Yesterday’s Ion Torrent Proton PII™ and Illumina NextSeq 500™ post certainly got a reaction from several quarters, including detailed pricing information about the 1x75bp format for the high-throughput configuration on the consumables. Instead of making edits to the original here are some clarifying points, as it is clear that Illumina is making a break from … Read more
There has been a lot of publicity around the NextSeq 500 from Illumina, and it appears to have been designed to compete directly against Ion Torrent’s upcoming PII chip. Thanks to a visit to upstate New York last week, I met Dr. Sridar Chittur who told me how important it was to put current information out on this blog, and if I can put out the disclaimers up-front it would be very helpful for those thinking about what benchtop system to purchase over the next several months.
Product launches are exciting things, and the Ion Torrent Proton has officially launched (as of the recent Ion World conference September 13-14, 2012). For those who were not able to make it to San Francisco for that two-day event, we now have the videos of four presentations up on the Ion Torrent YouTube channel, and for those who have complained about the ‘lack of data from the Ion Proton’ there’s quite a lot of ground to cover, and there’s a fair amount of interesting items about the PGM too. The Ion World-specific list of videos are linked here on an Ion Torrent Community page for ease of reference.
A Life Technologies-sponsored 2-day conference called Ion World 2012 kicked off yesterday afternoon, with Jonathan Rothberg founder of Ion Torrent, Tim Triche of the Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, Joe Boland of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, Shawn Levy of Hudson-Alpha Biotechnology Institute, and Craig Venter from Synthetic Genomics and the J. Craig Venter Institute all speaking.
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.