SciLink Blog

Our website was updated last night with some exciting new features, changes to the dashboard and general performance enhancements. We’ve also fixed a whole lot of bugs and improved the registration workflow per your feedback.

Improvements:

Profile:

To start, we have completely revamped the profile page, chunking it into small bite sized sections in order to streamline the profile management process. We used over 300 pieces of feedback on that section to inform us of your needs and believe we have delivered a tool that will make filling in your profile faster and easier than ever. Here’s a look at the new profile page.

Claiming your articles has never been easier either. We completely reworked this section of the website and have increased the frequency at which we update our publication databases. Expect to see more exciting improvements and connections to the literature in upcoming releases.

Dashboard:

We have updated the dashboard with a new “news from around the web section” to give you a one stop shop for all your scientific, technical and medical news. We’ll be bringing you news and information from partner sites who will provide exclusive access to invaluable and timely content. We also updated the dashboard with a new 3 column layout which organizes things in a much more intuitive way.

New Features!

Citation Manager:

The SciLink team has been working on a citation manager in stealth mode and are finally ready to release it to you. We are extremely proud to provide you a delicious style citation manager specifically made for scientific citation management. This tool is experimental but in a very usable state. Like delicious, citeulike, connotea and others, SciLink’s citation manager allows you to install a small bit of javascript to post interesting links to your account. What’s even better, is that our manager can recognize whether a you have posted an article and will find and retrieve that article from the web! Finally, you can tag, take notes and share your bookmarks with colleagues. Expect to see even more interesting uses of this tool and small tutorials from us soon.

Profile Widgets and Tree Of Science in syndication:

We have actually allowed users to syndicate their profile since day 1 but did not make this functionality public until today. Take a look at the right side of this blog and you will see a blue box with a brief sketch about me in it. This is the new SciLink profile widget and the admission that SciLink is a full blown development platform! What does this mean to you? If you have a blog, website, wiki etc. that you would like to include your SciLink information all you’ll need to do is drop a small bit of javascript into your page and SciLink will render that information for you. If you are a developer, you can call a SciLink URL and get the information as a JSON object. Look for SciLink widget code that you can place on your own website on the profile section of SciLink in about 1 week.

Tree Of Science:

Want to put the TOS on your own website? Now you can! Again, we’ll be posting details on the SciLink profile page in another week.

Developers: As I wrote before, SciLink is not just a cool website to represent yourself as a scientific professional it’s also a full blown development environment. We will be launching a developers section of the site in 2 weeks with developer documentation, code examples and short demoes of what SciLink can do today. We’re really excited about the possibilities here and can’t wait to engage with you and see what people will do with SciLink information!

Thank You!

I can’t thank you enough for taking part in the SciLink experience. More announcements are on their way. Stay Tuned!

Brian Gilman

Founder

SciLink Inc.

We apologize to those of you who are trying to play with SciLink over the holidays. We’re performing a major yearly system update and will be back up on 1/3. Happy New Year!  

Make sure you’ve got a backup plan and plenty of generators so your site will remain functioning. This is what we all learned at SciLink last December. Since then, NSTAR has delayed its part of the bargain and postponed our building’s transformer upgrade for almost 5 months now. Why do you care? Well, we can’t power back on our servers until they’ve installed, turned on and validated our new 4k amp (yes that’s a k as in 1000) transformer that powers 5 city blocks.

SciLink will be down from 11/30 - 12/3 at 7am. We will resume normal operations at 8am EST on 12/3. Thanks very much!

Brian

Cambridge, MA — November 7, 2007 — SciLink Inc., a privately held developer of professional networking tools for the scientific community, today announced the release of the first product designed to allow organizations of any size to host their own private professional network to stay in touch with personnel, customers and alumni. The company also announced that Biogen Idec, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIIB) has become SciLink’s first customer for this new service.

“Almost 29 million Americans now work remotely at least one day per month, and experts estimate that approximately 100 million U.S. workers will telecommute by 2010,” said SciLink’s founder and CEO, Brian Gilman. “As this trend continues, it becomes increasingly more difficult for corporations to manage their relationships with employees, contractors and collaborators. SciLink is designed to fill this gap by providing the tools and platform necessary for companies of any size to start managing the most important asset of a business, their people. We are proud to work with Biogen Idec as our initial customer for this science-oriented networking tool.”

“We are extremely pleased to be working with SciLink to provide Biogen Idec with these professional networking tools,” said Connie Matsui, Biogen Idec’s Executive Vice President of Knowledge and Innovation Networks. “As a global company with sites and people around the world, it becomes difficult to maintain an inventory of expertise.  SciLink will effectively enable us to improve our awareness of internal expertise and increase our ability to network and collaborate, both within Biogen Idec and with the broader scientific community.”

SciLink provides a professional networking platform specifically tailored for the scientific and medical community. Employing the SciLink platform, customers can build and visualize relationships among colleagues, collaborators, business partners, alumni and friends. By leveraging these relationships, SciLink users can find great talent, retain knowledge assets and increase productivity. SciLink’s professional networking platform is unique in a number of aspects including its ability to help users to visualize their relationships and career paths over time by using Scilink’s Tree of Science application and its scientifically oriented content push engine, named The Phoenix Suggestion Engine.

“Phoenix learns what you find interesting as you use it, and suggests content that you find important and interesting in real time,” Gilman said.

I’m extremely proud to announce that SciLink was recently featured in Bio-IT World magazine. You can read the article here . We will also be featured in a number of other magazines. I’ll keep you updated as these articles are released.

For those of you who don’t know, SciLink has been located in the Cambridge Innovation Center which is an incubator for startups for about a year now. CIC was founded in 1999 by Tim Rowe and Andy Olmsted, and were joined shortly thereafter by Geoff Mamlet. Besides the fact that Tim and Geoff are venture investors themselves, CIC allows you to meet some amazingly cool and talented people who are executing companies in various stages of the business life cycle. One of these cool people is Michael Putnam the founder of Grrasp Inc. We met Michael when he moved in next to us and we became quick friends, sharing ideas, critiquing business models etc.

Michael is executing Grrasp which is still in “stealth mode” but something I think many people will gravitate to once it launches. I’ve seen this site in pre-production and it really looks amazing. I wish him the best of luck with his venture.

Another amazingly small company with a big reach is Ambient Devices founded by a bunch of smart MIT guys. Ambient’s office is also located next to ours and, while we don’t interact a lot in person, can hear everything that is going on with this cool company. Ambient makes devices that turn complicated information sources into something more digestible. They use the term “glanceable”. What makes these guys so fascinating to me is the fact that they can have such a small office with a global market presence. Spend some time on their website, they’re doing some neat engineering that can be found in everyday household products. I like their “data casting kit” which opens up a world of opportunities for OEM’s.

Finally, to round out the company list, there’s H3.com, a company that turns a social network (your address book) into a job seeking service for you. This is a great idea and one that we at SciLink would like to use to help you find jobs in pharma, biotech and academia.

To that end, we’re looking for feedback from the community on your experience finding jobs in the sciences (both good and bad) and wondering whom amongst you have gone into the role of professional consultant. Let us know! We’re interested in hearing from you!

What a great launch week! We’ve received over 300 e-mails letting us know how much fun you’re having with SciLink! Getting that kind of feedback is deeply gratifying for us. As we said in our launch e-mail, we’re not resting on our laurels but, rather, working on yet another release of our tool for scientific networking. In the next minor release that we make you will notice small interface updates that make a world of difference in terms of integration across the site. We’ve also put in more informational links, added icons to represent different parts of the site and added better descriptions in the dashboard.  That’s not even 1/16 of the stuff we’re up too :-) More very, very soon! And, a BIG announcement with a great partner!  

We’re changing over to wordpress. Stay tuned!