“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, Mao once said during the Revolutionary Days of 1957. Now in the middle of a genomics revolution, it feels that way in the market for genomics software to analyze next-generation sequencing data. New companies are being formed, large […]
Every mother-to-be who has what is considered an ‘at-risk’ pregnancy is informed of the risks to the fetus of a genetic abnormality. ‘At-risk’ can involve a long list of medical conditions (diabetes or cancer for example) or poor health choices (illegal drug use or smoking). Yet a common cause of […]
NanoString is a startup company that has commercialized a product called the nCounter™ system. It is able to take an RNA sample and look at the expression level of up to 800 genes per sample, and recent news indicates that it is in current preparation for an IPO.
Oxford Nanopore, based in Oxford U.K., made a remarkable announcement that surprised many in February’s AGBT meeting in Marco Island. A GridION and MiniION single-molecule sequencers were announced, promising 15 minute runtimes, no sample preparation, and a disposable USB-stick sequencer for $900 (in the case of the MiniION), with 50kb […]
The next-generation sequencing market continues its downward trajectory – routinely violating Moore’s Law by an estimated 3x, the cost per megabase curve started to significantly bend downward around 2007 when the Solexa 1G started selling in volume, and gave the 454 GS20 (as it was known then) the first competition […]
Even though the history of next-generation sequencing is short (the 454 GS20 came out in 2005, the Solexa 1G in 2007, and the SOLiD 2 in 2008), there is a robust genomic revolution going on, and a fierce battle in the marketplace with plummeting costs and soaring throughput. Whether Moore’s […]
Life in the next-generation world moves quickly. And I’m talking not about next-generation sequencing, but something termed ‘next-generation PCR’ by internal folks at Life Technology, and can be described as ‘third-generation PCR’ if one thinks about the Polymerase Chain Reaction in terms of measurement.
This past week a statistic was released that indicated that over 50% of all cellphone usage in the US were smartphones. In addition to that, about 9% of all web traffic is now from mobile devices, yet according to one survey of 7,000 websites, only 4.8% of them were mobile-ready […]
In the 10 years (or so) since I last did tactical marketing for QIAGEN, the world has changed a lot, and in many ways the world hasn’t changed all that much.There was a trade show in San Diego I was a ‘booth champion’ for, called the Protein Society, that I […]
This week my great employer sent me (no sarcasm here, the amount invested in training is remarkable) to an email management training course. (It was The Effective Edge, an outfit out of Austin Texas in case you were wondering.) Now I’ve been on Outlook since, oh, 1999 or so, and […]
Someone smart said in the summer of 2011, “If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.” In our current hyperlinked and Facebook world the nature of online services is changing. I have a nephew who recently graduated from high school […]
I like hearing from recruiters, and can say that not only because they are salespeople and I am a salesperson at heart. They can be a critical source of difficult to find information, such as their ‘people network’ as well as which employer is looking for which type of talent. […]
