There are very conflicting theories at the moment as to the role of Marco Polo and Admiral Zheng He in medieval times in the coming together of the Western European and Chinese cultures, and who discovered who. You could do worse than checking out 1434, by Gavin Menzies, to read some alternative history.

I am now following on the trail of Marco Polo, but of course I have no pretensions of discovering China, rather, we are trying hard in Mestrelab to get China to discover Mnova, so far with a relatively pleasing measure of success. Before I get into matters Mestrelab, though, there are a few really amazing things one finds out on arriving in Shanghai, which is an incredibly modern and buzzing city. I was here last November, and I was really taken by surprise by the speed of the developments in this area of China.

The first incredible thing is the district of Pudong, on the East shore of the Yang-Tze river. This was basically farmland 10 years ago, which is truly incredible when you see it now, as the people of Shanghai have built 12,000 (yes, 12,000!) skyscrapers since then in this new part of town. One of them, the Shanghai World Financial Center, I believe to be the 2nd tallest in the World at present, and many others are hugely imposing and spectacular buildings. The realization that all this has sprung from nowhere in 10 years really gives the newcomer a measure of the power of aspiration of the Chinese society in economic terms.

Santi in Shanghai, with the Pu-Dong skyline behind, last November (2008). Click on the photo to view more from the Shanghai album

The next thing that catches your eye is downtown Shanghai. Buzzing with commercial activity, spectacular with a beautiful (and incredibly contrasting from one shore to the other) skyline, and no end of places for the visitor to go to, great restaurants, exciting nightlife, modern facilities. A true metropolis of the XXI century. Check out a few photos, unfortunately spoilt by me and Chen, by clicking on the photo to the left.

The second incredible thing in Shanghai is the Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, and in particular what guys over here call Pharma Valley (I guess in a reference to the very notorious Silicon Valley in CA, US) Pharma Valley is a huge sprawl of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies which have sprung up in Pudong in the last 5 years. It takes close on half an hour to cross it in a taxi and, although I have heard different estimates, it would appear that there are between 100,000 and 250,000 chemists and biologists currently working in and around it. For anyone working in this industry, this is a mind boggling number. Of course, for me, marketing software desktop licenses, this is a sleep depriving piece of information! It is in any case fascinating and I am very lucky to have seen it and happy to have visited it. I think anyone working in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries should do so sometime. The visit is so exciting, that I was inspired to start learning Mandarin after last time (I am still working on that, although with very little time which makes progress frustratingly slow)

The good news for Mestrelab is that we already have some customers in Pharma Valley, people like Alputon Inc. and Hutchison MediPharma Limited, as well as a number of Chinese universities (University of Tsinghua, South China Botanic Garden, Institute of Materia Medica Beijing, National Chiao Tung University, Beijing Institute of Chemistry, Fudan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Defence Medical Center) who are the early adopters of our software. After this visit, I hope to have many more. This week I am going to Shanghai and Beijing, as well as Qingdao. Chen is staying over for nearly a month, and I am sure he will make further progress (for one thing, his Chinese is much better than mine!). We also now have a distribution company working with us, Qingdao Tenlong Weibo Technology Company Ltd. These guys are very professional and hard working, and they will be developing the business for us in China, as they already have a very strong presence in the Chinese chemical R&D market. Qingdao is famous for its beer and its beaches, but maybe there will soon another reason!

I am going to be here for a week, after which I cross the World to go to Brazil (more on that on oncoming posts). I hope to post some photos of the city later in the week and, hopefully, some news on business progress. I may even come up with a little ‘my guide to Shanghai’ assuming I get time to find some good places to visit, eat, drink (not necessarily in that order).

Santi Trips and business development business development, China, Mestrelab in China, Mnova en China No comments Leave a comment

Visit to eMolecules

From left to right, Craig James (eMolecules), Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and Santi Dominguez (Mestrelab) in Del Mar, by the eMolecules office. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

So, as part of our trip to California a few weeks ago, immediately prior to the ENC, we also visited eMolecules. I omitted this on that previous post to avoid overloading it, and also because I wanted to allow some more room to discuss what these guys are doing (in our opinion, extremely well).

Of course, the first great thing about visiting eMolecules is their location, in Del Mar, CA. This is a beautiful area just North of San Diego, with a spectacular beach. The eMolecules office as well as Klaus’ house enjoy stunning views. Combine this with the great restaurant and bar offer in Del Mar and we were obviously very happy there.
However, the most pleasing thing was meeting with the eMolecules team and hearing of the great progress eMolecules are making. Their star Cheminformatics product, eMolecules Plus, is now gaining excellent acceptance in the biotech and pharma industries, with several high profile adopters (not sure I am allowed to mention them here, so I will not, you could probably find them in the eMolecules web site somewhere, but some of them really are major players). If the Cheminformatics guys in your organization are not using eMolecules Plus, you should send them to the eMolecules Plus product page to take a look. They could find it very interesting.

The other great bit of news is that eMolecules is really succeeding at creating a great ecommerce solution for people buying screening blocks. They now allow you access to all major screening block suppliers in a ‘one-stop’ screening blocks e-commerce interface (I cannot link a demo here as it is not quite ready, we show a late alpha and it is very impressive. I will let you know as soon as it is available) which you can combine with many of the listing and searching features in eMolecules and eMolecules Plus to save outrageous amounts of time and effort in the procurement of screening blocks. I know one of their customers just managed to place an order for over 3,500 different compounds in one single process, and anyone who has tried to purchase a large variety of screening blocks in the past will know how useful this is. I believe they saved over a man-month!!! Now, what would you, or I, do with one extra month?. So, once again, I would point the people who buy screening blocks at your organization in the direction of the eMolecules ecommerce system – at this point, what they need to do is to contact Niko directly (niko@emolecules.com) as the general demo site is not quite up and running as explained above. Your purchasing guys will be forever in your debt, and you will be able to claim the favour some time later, I am sure!

From left to right Craig James (eMolecules), Carlos Cobas (Mestrelab) & Rashmi Mistry (eMolecules & Modgraph) and, behind them, the Pacific Ocean. Click on the photo to see the whole photo gallery

Finally, and not really related, we also heard while we were there that Niko just got a paper accepted in Science! Now, that is something you don’t hear from people everyday, so congratulations to Niko, these guys make good software but also do good science!

Santi Mestrelab cheminformatics, eMolecules, eMolecules Plus, partners, screening blocks No 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

I have been meaning to post this blog for a few days, but it has been a crazy couple of weeks. Carlos was more diligent than me, and you can read his post on the subject on his blog, already over one week old.

JCIM has recently published a review of Mnova NMR written by Dr. Tim Claridge, of Oxford University. We are delighted with this review, as we regard Tim as one of the most credible and reputable reviewers we could have had for the software, both in his position as Director of NMR Spectroscopy at the Organic Chemistry Department and as author of High-Resolution NMR Techniques in Organic Chemistry, an NMR educational book widely used by Universities worldwide and also widely used by the Mestrelab team (available from Amazon here, just in case you don’t have a copy yet).

We take our work on Mnova NMR very seriously, and are proud of it, and having it reviewed by such a prestigious figure is both exciting but also slightly nerve wracking, a bit reminiscent of graduation exams (do you remember when you took those?). We could not have been more delighted with Tim’s conclusions, which you can read in the full article, and of which I quote just one excerpt:

‘In conclusion, I would recommend highly this software to any chemist or spectroscopist seeking a desktop package for the analysis of 1D and 2D NMR data sets. Its attractive and intuitive graphical interface combined with some smart functionality will suit less experienced users, while dedicated spectroscopists will also be impressed with the more advanced functionality it contains.’

We are obviously very happy with this endorsement, and very proud of it, and this is the reason why we are shouting about it everywhere (our blogs, website, emails and conversations with anyone who cares to listen). I want to thank JCIM for their interest in Mnova and Tim for the work he has obviously put into the review. Also congratulations to Carlos, Nikolay and our whole development team for the first part of a job well done (lots to do yet!).

BTW, if you have not tried the software yet and you would like to do so, you can download version 5.3.1 from the Mnova download page.

Santi Reviews and Publications Mnova, Review No comments Leave a comment

So, I guess, in these dates, we should start with a post about ACS and ENC, both conferences we have been to in the last 2-3 weeks.

However, I did not go to ACS, so I am not going to post about that, I will leave that to Chen if he wants to write something. As for ENC, as ever, this was a great conference, at a great location (Asilomar, if you haven’t made it there yet, make sure you do, what a place!), with a great scientific program (take a look at it here) and a fantastic ‘non-scientific’ program, as ever. For our team there (Carlos Cobas, Chen Peng, Stan Sykora and myself), there were a few highlights:

Firstly, on Sunday 29th of March, our Mestrelab User Meeting, held in the afternoon at Viewpoint East. The User Meeting was attended by around 30 people (you know who you are and many thanks for supporting us), which was our room capacity, and included sessions on some of the latest functionalities in Mnova 5.3.1, some works in progress (GSD, automatic verification, etc., more on these later), NMR prediction (related to our NMRPredict Desktop plugin), our newly announced LC/GC/MS plugin for Mnova and Mspin. As well as thanking the attendees, I want to take the chance to thank our presenters (Stan Sykora - eByte, Jeff Seymour - Modgraph Consultants, Chen Peng - Mestrelab, David Stranz - Sierra Analytics, Armando Navarro - University of Vigo). It is always very difficult to trade the golf course, beaches and great walks of Pacific Grove for a software presentation, so we were delighted to see anybody at all there (although we had a sneaky hope nobody would make it and we could therefore go to the beach or the golf course ourselves!). If you would like to download the presentations, follow this link.

Even before that, Yosemite! Carlos and I had a great day there on Saturday 28th. I had never really stopped to think long enough about the significance of the initiatives by the US governments of Andrew Jackson (Hot Springs, AK) and Abraham Lincoln (Yosemite, in fact, amongst others) in the XIX century to protect areas of outstanding natural beauty and turn them into the first national parks. Looking out onto Yosemite Valley, with Merced River at the bottom and Half Dome and El Gran Capitan in front of us, you really have to feel grateful for the vision of these governments who decided ‘average man’ should not be allowed to run amok in these areas, and that they should be protected from normal exploitation.

Within the scientific program of ENC, a couple of highlights, at least for me, were the sessions on past and future. They were very full, and it was very hot perched at the very back of the Auditorium, but they were well worth it, both for the insights into what NMR and the ENC used to be like, and into what NMR (and by extension the ENC) may be like in future. It is always dangerous and troublesome to commit to highlighting some speakers, so I will ;-). Ray Freeman and Richard Ernst were my favourites, always a great pleasure to hear them talk and to be privy to their knowledge and experience, but also their wit (Lord Chesterfield said, and I quote: ‘ Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves’. Well, I love it, specially in others - although I don’t mind mine when it appears in rare occasions!). Many others were also great, and both sessions were hugely interesting. Congratulations to the ENC Committee for putting these two sessions together.

Of course, the hospitality suites, with their well developed entertainment themes: Norell and its live music, always excellent, JEOL with the sushi and sake, Varian, Bruker and, as always, that last port for strugglers, Isotec/Spectra Stable Isotopes and their excellent hospitality at Sanderling, were some of us congregated at the end of the night (once again, you know who you are, but don’t worry, I am not mentioning any names. Hope to see you there again next time!). And if you did not get to Sanderling, you haven’t fully been to ENC, but there is always the next ENC, we expect to see you there!. There were also a few ‘after hours’ parties, which kept some of us going well into the morning, another excellent ENC tradition! No details, I am afraid, I am not brave enough!

Still on the subject of hospitality suites, we were at Curlew this year (kind of promotion from Forest Lodge), and we had excellent traffic, I reckon that over 250 people came through the suite during the conference, thank you very much to all of you! In some ways, we were not ready for the location or for the traffic, so we did not have any interesting entertainment, apart from, of course, us and our software, Mnova, which we were heavily demoing all week, and which is not only beautiful but also entertaining in its own right ;-). If you have not seen Mnova yet, you can download it from here. For next time, we are open to any ideas on what we should be doing with the suite, if you have something in mind, which is feasible and not too indecorous, let us know by posting a comment here!

Another highlight was the meeting of the Overseas Chinese Magnetic Resonance Association, held at Surf & Sand. At this event, the new web site for the association was presented. This website is sponsored by Mestrelab, and has been developed by the guys in our company, so this was a subject close to our heart and we were very pleased to see that the meeting was very well attended. If you would like to know more about OCMRA, visit their website here.

So, another fantastic ENC. The Mestrelab team had a great time there, and we want to thank the organizers, our users, the attendees in general, the NMR community and presidents Jackson and Lincoln for making it such a great week!

You can see a few photos of the team working???? at the suite from the Mestrelab team at ENC gallery

Santi Conferences ACS, conferences, ENC No 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