Show HN: Chemical.io – Cloud-Based Lab Management Solution

Too many landing pages nowadays with too little information. Be nice to see a better list of features, screenshots, or a demo without having to sign-up.

It's been years since I've been in a chemistry lab, so I don't remember how they monitored inventory levels, but do they really just jot down amount used/remaining for each chemical? If that's the case, then I can certainly see value in the app.

Just brainstorming, how feasible would it be to detect fluid levels/quantities using the phone's camera? A chemist can simply snap a photo of a vile and the rest is automagically taken care of. Or maybe you could at some point sell a line of viles/beakers/flasks/etc with level markers, volume indicators, and chemical labels that would work with your app.

A little design feedback: I would show the product on the homepage. Right now you're just selling to me with words. And the weight of that typeface being used for that sub-header is really light. This is how it's rendering in Safari - http://i.imgur.com/izWWUbZ.png

We use Quartzy right now, but if you can make the Facilities management (ie. scheduling time on an FPLC) better (which, wouldn't be too hard) and embeddable / supporting CalDav/CardDav I would use this.

I have an Excel sheet of all our chemicals (~500+ reagents), is there a way for me to upload this? The data is fairly well ordered with the below headers

   Chemical Description	Bldg	Room	#Units	Qty.	Unit	CAS #	Lot #	Expiration	Vendor	Storage_Location	Comments	Container	Physical State	Max on Hand	Chemical Formula	Molecular Weight	PO #	Vendor Catalog #	EHSA Chemical #	Order Date	Open Date	Receipt Date	Contact	Contact Phone	PI Code

I'm sitting in a chemistry lab right now, and this is pretty sorely lacking in anything that would make it remotely useful to a small academic lab, much less a larger corporate lab. The experimental write-up section is a joke, especially if you're going to make people pay for it. The fact that grams and milliliters are the only options when inputting a chemical tells me you have no idea what you're doing, and the idea that chemists are going to log in and enter the amount they took out of a bottle every time they weigh something out is ludicrous.

Interesting that they launched first on Android. I wonder if that's because lab managers are expected to use their own phones, and they'll likely have Androids. Or, maybe labs purchase phones for this purpose, and Androids are cheaper. Or, maybe the dev has an Android phone and that's what he or she knows.

I literally know nothing about this space... but I'm aware of Quartzy ( http://www.quartzy.com/ ) which I think competes similarly.

Care to do a competitive analysis with them?

Definitely going in the right direction, I remember doing inventory endlessly in an inorg lab.

It would be nice to have a little more info about the products, but I think this is a space that could do with some innovation.

Good job.

Looking really good. Just a minor, minor detail. On your signup page, the page title reads "Chemilog|Login" which I assume is a legacy name...

Nice, just what I was looking for. Now I don't have to keep any orders in Excel or similar. Are you planning to add any export features?

20 euro/month seems way cheap. 20 euro/month for 24/7 technical support seems crazy.

Do you have a demo of the "Experiment Writeup Functionality"?

Just a heads up, firefox lists the website as a security threat.

We're on the sales side of chemicals, drop me an email!

You really should change re-agents to reagents.