23 July 2008

Dr Vivek Murthy of B & W and Epernicus.com on HighTechFever

I interviewed Vivek Murthy, an attending physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and co-founder of the scientist's social networking site Epernicus.com, on my HighTechFever TV show today. Epernicus helps solve a key challenge in science: how to find the right people with the right expertise in one's larger network right now. Few existing social networks capture information that is relevant to scientists, and those that do make it far too hard to find specific skills and expertise. Epernicus targets such problems directly. Some 2-3000 people have signed up so far, with more daily.

2 comments:

brian said...

Have you seen SciLink? It is the largest professional network for scientists in the world. Came out a year before epernicus.

Adam said...

Epernicus is indeed good for collaborative efforts. I am the co-founder of a start-up, Quartzy (http://www.quartzy.com) that tackles a related problem.

On Quartzy, scientists can manage and maintain their reagent and chemical inventories online and share them with their lab-mates. They can also send orders to their lab-manager with a few clicks and lab-managers can respond to orders from all lab-mates in a convenient fashion.

Quartzy allows scientists to find things quickly in their lab, save time while ordering, avoid duplicate orders and more. We also have similar functionality for managing shared facilities and protocols.

There is nothing to install since the software is all online. Quartzy has been active for more than a year and has thousands of scientists using the site to manage their labs!