Great news! We’ve been picked by Chinwag and the UKTI to don our cowboy boots and Stetson hat before jetting off to the great Lone Star State on a Digital Mission.

“39 of the UK’s leading digital companies have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. [...] The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, journalists and industry pundits to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.”

(You can find the full list of participating companies here.)

There are some great presentations in the line-up at SXSWi, some of the ones we’ll be looking out for include: Can the Real-Time Web be Realized?; Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change and Is The Brain The Ultimate Computer Interface?

We also hope to swot up on doing business in the US (not by watching re-runs of Dallas) but attending some special events and seminars set up for tech entrepreneurs. SXSWi brings together some of the brightest minds in the tech world and a line up of special programs showcasing websites, video games and start-up ideas. If you are planning to attend, let us know and we’ll be happy to hook up.

A big thanks to Digital Mission for making it possible and we’re looking forward to a great event!

Happy New Year 2010!

The whole Mendeley team would like to thank you for a great year in 2009! And we promise, 2010 will be a really exciting year as well, with great plans and so many cool things in the pipeline…

And as the team arrives back in dribs and drabs following their holidays, here’s one more piece of news we’d like to share with you.

Earlier in December, Jan and Victor were presenting Mendeley at LeWeb ‘09 in Paris, and the guys over at intruders.tv took the opportunity to interview them on the latest developments at Mendeley:

Last Friday we finally moved to our new office, just a few blocks down the road. That’s 4,905 sq.ft. of pure leg freedom (or 455m² to you metric people out there). Turned out the hardest part of the relocation was disentangling the team members, who have been piling up over the last few months, as Mendeley grows and grows.

Fitting all these people in our old 1,090 sq.ft. office had become quite difficult: Alright, place the new designer over here, seat the new data mining experts over there, cram in a bunch of developers in that corner and don’t forget to fill up any remaining space with interns.

Single-handedly, our very own Captain Cindy managed the whole relocation process within a mere matter of hours. Lured by corporate pizza, the whole Mendeley team pitched in highly motivated. Some ha-ha-funny guys even volunteered to carry the wireless network cables!

Our new neighbours kindly hosted a nice house warming party last Thursday. A big “Thank you” to the friendly people at IDEO and we happily accept your table soccer challenge.

Let’s hope that this time we can stay a little longer than just one and a half years.

You’re welcome to have a look:

You’ve got some spare time this Wednesday and Thursday? Then come to beautiful Paris, do some Christmas shopping, and meet us at LeWeb ‘09. Yes, great news: Mendeley is one of the 16 finalists and we are demoing Mendeley on Wednesday (and if we make it into the final-final then also on Thursday).

What is LeWeb ‘09? It’s one of the biggest (if not the biggest) start-up competition for Europe’s start-ups to present their products and technologies to some of the most influential players in the market, including Royalty! The list of speakers is truly impressive, and the high-profile judges include entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and representatives from companies such as Sun and Microsoft.

Besides having the chance to present Mendeley and show what we are up to, it will be a great event to mingle with other companies and founders and share start-up experiences (and maybe get some free sandwiches).

And who knows, maybe we will be lucky enough to follow up on our success at Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009″ and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At the very least, it will be a lot of fun! Oh là là!

Happy Thanksgiving: Around 5pm yesterday Mendeley services ceased when all of our servers went offline simultaneously; we quickly realised that something was very wrong with our connection to them and this was confirmed by our hosting provider’s customer service calling us to let us know.

The details are not completely clear at the moment however we do know that the data centre suffered a very serious power outage, and it appears that there were some faults with their back-up generator and batteries too. In summary, we didn’t have much influence: our servers were stuck in the data centre without power, unreachable for around 2 hours, due to issues sadly outside of our control.

After we re-established contact, the process of checking data integrity, restoring backups as necessary, and testing the system took us another 8 hours – although some of us were up much longer doing their very best to ensure everything was back to normal. Well done Ben and Fred – excellent work! I hope you’re having a well deserved lie-in…

Please be aware that if you were syncing your data around 17:12 UTC yesterday then it would be worth checking everything is ok and contacting support if you are having any problems.

As we are growing in size, we continuously work on scaling Mendeley further. However, yesterday’s combination of events borders on the absurd, and if it were a Mr Bean movie, it would have been funny.

Our apologies that Mendeley was away for so long – we will surely have a word with our data center providers…Normal service has now resumed. Enjoy!

Back during the conceptual phase of the service, Jan, Paul, and Victor were thinking about what to call their product. The working name at the time was “Literacula”, because it sucked the metadata right out of PDFs.

While this was a descriptive name, it was eventually decided that it was far too silly. No one would take them seriously with a silly name like that. What they needed was a distinguished name, a dignified one, steeped in the long history of science. Considering famous scientists through history and the work they’ve done, two names in particular came to mind.

The first person, Mendeleev, was well known for being the one who started a systematization and organization of the elemental forms of matter, eventually coming up with the scaffold of the periodic table, which through its structure allowed patterns to be found and gaps in knowledge to be inferred. This sounded like just the sort of images they wanted to evoke.

The next name was similar – Gregor Mendel, who, despite being a lone monk far from the official walls and financial support of of the academy, was able through careful and diligent study of the humble pea plant to uncover the rules of heredity, the foundation of genetics and one of the most important discoveries science has made to this day. This helped convey their strong support for open access and making the world’s knowledge available outside of institutional walls.

Now, even though Mendeley seems like a distinguished and memorable name, some users – when they hear about “Mendeley” – accidentally misspell it slightly, which can lead to interesting results.

So having had a look at our logs, and speaking from our own experience, here are the 5 most popular misspellings of Mendeley.

(more…)

It’s the Crunchie Awards season again, and you can help us get on the shortlist for Best International Startup! Just click this badge and submit the nomination on the Crunchies page:

If we get nominated, everybody who voted for us can come to our office and get a kiss from our development team. If you don’t want a kiss, you can also rub their bellies, which brings good luck. Don’t let this chance get away!

Here is an alternative version of Michelangelo’s fabled Flying Spaghetti Monster painting – this one includes His halo, shining a divine light on His Noodly Appendage. The halo looks otherworldly, yet eerily familiar.

You can grab a larger version off the Mendeley Flickr account. Hat tip to Niklas Jansson, who was the first to be touched by His Noodly Appendage.

That's not me, it's Chris, but you get the idea.

Childhood Mathematica
There was an early experience in first grade when the makings of a geek made an appearance. Somehow, I had managed to perfect the art of making papier-mâché frogs faster (and at higher quality) than anyone else in the class, including the teacher. The teacher then had me demonstrating for the entire class how to make this particular craftwork.

How I perfected the art shall remain my trade secret, but what’s important is little did I know that the path I had set out upon because of that single activity would take me to where I am at today. From that incident, I learned that I was capable of doing things no one else could, or in cases such as papier-mâché frogs, what no one else sanely wanted to do.

By second grade I was still determined to be the best at whatever ridiculous class activity was occurring. Only this time I got duped into doing math. By first semester’s end I had plowed through not only the second grade textbook, but the third grade as well and was just cracking the fourth grade textbook. I then decided to become a mathematician. (more…)

“It has been described as internet dating for inventors” – well, here at Mendeley we didn’t know that we were doing this kind of stuff, but in any case it’s fantastic news that yesterday Benjamin Cohen from Channel 4 News, one of the UK’s leading news channels, reported on Mendeley! The three minute report names James Dyson, probably Britain’s most famous inventor, and Mendeley as exemplary innovators in the UK’s recovering economy.

Besides showing Mendeley in our “tiny office in London” (oh well, start-up life…), Channel 4 News also interviewed Dr. Cameron Neylon, Molecular Biologist at the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, and an Open Science advocate, in front of his mega-super-duper-luxurious four monitor set-up. Thanks Cameron for the nice quotes!

Here’s the write-up, the link to the video, and below you will find the video embedded.