Month: August 2008

Putting the roof terrace to good use

victorhenning

We had comparatively nice weather (i.e., it didn’t rain) in London yesterday – so we seized the chance and organised a Mendeley team BBQ on the roof terrace of our office! Luckily for us, we didn’t set the building on fire, and no one fell off the roof. Here are some impressions:

Paul being happy while stealing plants for decoration:

Paul becoming even happier and pointing at things:

Smoke signals:

Pankaj, Steve and Falk discussing physics and metaphysics:

More happy Paul:

Julia, Aaron, Ben and Britton Street:

Ben apparently not moving as much as the others:

Fin!

And just in case you’re thinking, “these kids should do less BBQs and more software updates”, we’ve got you covered! Tomorrow we’ll release Mendeley Desktop beta version 0.5.8 with plenty of bugfixes, speed and stability improvements. Happy Paul will blog about it in more detail.

A new Knight joins Mendeley's round table

Paul Foeckler

We are proud to introduce Robert Knight – yet another boost to our development team. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the company of a certain other knight who said “Ni” (and from whom we rented our previous office):

Still, we think Robert is a much better fit to our team. Ni!

——

Robert Knight joins Mendeley as a software engineer working on Mendeley Desktop. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in June 2008. In his spare time, Robert is a contributor to the KDE project and develops the Konsole terminal. In the past he also wrote the BlueIDE development environment for DarkBASIC and contributed to KSpread.

PRESS RELEASE: Research-Sharing Start-Up Mendeley Launches with Support of Last.fm Chairman and Skype's Former Founding Engineers

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2008

Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The founders’ vision to create a “Last.fm for research” excited Skype’s former founding engineers, who became investors, and former Last.fm executive chairman Stefan Glänzer, who is now executive chairman of the company.

London, UK – When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”

After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype, who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita through their investment fund ASI. Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”

About Mendeley: Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The company was founded in 2007 by Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt and is based in London, UK.

Screenshot 1: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers.

Screenshot 2: Mendeley Web lets researchers access their papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded scholars and academics.

For further information contact Victor Henning (victor.henning@mendeley.com), Tel: +44-207-2531595, or visit http://www.mendeley.com.
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Broken keyboard = hilarious dialogue

victorhenning

Today in our web developer Skype chat: Paul, Falk (brother-in-law of Paul) and Pankaj (freelance database expert).

Paul Föckler, 10:46am: I added Pankaj to our web chat
Falk Kühnel, 10:46am: hiankaj
Falk Kühnel, 10:47am: damn, my eybor is bron i guess

Cracks me up!

The long night of bugfixing and other mysterious phenomena

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Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. I won’t be able to travel to the AMA Summer Conference. At this time tomorrow, I should have been at the beach of San Diego with Michael and Thorsten and a nice cold beer, but it was not to be. My cough from the viral infection hasn’t completely disappeared yet, and a weeks’ travel to California would have worsened it again… what a major bummer!

However, after a month of working from home, I have returned to the office. And as promised earlier, here’s a brief guided photo tour:

Exihibit A shows a room full of software engineers.  They occupy the west wing. They’re all so talented that they have little halos around their heads, but you can’t see them in this picture due to the backlight from the window. True story!

Exhibit B: The east wing. This is where we non-software engineers gather (notice the puny monitors and machines).

Our meeting room at lunchtime. Paul’s arm stretches out inconspicously, stealing someone’s food (or so I presume).

Our kitchen. Jan.. trying to sell me a coffee machine?!

Me in my corner, trying to take a break by hiding behind a book. Fittingly, it’s titled “Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness“. Incredibly fascinating stuff! I’ll probably write about it on this blog later.

Outside our windows, enveloping darkness has settled in, and thus the long night of bugfixing has begun. I have witnessed a mysterious phenomenon: After dark, wherever large groups of software engineers congregate, large quantities of pizza boxes spontaneously materialize out of thin air.