Great news! We’ve been picked by Chinwag and the UKTI to don our cowboy boots and Stetson hat before jetting off to the great Lone Star State on a Digital Mission.

“39 of the UK’s leading digital companies have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. [...] The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, journalists and industry pundits to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.”

(You can find the full list of participating companies here.)

There are some great presentations in the line-up at SXSWi, some of the ones we’ll be looking out for include: Can the Real-Time Web be Realized?; Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change and Is The Brain The Ultimate Computer Interface?

We also hope to swot up on doing business in the US (not by watching re-runs of Dallas) but attending some special events and seminars set up for tech entrepreneurs. SXSWi brings together some of the brightest minds in the tech world and a line up of special programs showcasing websites, video games and start-up ideas. If you are planning to attend, let us know and we’ll be happy to hook up.

A big thanks to Digital Mission for making it possible and we’re looking forward to a great event!

Upload Space

When we first cleared out some room on our servers to allow you to upload PDFs to your private Mendeley Web account, we spared 500 MB per person, given that PDFs are usually around 1-2 MB, this  enables you to store 250-500 PDF documents online. In response to requests (or should we say popular demand?) as well as bulging research collections, we will increase the storage space as part of a premium package in early 2010 (we are also working on more detailed stats, a recommendation engine and some other nice features).

For the growing number of people who really can’t wait that long (hats off to those of you who have already maxed out your accounts!), please write to support@mendeley.com with a request for extra space and we’ll be happy to pass out some freebies. It will be a temporary upgrade but you won’t have to switch to a premium subscription later. Once the premium features are in place and if you choose not to upgrade, you won’t be able to add any further documents to your web account (if it is larger than 500 MB), but your data will still be accessible and safe.

Shared Collections

Taking a similar approach with shared collections – which are currently limited to ten people – we quickly found requests rolling in for collections of a much larger size, mainly for departments and labs. So, we will raise the number of people who can access a shared collection as part of a premium package and in turn make the limits flexible. Again, write to support@mendeley.com if you need more shared collection slots within your department, lab, or research group. Send us your username (e-mail address), the name of the collection, and the number of people you would like to collaborate with and we can expand your shared collection to make it a bit more sociable for the festive season.

(Image by CwThomas43)

You’ve got some spare time this Wednesday and Thursday? Then come to beautiful Paris, do some Christmas shopping, and meet us at LeWeb ’09. Yes, great news: Mendeley is one of the 16 finalists and we are demoing Mendeley on Wednesday (and if we make it into the final-final then also on Thursday).

What is LeWeb ’09? It’s one of the biggest (if not the biggest) start-up competition for Europe’s start-ups to present their products and technologies to some of the most influential players in the market, including Royalty! The list of speakers is truly impressive, and the high-profile judges include entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and representatives from companies such as Sun and Microsoft.

Besides having the chance to present Mendeley and show what we are up to, it will be a great event to mingle with other companies and founders and share start-up experiences (and maybe get some free sandwiches).

And who knows, maybe we will be lucky enough to follow up on our success at Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009″ and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At the very least, it will be a lot of fun! Oh là là!

In piphilology, one hundred thousand is the current world record for the number of digits of pi memorized by a human being (well, that’s according to Wikipedia). So, as happy as we are at Mendeley to have 100,000 users onboard, we regret to say that it is now beyond our limits for us to remember every single user on our site (but good to see that you keep on writing and helping to improve Mendeley). In the same week we crossed a second milestone of 8 million research articles uploaded to our database in less than a year. Currently Mendeley’s article database continues to expand as researchers, students and scientists from around the world upload, collaborate and share their research using Mendeley. In April 2009 we reached the 1 million article mark, which means the number of articles in our database has doubled in size every ten to twelve weeks. To give a little context: the world’s largest online research database by Thomson Reuters took 49 years to reach 40 million articles.

A big thank you to Techcrunch’s Sean O’Hear who wrote: “Mendeley could be the largest online research paper database by early 2010″ and James Glick from The Next Web who wrote: “Mendeley ‘the last.fm of research’ hits new heights”.

And congratulations to our growing community of users!

Image by Jorel314

Hello – I’d like to give you a quick update on Mendeley Desktop as we work our way towards a ’1.0′ release.  We’ve been focusing on stability, making Mendeley easier to use and have improved collaborative working amongst other issues.  To get feedback on our work in progress, we publish ‘development preview’ versions every few weeks which contain features and bug fixes that will appear in the next official release.  If you would like to have an early look at what will be in the next version of Mendeley Desktop, you can download the latest development preview which is available on all platforms.  We would greatly appreciate any feedback, good or bad, that you have.  You can contact us about development releases by emailing support-dev@mendeley.com. Alternatively, you can use our feedback forums at http://feedback.mendeley.com (please mention which version you are using).

These preview releases have not been tested as carefully as our official releases, so we advise users to backup their databases before trying out development preview versions of the client using Help -> Create Backup… in Mendeley Desktop.

Highlights since the current official release (0.9.4.1):

• User interface improvements (file-type specific icons for attachments, clearer wording in various messages, clearer progress information whilst the desktop is syncing with Mendeley Web, more keyboard shortcuts, fixed a problem where the right-hand Document Details pane could be hidden and it was not obvious how to show it again)
• Improved support for concurrent updating of document details by users in shared groups.  Tags and keywords changes are now merged correctly and conflict resolution is improved.
• Importer improvements.  File attachments are now imported from EndNote XML files, more document types and fields are supported by the Bibtex and RIS importers.  Mendeley is now able to guess the type of a file to import if it lacks the appropriate extension.
• The full text of HTML attachments is now searchable.
• Improved the stability of the file organiser and search features.
• Added support for citation disambiguation and super/subscript citations in the Word and OpenOffice.org plugins
• Faster bibliography generation and citation insertion in Word and OpenOffice.org.
• Many bug fixes and minor tweaks

For a complete list of changes since the previous development release and since the current stable release please see our release notes page.

Feedback and Support

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.

I was doing some research to see which universities have the most Mendeley users, when I thought it might be fun to see how these universities have grown day by day, over the last three months. The chart below shows just that: the top 10 Mendeley universities, and the growth in user base in each of these from August 1st to November 1st.

Watch out Stanford! Cambridge is right behind you…