The idea is to focus more on the science and less on where it is published, in assessing the quality of the work. Everyone agrees that judging researchers by the journal (impact factor) where they publish is terrible. But this specific proposal by Michael Eisen to strip journal titles from the scientists' publication lists has been controversial.
I am not going to engage in "he said, she said" with you. Instead, I encourage readers to look at the other comments in this thread to make up their mind about Collision. Plenty more of such concerns here http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2x8i04/weve_been_a....
Startups are hard. Very very hard. Every step. Every day. Rewarding but hard. Building, funding, traction, revenue - each one more impossible to attain than the previous. Burnout of the founder is the norm.
Hence my anger at the parasites who waste the time we already don't have.
Thank you for taking the time to comment. As I make clear in the post, it's not the fact that you charge that is the problem. It's the misleading tactic of calling startups, making us present, asking us questions, then e-mailing us "Congratulations! Your company is great and we are selecting you after screening. You can now pay us $1,400." If you are not explicit when you reach out by e-mail in the first place about the fee, and if you don't mention it on the phone call - you are wasting many people's time. Please look through the comments in this thread.
Thank you! We've been working on sharing and discovery of science knowledge for 3 years. But our developers aren't molecular biologists and working on abstract science problems is hard. So Wayzaway is an extension of "share & discover" idea to everyday activity - our 10% side project.
The changes, via a good user interface, will be visualized on step level. Very true that the UI is key here. But trust us - there will not be thousands of variants of a single protocol. There will be thousands of annotations, easily found for your species, on the single original published protocol.
There are many ex-companies that tried to push for an electronic lab notebook (ELN). There are several other ELN companies today that seem to have gotten nowhere. That's due to a panel of reasons, most important of which - they are competing with a paper notebook. May not be digital, but getting information into the paper one is trivial. Getting it into all the others a huge barrier.
Indeed, the effort to create a central protocol repository is at least 20 years old. No one succeeded. The key part here is the crowdsourcing. Won't happen without a crowd. And won't happen unless a busy geneticist can share with a tap of a button. That's why for two years we have been focused on giving amazing tools to researchers - build the user base. We did not even begin building protocols.io and the checklist app right away because we know how hard it is to get traction. Also, we may just be doing this at the right time - on mobile. The protocol checklist app is the key ingredient that will make this happen.
Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?