It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote though.
It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.
It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of
startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one;
TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?
If ARM's business model is around licensing their IP, wouldn't getting distribution (via Apple, etc.) be considered growth? They hit profitability in a year.
"EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people."
Game studios take time because game releases used to be all or nothing. There were no second chances.
I can't comment on id, but the entire reason Valve built Steam was to speed up distribution and release updates incrementally (the previous patching system sucked). It went from idea to inception in about a year. It was also buggy as hell when it was first released. Now developers can easily release additional content and make game play changes after a game is initially launched.
There is growth indeed via Apple, Samsung and other licensees. But that's mostly within the purview of Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm etc. ARM doesn't have to scale for that growth - Apple and Samsung do - yet ARM's designs reach millions of us.
As I understand it, the whole reason Valve built Steam was to cut the publisher out of the value chain (who, to be honest, had too much power and added little value for the customer).
Incremental patching and DLCs are (extremely beneficial) side-effects.
Sorry I posted this before you were ready for it to be public! I was asking a friend about a license and he sent me your site and one thing lead to another...
It's a bit misleading to describe this as "algorithms in python". You'll find that the course is almost entirely theoretical (as it should be) and that there is a small implementation component for each problem set that just happens to be in Python.
It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.
It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.