Team « The Mekentosj Newsroom

10th anniversary mekentosj

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

Note: the promotion week has now ended

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Mekentosj you can buy Papers for iOS for half the price this week from the iTunes app store!

Who could have ever figured where some simple brainstorming over a drink on my birthday, now exactly 10 years ago, could all lead to. The following day, July 16th 2001, Tom and I went ahead and officially registered the mekentosj.com domain name. The names Mek and Tosj had become our nicknames in the lab thanks to our boss at the time. As we had a beer on my birthday we came up with the idea of making a website about the eccentric people in the lab we had joined as undergraduate students, a website mainly aimed at the other members of the lab and the institute. It had a page called Chris’ coffee corner after one of the technicians in the lab, a page with the latest lab gossips, and the schedule for the upcoming movie nights we organized (including fake movie trailers featuring other lab members, yes we knew how to fill up our spare time

That summer I had also picked up a programming book and started playing with the free developer tools that came with the brand new Mac OS X that Apple had just released. This led to the first Mekentosj branded app called LabAssistant, a simple egg-timer app to keep track of experiments in the lab. To publish it on our student website was an obvious next step (it is still available to date), and started something we could have never envisioned. The excitement and addiction of getting feedback and enthusiastic reactions from real users, from all over the world was something that even today is still the main reason we do this today. And such the adventure begun, as well as a series of scientific Mac apps that quickly took over the center stage and reason for being of mekentosj.com

Tom came up with a logo and we signed up for the first WWDC, more or less just because we could, and wanted to see a Steve Jobs keynote for real. This was not long after we had released 4Peaks, our sequence viewer that had quickly started to become very popular, especially after we won our first Apple Design Award at the WWDC as a complete surprise.

Up till then mekentosj.com was running of one of these free hosting sites that gave you 1Gb of free bandwidth a month, which seemed enormous at the time. But I remember how slowly things had grown to point where we were anxiously staying within the quotum at the end of each month. And when the ADA news came out it was inevitable and we had to pull our creditcards.

Over the next three years, the second ADA for EnzymeX, and of course the launch of Papers for Mac in January 2007, followed by the third ADA in June brought us to a point I could never imagined. In November 2007, mekentosj.com officially became mekentosj BV, an officially incorporated company.

Today the 1Gb monthly limit we started with would last us less than half an hour, and mekentosj has now grown to 7 people on 4 different continents. The past 10 years have been an amazing story with an almost infinite number of great memories and anecdotes. Yet, I feel it’s only the beginning and to see new adventures and chapters being added to that story every day is what is really most exciting. Here’s to all who play part in those stories, and to all our users who we’ve done it for, here’s to the next 10 years for mekentosj!

Alex
16 July 2011

Posted in Mekentosj, Team | 4 Comments »

Papers Geniuses

Monday, February 14th, 2011

They say good news never comes alone, and so it is. We’ve just announced the countdown towards the release of Papers2 for Mac, a moment we’ve been working towards for the past two years. But in those two years time hasn’t stood still and our Papers user base has grown tremendously. To the point where it started taking its toll. Having to answer over 30.000 emails a year, keeping track of 20.000 forum posts, releasing 15+ updates, AND having to build the next major version of Papers is not an easy feat.

We figured we needed help. We needed a Papers Genius. What is a Papers Genius you might ask? Well something like this:

“We’re looking for a talented and enthusiastic new team member who wants to help us improve every imaginable aspect of Papers.
You would help us provide better support, an awesome website, great tutorials, and guide both new and pro Papers users. And you would be key in helping us launch the exciting new features and products we’ve been working on!”

We had no clue what kind of person would respond or whether someone would respond at all. Luckily we were blown away by the reactions, the next day we received an email from Dan Quintana, a PhD student neuroscience at the University of Sydney, Australia. The description we had put up fit him perfectly, Dan’s a big Papers fan and has tons of ideas how to improve the program. Unfortunately he is still in the beginning of his PhD and therefore couldn’t join us full-time. We’re very pleased that he nonetheless has agreed to help us out a number of hours per week as a volunteer. You will soon start to see the first improved Papers for iOS tutorials that Dan has produced.

Almost at the same time as Dan’s email we received one from Christine Buske, a final year PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada. I don’t think we could have found a more suitable person as our first official Paper Genius! Christine is a self-proclaimed Papers addict and she couldn’t wait to join us in making Papers even better and help us launch Papers2.

Christine’s story is in many ways familiar to that of many of us; although she kind of liked working in the lab she quickly discovered that it was not the thing that kept her up at night. Instead, she has taken on an impressive list of activities outside the lab, including copywriting, producing TV commercials, translating research articles and marketing materials, and creating her own websites.

All those skills will come in perfectly handy in her role as Papers Genius. It will be exciting to see Christine join the team and work with Dan and all of us to improve Papers. Not only do we now have an official Papers Genius on board, Christine will also without doubt add some necessary girl power!

Posted in Mekentosj, Papers for Mac, Team, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Returning to our true Love.

Monday, February 14th, 2011

If there’s one thing that I absolutely couldn’t have foreseen 4 years ago, it is the enormous success of what the then just released Papers public preview would become. I still remember sending the first test version to Tom asking, “Do you think people will find it useful?”. Now, after 1.5 million downloads, someone, somewhere in the world, double-clicks the familiar red Papers icon every 5 seconds, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, to organize his or her personal library of research.

Therefore, we couldn’t be more thrilled to finally announce the imminent arrival of Papers2, which we believe will take the program to a whole new level. To speak in Steve Jobs’ terms, this all-new version of Papers comes with no less than 21 “tentpole features”, which we will reveal over the course of the next three weeks towards the release on March 8th.

Despite all the new bling, we believe the program still feels instantly familiar to those already using Papers. We tried very hard to prevent making the program more complex, while still adding loads of new features. We achieved quite the opposite in fact, we think that in many ways the program is easier to learn and use.

So finally we’re returning to our true love, Papers for Mac. What took you so long?!

To some it might have seen that we had abandoned the Mac, that we were more focused on Papers for iPhone and, more recently, Papers for iPad. Some even started mentioning Duke Nukem, and that we lost interest in the Mac. But nothing could be further from the truth. For the last 2 years we’ve been working day and night on Papers2 for Mac, it was just that we had taken on a monumental task, certainly considering Mekentosj was a one-man-band up until only one and a half year ago. That’s not necessarily bad though. Having personally answered each and every email we received (see below what that means), there wasn’t a single pixel, feature or checkbox of which I wasn’t aware what people liked or disliked, what they wanted to see added or improved. And one thing quickly became clear, to get to the next level, we had to start from scratch.

When I originally wrote Papers in between PhD and postdoc I wrote it with the PhD student in mind that I had been in the recent years leading up to developing the program; a cell biologist dealing with an overkill of journal articles found though PubMed. This is how we designed the program, a world ruled by articles and journals, what else would you possibly need?

As Papers became rapidly more popular I realized how wrong I was, and how many professionals found a use for Papers. And so we started extending the application on a foundation that was never meant to support other types of documents, other search engines, etc. After 2 years it started to slow us down and worse, it started to cause bugs and issues that were hard to resolve. With Papers2 we wanted to change all of that, but it meant we had to start from scratch. We now support 85+ different types of documents, but more importantly, we now have a foundation that allows us to rapidly add more features in the coming months. Will Papers2 contain everything you asked for? I’m pretty sure it won’t, we had to restrain ourselves and stop somewhere, but you’ll see us add new features at a rate not seen before.

Mekentosj 2.0

Perhaps as exciting as the upcoming Papers2 for Mac update, is the fact that in many ways March 8th could also be considered the launch date of Mekentosj 2.0. Things have grown over the past 4 years from a fresh graduate scratching his own itch, to postdoc quitting early to start a full time one-man-band, to what is now a small but thriving independent software company with 6 people working from 4 different continents.

And as Papers has gone to the next level, so has Mekentosj. Having to do everything yourself doesn’t scale, and with at least 100 emails ending up in your inbox every day, that quickly becomes painfully clear. Fortunately, over the last one and a half year we saw the addition of some of the most talented team members, and everything we do at Mekentosj has become a team effort, including dealing with support emails (we still answer each individual email personally though!). Today’s announcement is the first publicly visible result of a great team at work, it’s been an absolute pleasure to finally get to the point where we can start showing you what the new Mekentosj can do.

Over the course of the next three weeks we’ll be revealing a new feature every day, be sure to check back regularly to have a sneak peek at what’s coming on March 8th. In addition you can expect a new series of posts here about some of the design philosophies and features in Papers2, behind the scenes on the way we work and what you can expect from us in the future.

We’ve come a long way, and it has been an amazing ride thus far, but it’s only the beginning. We are excited to have you on board as we continue to move forward.
Thank you for supporting Papers!
Alex

Tags: announcement, mekentosj, papers2
Posted in Mekentosj, Papers for Mac, Team | 213 Comments »

Au revoir, Matt!

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

We are very sad to announce that Matt Wood is leaving us, after an incredible year working with Mekentosj. We can’t show any of the things he has been working on (except the new web site design of course!), but we can tell you it’s awesome, and we will very much miss him. We will miss his fantastic expertise and his great insights, and we will miss his energy, humour, and his guidance.

The good news is that Matt is joining the legendary Amazon Web Services team, as Technology Evangelist for Europe. It would be hard not to be excited for him at this great opportunity. Matt will remain a great friend for all the Mekentosj crew, and we wish him all the best in this new job.

As an ‘au revoir’, we leave him with this little movie where Charles expresses how each of us felt upon hearing the news:

Posted in Mekentosj, Team | No Comments »

New arrivals on the Good Ship Mekentosj

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Things are moving very quickly here at Mekentosj, and we’re very pleased to welcome two new members to the team!

Constantine Nicolaou, a long time collaborator of Matt from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is the newest member of the Mekentosj development team. Constantine is a software wizard, bringing with him a world of experience with scientific software, high quality tools and exquisite workflow designs.

Mark Bate joins as our new infrastructure guru and system architect. An expert in scientific distributed systems, Mark is responsible for designing, building and managing the largest Apple Xserve high performance cluster in the southern hemisphere. He joins us after a long stint at Monash University, and will be working from Melbourne, Australia.

You can read more about our new arrivals on the Mekentosj Profile pages.

The Mekentosj team is now distributed across 5 cities in 4 countries: a big thank you to everyone for all their support for Papers and Papers for iPhone. We love building software to help with your research, and look forward to even bigger things with our new team in the future.

Welcome aboard, Mark and Constantine!

Posted in Mekentosj, Team | 3 Comments »

From the archives

You are currently browsing the archives for the Team category.
Back to The Newsroom front page

Archive for the ‘Team’ Category