Author: Jan Reichelt

Mendeley at LeWeb '09

Jan Reichelt4 Comments

le web 09

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, and even Royalty** will be there! The high-profile judges include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, 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 who knows if we will be lucky enough again to follow up on our success of Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009” and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At least it will be a lot of fun!
Oh là là!

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!

Channel 4 reports on Mendeley

Jan Reichelt1 Comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It has been described as internet dating for inventors” – well, here at Mendeley we didn’t know that we were doing this kind of stuff, but in any case it’s fantastic news that yesterday Channel 4 News, one of UK’s leading news channels, reported about Mendeley! The six minute report names James Dyson, probably Britain’s most famous inventor, and Mendeley as exemplary innovators in UK’s recovering economy.
Besides showing Mendeley in our “tiny office in London” (oh well, start-up life…), Channel 4 News also interviewed Cameron Neylon in front of his mega-super-duper-luxurious four monitor set-up. Thanks Cameron for the nice quotes!
Here’s the write-up and below you will find the video.

“It has been described as internet dating for inventors” – well, here at Mendeley we didn’t know that we were doing this kind of stuff, but in any case it’s fantastic news that yesterday Benjamin Cohen from Channel 4 News, one of the UK’s leading news channels, reported on Mendeley! The three minute report names James Dyson, probably Britain’s most famous inventor, and Mendeley as exemplary innovators in the UK’s recovering economy.

Besides showing Mendeley in our “tiny office in London” (oh well, start-up life…), Channel 4 News also interviewed Dr. Cameron Neylon, Molecular Biologist at the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, and an Open Science advocate, in front of his mega-super-duper-luxurious four monitor set-up. Thanks Cameron for the nice quotes!

Here’s the write-up, the link to the video, and below you will find the video embedded.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1184614595

Update for "About us" and "Support"

Jan Reichelt

If you haven’t seen it yet, go and have a look – we’ve updated Mendeley.com! We’ve created two new sections in which we hope to give you a bit more information about us and to provide better support for the fast-growing Mendeley community.

About Us

Here you can learn more about Mendeley and all the magnificient people who are helping build it. And this doesn’t even include our Community Liaisons, interns, Lead Users, and all the other supporters we have world-wide.

We’ve also created a little showcase to display the awards we’ve won recently (yeah, reasonably proud of it… but we have to say that this is also due to all of your incredibly helpful user feedback which just makes Mendeley better with every release!). As you can also see in this section, many large universities have either recommended or linked to us, and we’ve already had many good reviews talking about Mendeley.

As you may also remember, we recently published some teaching materials. Hopefully our new “Spread the word” section is an even easier way for you to access these now. Let us know if this is helpful for you and how we can further improve this!

Support

In our new support section we help you to get started with Mendeley. You will also find our FAQ has been slightly redesigned. To get in touch with our support team (the “Stability Liberation Front” & “Mean to Bugs, Kind to Ponies” guys) to report a bug or to request a feature, visit our feedback forum. Watch out though, we are currently planning to set up a more extensive and detailed online manual for Mendeley. This manual will be wiki based too, so you can also become active and share your hints! Phew… ah, and the next release is also not far away…

Enjoy the new pages!

Our "The Guardian" week

Jan Reichelt

Just some good news to finish off a week full of work: Today Vic Keegan, a technology journalist veteran from The Guardian, visited Mendeley’s headquarters in Clerkenwell and did an interview with Victor and me. For us, that capped a completely surprising “The Guardian” week – this is how things happened:

MiniBar follow-up

After seeing us present at MiniBar, Vic wrote some very nice words about Mendeley in his weekly technology column:

“Standing out among a slew of interesting five-minute pitches was mendeley.com, billed as an iTunes for scientific research papers, which again prompted the ultimate compliment – why didn’t someone think of that before? You can manage your own research papers from any computer and search others and link up with other researchers. No wonder that some of the world’s major universities have already signed up. The founders point out that public research papers reflect the science of two years ago, and if that gap could be cut down it could have a big impact on economic growth.”

MiniBar was a great event anyway, but such feedback is the icing on the cake!

Update – here is another Guardian article about Mendeley: “How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough”

Mendeley on #6 of top 100 tech media companies

Even more thrillingly, on the 7th of September Mendeley appeared on #6 in the list of the Top 100 Tech Media Companies, put together by The Guardian and Europe Unlimited. To celebrate, we took the whole team to a very nice Korean restaurant for dinner, and a pub for one, two, three… drinks afterwards (you can see some pictures in our photostream on Flickr). We’re going to present Mendeley at the TMI event on 1st October at 11am – so come by and say hi (if you want to drop by before, use our Open Office Friday next week)!

guardian

Interview with Vic Keegan / The Guardian

And then today, to finish off our “The Guardian” week, Vic did the following interview with us (listen here or below) – gosh, it sounds too strange to hear yourself talking! All in all a very intense but rewarding week – now I’m looking forward to the weekend!

http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf

By popular demand: teaching materials

Jan Reichelt2 Comments

Since many of you have asked for it (and because we thought it was a good idea anyway), we’ve increased our efforts in developing support and documentation materials for Mendeley. For example, some users (especially librarians) wanted to give a presentation about Mendeley at their institution, or asked for some written documentation about how to use Mendeley.

Currently, we are working on both a new support section and on some updated about pages. Today however, as a little appetizer, we proudly present our new and fresh teaching materials! You can use them to learn more about Mendeley’s features, or you can use them to spread the word about Mendeley by giving a presentation at your institution or department/lab by simply forwarding the materials to your colleagues, other researchers, and students.

  • Getting Started Guide: The Getting Started Guide shows you how to use Mendeley’s basic features. It is also bundled together with each Mendeley Desktop installation. You can download the document here (size: 1 MB).
  • Teaching Presentation: You can spread the word about Mendeley at your institution using our Teaching Presentation (feel free to adapt the presentation to your needs). It shows both Mendeley’s vision and how to use the features of Mendeley Desktop and Web. Get the Adobe PDF (size: 4 MB) or the Powerpoint PPT (size: 22 MB) file.
  • Mendeley Fact Sheet: For a quick overview of Mendeley’s features, have a look at our Fact Sheet. On just two pages, it describes what Mendeley is, and it’s easy to forward. You can download the Fact Sheet here (size: 2 MB).
  • Mendeley Poster: Finally, didn’t you dream of having a Mendeley poster next to your Albert Einstein one? Here it is, put it on your wall or the notice board of your university. Enjoy it here (A4, size: 0.5 MB) or download the larger one (A3, size: 1 MB).

Soon, you’ll also be able to download these teaching materials from our updated web pages. A big thank you to Aladin, one of our great Mendeley interns, and Ricardo, one of our community liaisons!

Mendeley Web now supports COinS

Jan Reichelt3 Comments

As one of the many requested features from our feedback page, Mendeley Web now supports COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is an open and easy to use specification for publishing OpenURL bibliographic metadata in HTML. On web pages, embedded COinS can be read and processed by applications.

Also Mendeley’s Web Importer can now identify COinS embedded on other websites. This information can then be easily imported into your Mendeley research library. In addition, a COinS section is embedded in each of our article pages. This means that other bookmarklets can extract and process the information from Mendeley’s article pages.

Addendum: COinS are not only embedded in article pages but also in profile pages (own publications list) and in public collection pages.

CiteULike and Mendeley collaborate – it’s live!

Jan Reichelt5 Comments

Roughly three and a half months after our announcement that we would plan to collaborate with CiteULike it’s even better news to announce that the first step is live – Mendeley users can now access their CiteULike data from within Mendeley. As we said in our previous blog post,

Your CiteULike account will show up as a “Document Group” in our Mendeley Desktop software, thus making your CiteULike metadata available to you in a desktop interface – from where you can manage them offline or insert citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word, for example.

Follow these steps to activate the integration of CiteULike with Mendeley:

  • On your settings page, scroll to the bottom and enter your CiteULike username. Then click OK, and allow any pop-up blocking messages displayed by your browser — if any.
  • You will be taken to an activation message on CiteULike’s site — confirm this action.
  • This will take you to your Edit Profile page with a check-box displayed next to Enable Mendeley. You will find this at the bottom of the form, highlighted. Click Update Profile to save this.
  • You will now see your CiteULike profile page. Don’t worry if you don’t see any confirmation — this is normal. The synchronization is now set up successfully.

You can enable, or disable, Mendeley synchronization by going to your Edit Profile page on CiteULike, and checking, or unchecking, the check-box labelled Enable Mendeley. If you don’t login to Mendeley once every 30 days, this sync will be disabled. You can re-enable it by re-checking this box.

This is obviously just a first step – together with the guys at CiteULike we are now working on a two-way synchronization. Our reference manager Mendeley Desktop now already offers a wide selection of import/export options (plus a Web Importer to grab citations off the web), and if you have any additional suggestions or comments, have your say on our feedback page.

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Announcing Science Online London 2009 at the Royal Institution

Jan Reichelt5 Comments

solologoFollowing last year’s successful “Science Blogging 2008” conference in London (see Victor’s blog post), we are happy to announce a slightly rebranded “Science Online London” as this year’s follow-up conference. The event will take place 22 August 2009 at the Royal Institution, London, and is co-hosted by Nature Network, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Mendeley. To accomodate for a wider range of topics (i.e. not only science blogging), we changed the name to “Science Online London”, and we encourage you to suggest topics for the programme.

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

As stated on the Science Online London webpage, “Topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifies and measuring the impact of research.” Subscribe to the newsletter, send us your ideas – and let us know if you want to sponsor the conference. We’re all very much looking forward to meeting you at the Royal Institution on 22 August!

Mendeley among the 20 finalists of Plugg.eu's European Startup competition

Jan Reichelt1 Comment

And again some great news – Mendeley is among the 20 finalists of Plugg.eu’s European startup competition, organized by TechCrunch writer Robin Wauters (TechCrunch coverage here)! In total, 133 companies applied, with a jury of VCs and entrepreneurs selecting the finalists. The whole event sounds really promising, with a number of interesting speakers from Google, Sun, Dopplr, Tapulous, or Atlas Ventures.

plugg-banner

It’s actually the first startup competition in which we’ve participated! Also, it’s nice to see the European startup scene growing further, and I’m looking forward to meeting the other entrepreneurs. So we’ll hop over to Brussels next week and try to give our best in the planned elevator pitch presentation. If you will be there as well, it would be great to meet you!

Addition from Victor:

And I’m really excited about visiting Brussels again… I spent a few very happy months there in 2002 as an Erasmus student at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. I lived in Rue Edith Cavell in Uccle, close to the Bois de la Cambre with its pretty parks and lakes. I mostly spent my time with a polyglot bunch of French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and Danish exchange students, who would meet almost every night at Le Tavernier or one of the cafés on Place Saint-Géry… from where we’d go for midnight french fries avec sauce piri-piri at the stall behind La Bourse. Good times!

Mendeley at night

Jan Reichelt

The other day, whilst Victor went to his meditation class (still awaiting some insights into that, Victor…), Paul and I had a “nice and cozy” evening break in the office. We were having a Tesco dinner (the one who first correctly guesses at least three of the foodstuffs we had will get ten free beta invites) and watched some news on a magnificient 12,1” laptop display, and I wanted to share some of those impressions with you. It’s really not much to write home about, but it’s our start-up life…