t as simple as that – these commodity services are just focused on a different market. So before you get the Cloud bug in the Lab, read the Terms of Service and consider if that’s appropriate for your circumstances. When you’ve done that, check with your provider – do they run the services themselves, or do they use another platform – if they’ve got it all on Google or Amazon infrastructure (excellent technical choices! legally trickier) it is worth taking the time to understand who your contract is with and what is happening to your data.

Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.

For the background see the original post on Ironic Sans blog where this is one of a series of Inventor Profiles.

Kodak were Amphora’s first customer, we started working with them and ELNs way back in 1996… the comments in this post give some additional background into Kodak’s lead in digital imaging and the “Innovator’s Dilemma” problem they had in commercialising that.

So in general: you don’t need to regularly change the password to your computer or online financial accounts (including the accounts at retail sites); definitely not for low-security accounts. You should change your corporate login password occasionally, and you need to take a good hard look at your friends, relatives, and paparazzi before deciding how often to change your Facebook password. But if you break up with someone you’ve shared a computer with, change them all.

Two final points. One, this advice is for login passwords. There’s no reason to change any password that is a key to an encrypted file. Just keep the same password as long as you keep the file, unless you suspect it’s been compromised. And two, it’s far more important to choose a good password for the sites that matter — don’t worry about sites you don’t care about that nonetheless demand that you register and choose a password — in the first place than it is to change it. So if you have to worry about something, worry about that. And write your passwords down, or use a program like Password Safe.

Basically you can print into PatentSafe just like you can from a desktop application… which is pretty cool!

This interview of SAPs CIO makes interesting reading.

Oliver Bussmann told me that SAP’s chief scientist had done an analysis of computers in business, and where they will be going. In their scientist’s view, the mobile and desktop models are converging. That is, instead of rolling up to a desk every day to power up a machine, and sift through screens of information to arrive at a simple dashboard, users will come to expect a smaller device to focus on the data. This smaller form factor and more task-focused paradigm will allow you to call up information almost instantly, with laser focus on specific processes, rather than one large machine that does a dozen things. It’s an evolution of the species, if you will.

We’re seeing this ourselves, both in our internal use of the iPad and also by our ELN clients. The Tablet form factor and the very task-centric paradigm really does create a compelling additional device from which to interact with your data – and we’re pleased that PatentSafe continues to keep up with the innovations in the tablet space.

A large number of our customers have iPad trials ongoing; there are few who are refusing to entertain the iPad at all on the basis that it is a “toy”. With endorsements like this from SAP I can’t help but think they will be reconsidering!

(my first post from the iPad WordPress app! Typed with one hand while cuddling my upset 7 year old who lost his ball at the park… he wanted to watch the Dilbert TV series as a cheering up treat – I wonder what that says…)

Cool. Very cool.

In an interesting post from Jack Vinson (a fellow CENSA alumni) lays out to three simple truths of failure from a post on the IT Failures Blog which in turn was inspired by Dilbert:

• Complicated plans don’t work.
• “Spraying energy into the vortex of failure” doesn’t work.
• Your boss really doesn’t care.

The first is the most important in my opinion; and it is directly relevant to ELN projects. In my experience the more time a product takes to implement, and the greater the change in working practices required, the less chance there is of the project achieving the hoped-for Return on Investment. Which in my mind is a failure, even if you do manage to roll the application out and torture the users with it (aren’t we here to make life better for the end users?).

I’d broaden the last point to no one really cares about the ELN project – they care about its potential to impact their lives in a positive or negative way. If they really cared they’d be on the Project Team! This is a broader varient of my Toaster Analogy which when it comes up in Workshops often gets that kind of embarrassed “Yeah, that’s very true but it makes us comfortable so let’s move on” laugh.

There’s enough material around to show that complexity causes massive problems. There’s enough public literature around to show that IT projects often fail to meet their goals (and you only have to wonder what really goes on in private because who likes washing dirty laundry in public?).

Which is why I am mystified to see complexity still worshipped, with project teams brandishing their laundry list of features (all mandatory) and vendors explaining with great pride their multi-week implementation process. When questioned, people seem to honestly believe it has to be this hard!

Why can’t we find the quickest, simplest way to achieve the outcome we seek? Why are project managers so rarely rewarded for paring down the list of requirements to the essentials, shortening the project timescales, reducing risk, and slashing the budget? Why is it that products that “Just work” are somehow “Not powerful enough”?

I suspect the underlying reason (once you get beyond organisational politics and vendor sports) it is because geeks see value in intrinsic complexity. Which is fair enough – until that complexity meets the real world of people, budgets, and other projects.

Amphora are quite happy worshipping at the temple of “Less is more” because we believe that’s the best way to serve our customers. Seems that this view isn’t shared by everyone but that’s fine – the trend is in our favour. In this economy we all need to renew our focus on adding the most value for the least cost.

Oh, here’s Dilbert:

I really don’t know why customers put up with vendors shipping undocumented private file formats. It just locks up your data.

Purchasing should be requiring Open File Formats for any piece of software that is purchased – it should be an absolute corporate mandate. Sadly the purchasing playbook has yet to get a section on probably one of the most business-critical aspects of scientific computing.

As a general rule Apple MacOS X, Linux are second class citizens in the ELN world and it is all the salesperson can do to stifle a laugh when you mention those “other platforms”. The iPad and Android equivalents don’t even get a look in!

I’ve felt this situation is increasingly unsustainable – not only is Apple’s Macintosh experiencing a resurgence, but we’re quite possibly on the cusp of a tablet-drive revolution.

An interesting blog post from the CTO at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions wonders if their current Windows desktop refresh might not be their last.

Personally, I think it likely this is the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though.

The reason? I think they’ll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that’s coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser.

Talking with our larger Enterprise customers, it appears their Windows Desktop infrastructure is increasingly cumbersome and it is very hard to innovate in such a complex environment. In the smaller Biotechs there’s a real push to avoid cumbersome IT generally and there’s ready adoption of web and Cloud technologies, as well as additional platforms such as Macs and iPads.

The article makes a good long term point which ELN project teams should urgently consider:

From a strategic point of view, if you’re designing the future technology estate of a large organisation, that last thing it makes sense to do in this kind of context is build stuff that depends on a desktop stack. Furthermore, decoupling legacy from the desktop stack also has to be on the agenda, because you just can’t count on that stack being relevent in 10 years time.

Most ELN products on the market are tightly linked into the Windows ecosystem, even to the extent that one vendor just trumpeted the re-launch of their ELN which is now completely based on SharePoint!

My feeling is that organisations looking for an ELN which is going to last for more than 2 years should consider a situation where there are more than just Windows Desktop PCs in their IT infrastructure – not an unreasonable consideration, but one that needs thinking about up front rather than purchasing a product that locks you in to a dying ecosystem. The Windows PC isn’t going to be replaced but it won’t be the only way you’ll want to access your ELN, and whatever you select needs to be able to work with whatever you might adopt. That such lightweight “thin” solutions are easier to deploy than a thick client just icing on the cake.

(update: this story has been picked up in The Register)

A good Electronic Lab Notebook takes careful design; the foundation of this is what does, and more importantly what it doesn’t do. This is really hard, as evidenced by the complexity that can creep in to products as you add feature after feature. Apple’s success is built upon design and the fact that better-resourced competitors can’t keep up shows just how difficult it is to get design into your corporate DNA.

I’ve always felt that ELNs are particularly susceptible to “Kitchen-sink” tendencies; the term is so badly defined, and the potential use cases so broad that you can easily find yourself needing to add more and more functions until you end up with an unholy mess which then:

• Requires a lot of consulting to customise the application to fit the needs of any group of scientists
• Is complex to master, requiring quite extensive training time

In PatentSafe we’ve taken a different approach – less is more. Our aim is to allow our users to use any application as part of the ELN experience, and we’ve come up with a handful of basic concepts which can be mastered in lass than 15 minutes and allow the user to use all their existing applications and work processes unchanged.

I’d to claim this is as a result of an amazing design philosophy but in truth it is a product of where we started. Most ELN companies started either in big Pharma (or were swiftly pointed in that direction by their VCs). Amphora in contrast started out working with Kodak and then into companies such as DuPont, PPG and J&J – doing really very large deployments (100′s to 1,000′s of users). When you’re rolling out that many seats especially into the very diverse research environments of chemical companies, you have to keep things ruthlessly streamlined and build on what’s there, because it is just physically impossible to customise the ELN for each group.

When we started to work with Biotechs this experience really paid off:

• Biotechs don’t have the resources to pay for a long consulting engagement and lots of software
• Biotechs will often change their entire business over a period of years; if their ELN was overly customised it would be hard to prevent it becoming a business-threatening impediment to change

It is interesting that Biotechs really have a lot more in common with diverse Chemical companies when looked at this way; most people seem to think Biotech is just little Pharma, but nothing could be further from the case when you are deploying IT.

Less-is-more is also helping us as we move into additional devices such as the iPad. PatentSafe is device-, application-, and discipline-agnostic, so the iPad just fits right in.

When we first started out I was always worried that we would need to add a lot more functionality to the core product to meet market demand. It turns out that resisting this was one of the best decisions we made as a company – we now have a product that can be dropped in almost anywhere and used immediately, which is dramatically different from the alternatives (so much so that people often think we’re lying when we say no consulting and 15 minute training time!).

I can’t help but feel that our market-leading presence is down to what we decide not to do, instead choosing to work with what’s out there. I’d like to think that what we’ve done is technically excellent, and PatentSafe has a number of very powerful features. But it is the features we chose not to implement which make PatentSafe so quick and easy to use, and able to stand the test of time as our customers’ business change.

(this post was inspired by “Simplicity isn’t that Simple” on 52 Weeks of UX blog.

The resulting lack of competition on top of vendor consolidation has led to Chemistry-focused ELNs tending to lag in terms of ease of use, and openness, whilst of course being pretty expensive. As those vendors seek to expand into other scientific disciplines, they bring with them the same costs which are then unnecessarily imposed onto other areas.

One major reason for this is that the Open Source Cheminformatics world has historically been under-developed. My theory is that’s because Cheminformatics started in earnest before Open Source took off as a concept (in comparison to Bioinformatics) but I have no real evidence for this.

Open Source is an important part of todays’ software ecosystem:

• It provides a set of building blocks, and I would imagine almost every software product (commercial or otherwise) has some Open Source components. By sharing the basic foundations, the cost of entry is reduced and this results in more entrants and lower costs for everyone.
• Open Source drives innovation by allowing people to re-mix things to “scratch their own itch” and produce new approaches as needed. Even if those solutions remain in-house they still inspire others, and perhaps allow the engineers inside the commercial vendors to successfully propose new approaches.
• The threat of “free” competition as well as more players in the market generally keeps vendors on their toes. Without a complete lock on particular functionality, vendors must instead compete on value and functionality.

Amphora are not in the Chemistry ELN market (and have no intention of being in that market), but I look at what’s out there and compare with what I see happening in other areas and it is clear there’s a lot that could be done which would benefit the wider ELN world as well. Frankly what’s going on Chemistry is giving the wider ELN community a bad name – especially as marketers keep positioning their products as the only “proper” approach for any kind of science, chemistry or otherwise. You really don’t need to spend thousands of dollars a seat and days/weeks of implementation time to deploy an ELN!

So I’ve waiting for a decent Open Source approach to Chemistry-based searching because if nothing else it will inject some innovation where it has been sorely lacking.

So I was delighted to read this post on how to Enable Exact Structure Search and Substructure Search for Your Chemical Database. I don’t think there’s a great breakthrough here, but it is a straightforward set of instructions on how you can do it which demystifies Cheminformatics a lot.

This could get pretty interesting in the next few years…

• HTML5 and other web technologies are surely at the stage where we don’t need a “thick client” deployed onto a desktop anymore – can’t we do it all in the browser?
• What about all the tablets (like the iPad), can we make them full clients?
• Can we finally have true cross platform chemistry ELNs?
• Can we easily embed chemistry into a variety of other applications, rather than having to buy a complete implementation of someone else’s idea of an ELN?

Amphora’s focus will remain on our particular slice of the ELN problem, which is providing the secure recordkeeping back end, discipline-neutral collaboration etc. Once you’ve done all that work the lawyers generally want to make sure you get the credit for all that Intellectual Property you’ve created even if they don’t explicitly apply for a Patent – even in Academic environments this is becoming more important as the journals and funding agencies raise their expectations in terms of record keeping etc. Amphora’s job is to help our customers focus on the science, and we’ll look after the Intellectual Property and Records considerations.

Even though we don’t plan to directly participate, I’m really looking forward to this. It is great fun working with our customers’ in-house Bioinformatics solutions, and I’d love to see that level of innovation in Cheminformatics.

This is classic case of an established industry being threatened by The Internet. We’ve see it with Travel Agents, Book Stores, Insurance Brokers, Newspapers… you name it. The Editorial just effuses indignation that some people have the temerity to bypass the establishment.

Scientific Blogging is here to stay, as is blogging in general (sorry, newspapers). My advice to anyone who feels threatened by that is:

1. Understand the rules have changed. What was scarce is now plentiful. What’s the new scarcity?
2. The new paradigm has some advantages and some weaknesses – what are they?
3. With the resources and expertise you have built up, how can you bring value to this new world (and hence remain relevant)?

What won’t work is sitting on the sidelines hoping the new thing will go away, because it won’t. It’ll just keep on getting more relevant and by the time you are forced to engage with it, they’ll have solved most of the problems without you… and you will be irrelevant.

We have had a couple of defective iPads. One device’s LCD developed rainbow stripes, the other developed a dead strip across the screen that wouldn’t respond to touch.

In both cases, the recovery procedure was:

• Sync the broken device
• Unwrap a spare
• Restore the spare from the last backup

The procedure takes about 30 minutes from start to finish and the pupil is back up and running quickly. If you’re going to do an iPad deployment, I’m starting to think it’s essential that you have hot spares on site. The iPad is now so embedded in everything we do that to be without it for a single day – far less two or three – is unacceptable.

Both devices were replaced after a 10 minute visit to the Genius Bar. Try that with your £200 netbook.

A 30-minute restore time from bare metal is quite outstanding. And given they are consumer-grade devices, I can see this being done without IT involvement – just go and get a new one from the Stationery cupboard and send your dead one back to IT in an inter-office envelope!

As an example, a recent post on battery life makes some interesting points about the impact of battery life on usability. The short post is well worth a read, and he finishes with the following which I think is equally applicable to the Laboratory:

Simply put: if your device doesn’t last for 10 real-world hours of use, your device is no longer competitive in education. I can’t imagine ever going back to using 4-hour devices like laptops on a regular basis.

I can’t shake the feeling that tablets like the iPad are going to completely change the way we use IT in the labs, because they are just so compelling for the kinds of interaction you need to do in that environment. But I also feel that people haven’t really woken up to the implications… which does make it interesting!

It is small-but-crucial things like this which we are exploring in our loose group of people who are interested in the iPad in the Lab. We’re getting lots of really practical insights as well as the inevitable “How do we do this” discussion.

As an aside, any reading of the iPad developer documentation shows how much effort Apple have put into managing the battery life on their mobile devices, and you can really see the results. But that does have software implications – e.g. people who think they must have Flash to have a viable Tablet probably don’t realise they will get a device which will have a greatly reduced battery life as a result!

So when I bumped into “How to read a patent in 60 seconds” I found it a real breath of fresh air. Insightful, brief, and enjoyable.

Highly recommended if you have ever tried and failed to read a patent!

Of course, you should always seek legal advice etc.