jayzee

It is not only an East coast thing.

I met with the folks organizing Band of Angels in the valley and after multiple meetings and phone-calls they told me that we had been selected to present at their event. It was free to pitch apparently but dinner was $80.

I was tempted to turn down dinner and offer to bring my subway sandwich.

I didn't end up going... for all the reasons patio11 points out.

I canceled my subscription. Not because of the price increase but the cavalier manner in which the increase was communicated. The presumptuous email re: the increase really pissed me off. It has also made more more careful with communications with our user-base.

Glad that they took away the bottled water. It is still H20 from the water fountain.

thanks for putting us on your list! We think we are on to something ;)

hey Shiven, This is Jayant, a Quartzy founder. We know 100% where you are coming from. We are scientists ourselves and know the pain exactly as you are describing it. Send me an email and I would love to chat with you and tell you about our vision for Quartzy!

Cheers and congrats on defending your thesis! Jayant (jayant@quartzy.com)

Could the big companies use the patents to make investments in startups? So companies with an investment from Google/Microsoft would come under the protective umbrella. That could be a value add.

It makes sense when you look at other industries from car manufacturing to IT. In the west people moved to more and more specialized, cutting edge stuff (Tesla, developing new dbs) while the bread and butter moved to places where it was more economic. Makes sense that the trend would continue in science as well.

We use Grasshopper for our phone-service. They do a computer-transcription of voice mail by default and they send it to you by email. If you don't like the auto-transcription from the email you can have it done by humans. And 5 min later you have a more accurate one in your inbox.

Which makes me think that there are a lot of services that could benefit from human intervention. I can see that you guys are starting out in a particular space but I think that the opportunity is huge!

Thanks for the detailed response. I will keep checking you guys out and best of luck!

It was actually smart. Groupon wanted a hefty break-up $5B fee. Google refused. Groupon must have known that the deal would never pass muster at Google after real number crunching. Hence they refused. With the break-up fee they would have still made like bandits.

looks good but I am not sure why I would use this more than I would use say Google Scholar?

Also could you explain with an example perhaps how your search results would trump Google Scholar? Such an example of on the home page would help people understand the value proposition.

My Plan B: Only one parameter is changed, everything else stays the same.

The parameter that is changed is how long the patent lasts. And that is determined by the pace of innovation ("number of patents / yr") being awarded in that category. The more patents in software the shorter the duration of patents in this category.

Doesn't dropbox essentially have infinite potential?

Pictures folders shared with your contacts and you have flickr etc. A shared music folder and spotify/grooveshark etc?

Basically an infrastructure company in the most elemental and violently grand sense of the word?

Sort of related/unrelated: But I had this thought about traction:

Wall Street is often blamed for encouraging short-term thinking as it is driven by results from one quarter to the next. And since incentive schemes for top employees are often connected to stock price you end up with short-term strategic thinking.

The same way I think that VCs and angel investors in startups, with their relentless focus on traction, push entrepreneurs towards a particular class of products, one that lead to dramatic growth. But that also leads to, I think, short term thinking by entrepreneurs. And so you see a lot of social photo-sharing mobile local stuff. Hockey-stick here I come.

But just as easy it was for these entrepreneurs to get dramatic growth in that space one has to think that others will come later and experience the same.

I think that actually slow-growth in a company, building barriers to entry, switching costs, relationships with players in the ecosystem might lead to more sustainable meaningful business than the ephemeral satisfaction of rapid growth.

I guess, easy come, easy go.

I do not understand this section: Here's where Mr Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures comes in. Intellectual Ventures owns a huge portfolio of patents. Quite possibly they also have some sort of patent that covers streaming music over the internet. Intellectual Ventures makes money through a sort of protection racket that helps Spotify defend themselves against companies like PacketVideo

How can Spotify use IV's patent pool defensively against PacketVideo, a patent troll when they PacketVideo doesn't do anything other than sue? The defensive aspect only comes into play against companies who have other lines of revenue that you can threaten... thoughts?

In a perverse way I think that all the recent patent law-suits and general trolling is a good thing. The more egregious the behavior and the law-suits (lodsys, IV etc) the more attention it will get from the media till finally we will do something about it. I hope that the trolls unchecked greed will be their undoing.

jugaad~=hustle

People knock Webvan around but the founder (Mick Mountz), 10 years after that debacle, founded http://www.kivasystems.com/ where instead of conveyor belts (Webvan) they use robots for managing a warehouse. Seriously cool robotics. Check out the videos on their site.

Kiva Systems has gone from strength to strength and is now used by Zappos, Wallgreens and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems)

How about algorithmically sequestering suspicious tweets? Reclaiming a tweet and making it live again would involve something like captcha and would have to be done by the person who made the original "false" tweet.

That way you are doing the scalable stuff. And you have crowd-sourced (back to the original tweeter) the burden of identifying what is real.

I am guessing people downvoted you because you just included excerpts from the article and said "superb" etc. Your comment did not add any value. Hence the downvotes.

I am not sure I like people offering to work for free. Nor of founders taking people up on this offer.

Also, I guess this explains why foursquare signs up so many seeming biz dev wins but still does not manage to generate revenue from any of these deals. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618...

Can you tell us why you balked? Market size?

I said this before in another post, but this article that I read in the New Yorker really hit home for me:

The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”

In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.

And when you are in school often you are given tasks which seem to have no discernible purpose or meaning other than perhaps to take you off your parent's hands while they go make a living.

From: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101....

For the past quarter-century, the American Medical Association and other industry groups have predicted a glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new physicians. [1]

The problem is that the supply for doctors is artificially constrained leading to better salaries for them. If anything let's have more doctors so that the salaries are in parity with engineers.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

Really good point. I have often wandered the corridors in research labs seeing equipment just lying there collecting dust. I suspect that there will be issues around selling stuff but it is something that we are definitely looking into. Once you have an engaged user base there are a few directions we could take this in.

Thanks!

We did bring out an ad in Nature a few months ago but the response was underwhelming. The thing with marketing for a startup, we have painfully discovered, is to try non-traditional approaches. Basically something that the other big companies with tons of money are not doing because they are either afraid of looking silly or would think that it would not work... Doing the expected thing doesn't work because it gets priced up to the point that it does not make financial sense.

For example, at a recent conference we had a very simple booth. Other large established companies had these giant booths that needed cranes with espresso machines and what not. The only thing we did was put out a scrabble board and gave out a Quartzy t-shirt every hour or so to the one with the largest score in that hour. We had a line of people waiting to play the game. So silly stuff like scrabble leader-board got people's attention.

btw, scrabble because Quartzy is the highest scoring opening word in Scrabble!

We are busy working on an iphone app in 3 weeks and then an android app in a month. Its the most requested feature so your wife is absolutely right that some people may not want to walk to a comp to enter this stuff. The plan is to then integrate with a company like "red laser" so you can just scan the stuff into your inventory. That would be cool!

Yup. We feel the same way. Electronic Lab Notebooks are a daunting undertaking and we decided to tackle a problem that we knew we could make a dent in the first pass.

Just to be clear, Quartzy is free for scientists to use. We want to close the gap between suppliers/manufacturers and scientists. So we are making money by hosting catalogs, running deals etc. Basically charging suppliers who have deep pockets instead of the scientists who are always strapped for resources.

hmm... Interesting. Well we basically helps groups manage their orders and inventories, in decentralized settings like research labs. We started targeting life-science researchers, given our background, but we have seen some interesting uptake in unexpected verticals.

For example, the Traffic Directorate for the City of London is using Quartzy for managing their assets. So we decided to go with more general copy but it is important to be on message and we will tweak it to be more clear about who could benefit.