Labguru – Scientific Project Management
Recently, Labguru launched as a better way to organize your laboratory projects.
Labguru enables you to create research projects, milestones, protocols and experiments, as well as manage your tasks and events in an integrated calendar. It reminds me a bit of 37signals, tweaked toward science, which is certainly a compliment.
A nice feature is the ability to give protocols, papers, etc.. tags. This way documentation can be linked together allowing for finding instead of searching as they nicely put.
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Video Overview:
I’ve been visiting their site since launch which was about a month ago and already noticed a number of improvements. I passed on the suggestion of offering a yearly fee instead of monthly in order to reduce paperwork.
Love to hear what you think and/or if you are using any digital tools in your lab. Do you think science is headed in this direction?
Vladimir Chupakhin
January 17th, 2012 at 1:06 AM #
IMHO: the site is more for wet-lab scientist, but not for chemo/bioinformaticians
Ivan
January 17th, 2012 at 8:00 AM #
The website layout is quite promising but I suggested to them to insert a crystallisation section with sub-sections such us crystal trials, crystal pictures, synchrotron trips etc. Alternatively they should allow the users to change the layout, otherwise we cannot take full advantage of the potentials of this tools.
They answered that at the minute the only way is to add crystallisation to the Specimen sub-categories with the side effect to lose the hierarchical structure.
Hope they will work on this in the future.
Otherwise I am sorry but I will stick to a combination of Papers for Mac and other lab databases already available in my lab.
Jonathan Gross
January 17th, 2012 at 6:08 PM #
Hi Ivan,
The way labguru moves forward is by listening to our user base and prioritizing requirements – (your suggestion is listed and will be further evaluated by the product team). The more structural biologists join the service higher the chances that we will develop those required tools. We are constantly rolling out new features and improvements.
stay tuned… lot’s to come in future weeks.
– Jonathan.
Ivan
January 18th, 2012 at 5:14 AM #
Deat Jonathan,
Thank you for your answer.
Mine is just a constructive critic and I think that your website has great potentials and it is already very handy in organising the information in the lab.
I am also glad to hear that you are open to suggestions from users.
Cheers
Ivan.
Scott Panichelli
February 16th, 2012 at 12:09 PM #
As a Quartzy team member I thought I would share my opinion. Though it may have taken a bit longer when compared to other industries, science is definitely headed in the right direction as far as the digital age! Though it’s tough to replace the old lab notebook and hanging whiteboard, in the end, it’s the right thing to do. Improving on the management of labs using technology and the web is a challenge in the scientific environment, but is a necessary one to undertake. Solutions like LabGuru and Quartzy allow for technological advancements that old tools do not, like easy searching, tagging (as you mention), and a smooth workflow for data. When one is able to organize a lab on various levels, from inventory management to data storage, you simply create a more conducive work environment for researchers. As the world speeds up so should science, but not at the risk of losing reliability. Fortunately, new products like these can increase the pace of research and improve the results attained through experimentation.
-Scott