Original Labstr Vision
Subscription based website for research labs/institues. Provides lots of on-line tools for data analysis and processing, lab wiki’s, integration with openwetware, facebook connect etc...
www.labstr.com
Monetization
- RescueTime pricing model
- Free if the institiution doesn’t want users data, pay $20 pppy (or something) if they want access to the admin stuff and reporting layer.
Could you aggregate collaboration & participation metrics, along with more traditional publication and citation metrics, into an online resume/reputation, so that scientists can feel rewarded for putting in the effort and have somewhere to point to to demonstrate the worth/impact of their online and other non-published/ing work?
- Integrates BLAST type stuff (with a better interface), with image processing, simple stats, etc.. on your uploaded data. Provide cloud storage, some free, charge for more.
- Simple interface to cloud computing for bench scientists - sell cloud computing power by the meg/minute/etc - amazon ecc/google app engine. Integrate bio-informatics tools with simple interfaces, so you can upload data and get it crunched on the cloud, for a few cents. Sell data storage too, to store everything - 2gig free, more on premium plans.
- Keeps an on-line logbook of everything you do, your uploaded data, all analysis run, results, etc... Your on-line lab book - available anywhere. Each person has a blog/labbook which aggregates into a ‘lab blog/planet’. Maybe have the aggregations be a Digg/Pligg/Lifestream/ResearchStream type thing - best practices bubble up.
- Has an API so that people can integrate new analysis tools, share in the revenue from people who use your tool?
- Each lab gets a lab wiki, with WordpressMU, lab calendar - an online lab in 10 mins. Tikiwiki, Google Apps. Autoregister on Anti-body Swap Shop, OpenWetware? Each lab wiki should be should be global to labstr, maybe with the ability to mark pages private (premium?)
- Currently science operates on a journal-article-or-it-doesn’t-count premise. There’s quite a lot of stuff that goes on that just never get published, for perfectly legitimate reasons. Is there a way to enable people to get credit for and do something useful with all that stuff? Give community credit/reputation/karma for peer review, publishing data, online lab book posts, wiki edits, forum participation, etc...
- Researchers have lots of other important skills, besides just publishing, which are they’re not currently getting credit for. Could labstr provide a way to give credit for things like networking, outreach, collaborating, etc...? “Universities want their researchers to bring in grants, lead a group, do research, spend time with postdocs and students, teach undergrad classes, sit on committees that do governance, review grants and papers, do outreach, etc, preferably spending 10-20 hours per week on each task, resulting in a desired average working day of approximately 20 hours.”
- How much of this is covered by openwetware?
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