SMRTcell of a PacBio RS system courtesy of {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/konradfoerstner/"}konradfoerstner<{/a}.
We’re living through a time this year of market transition. The Illumina HiSeq continues to have a strong market position (although the upcoming Ion Torrent Proton sets out to change that, however it won’t be available until this September / October). For the time being, customers with NGS platforms are considering upgrading (from the HiSeq 2000 to a ‘fast-mode’ 2500, or from a 5500 to a 5500 ‘Wildfire’ that will be launched later this year, decreasing the cost-per-base substantially and eliminating ePCR).
Photo via Flickr by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwp-roger/"}antwerpenR{/a}
In the roads I travel (and it is now over six years since I made that fateful move from being an ‘internal’ Product Manager to ‘customer-facing’ sales representative) the buying process is all about perceptions of the customer. Right or wrong, potential customers each receive the information from a local representative (from whichever vendor) and filter it through their own set of criteria. Opinions they read in their journals of choice, opinions from their valued collaborators and other friends in the research world, tidbits gathered from their post-docs, all form a perception in their mind about what a particular product’s value is to them.
As George Church introduced him, he has an unusual background for a next-generation sequencing company – involved with encryption and Digital Rights Management in prior roles, he met Roger Chien, a Maxim semiconductor company Digital to Analog Conversion chip expert, while at a Sand Hill Road Starbucks, as Roger was reading a book about the origin of life. (I’m not sure exactly which book, but it could have been Freeman Dyson’s.) Maxim, by the way, is a 9500-strong, $2.5B revenue company.
Any healthy diet has a good balance: regular ‘staples’, a fair amount of variety, and the occassional surprise ‘treat’.
For next-generation sequencing, the web offers unparalled information to keep up-to-date. Here is a short list of four sites that compose a healthy NGS diet – everyday staples and a lot of variety!
Pacific BioSciences RS Sequencer, from their {a href="http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/news_and_events/mediakit"}media kit{/a} page.
February 2008, Marco Island Florida – an exciting time in the world of NGS, the first pioneering papers were being published using short-read sequencing that are now every-day applications – ChIP, RNA-Seq, small RNA, the first whole genomes.
Photo courtesy of {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mknowles/"}mknowles{/a} via Flickr
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
This is a blog about next-generation sequencing and it’s intersection with marketing and business in general (primarily), which happens to be my particular area of professional expertise, having focused on next-generation sequencing since late 2006, when Illumina (my then-employer) acquired a startup called Solexa for $417M. I have had product development, product management, marketing (all in the San Diego area with Illumina) and key-account sales roles (in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US serving both the NIH and the entire SouthEast region with Illumina, RainDance Technologies and currently with Life Technologies). I am presently in a marketing role at Life Technologies Corporation (which used to be Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen Corporation), heavily involved with both the Ion Torrent PGM / Proton as well as the SOLiD / 5500 platforms. (More information about me can be found here; if you are interested in anything Ion Torrent and NGS market overall you’ve come to the right place.)
