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.

As Research Director at Mendeley, I try to get out and talk about how we work, where we are heading, and any ideas you want to see come alive. This time I’m taking the show on the road via London, UK to the San Francisco Bay Area!

If you are an academic research lab or department, university librarian, or perform industry research and would like to chime in then lets meet!

I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area the weeks of October 12-16 and October 19-23. As the schedule will be somewhat tight, please contact me as soon as possible to arrange either a demo or conversation.

Easiest way is to schedule via my public calendar here, but you can also contact me directly (see below).

Point of contact:
Jason Hoyt, Ph.D.

This is just a quick reminder of our ‘Open Office’ event this coming Friday 18 Sept from 5pm onwards – in case you haven’t seen our previous blog post from last week: we’d like to invite London users to come in to our office and chat to us directly in order to share their general feedback and their suggestions as to what they’d like to see improved in Mendeley. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

If you’re interested in coming along, please email anne@mendeley.com.

We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Just some good news to finish off a week full of work: Today Vic Keegan, a technology journalist veteran from The Guardian, visited Mendeley’s headquarters in Clerkenwell and did an interview with Victor and me. For us, that capped a completely surprising “The Guardian” week – this is how things happened:

MiniBar follow-up

After seeing us present at MiniBar, Vic wrote some very nice words about Mendeley in his weekly technology column:

“Standing out among a slew of interesting five-minute pitches was mendeley.com, billed as an iTunes for scientific research papers, which again prompted the ultimate compliment – why didn’t someone think of that before? You can manage your own research papers from any computer and search others and link up with other researchers. No wonder that some of the world’s major universities have already signed up. The founders point out that public research papers reflect the science of two years ago, and if that gap could be cut down it could have a big impact on economic growth.”

MiniBar was a great event anyway, but such feedback is the icing on the cake!

Update – here is another Guardian article about Mendeley: “How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough”

Mendeley on #6 of top 100 tech media companies

Even more thrillingly, on the 7th of September Mendeley appeared on #6 in the list of the Top 100 Tech Media Companies, put together by The Guardian and Europe Unlimited. To celebrate, we took the whole team to a very nice Korean restaurant for dinner, and a pub for one, two, three… drinks afterwards (you can see some pictures in our photostream on Flickr). We’re going to present Mendeley at the TMI event on 1st October at 11am – so come by and say hi (if you want to drop by before, use our Open Office Friday next week)!

Interview with Vic Keegan / The Guardian

And then today, to finish off our “The Guardian” week, Vic did the following interview with us (listen here or below) – gosh, it sounds too strange to hear yourself talking! All in all a very intense but rewarding week – now I’m looking forward to the weekend!