SciLink Blog

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!