Earlier this week we held our European LS forum in Basel.  We did a few things differently compared to the US one - we held the event in conjunction with a big discovery technology event called MipTec, and we held a single track instead of break-out sessions.

The agenda is posted along with many of the presentations, and I plan to write blog posts on my thought on the presentations and discussions we had.

Next stop Tokyo, where our Life Science user meeting is scheduled for November 6-7.

 

 

On Monday and Tuesday of this week we held our US Life Science Forum.  The feedback from those that attended was consistently positive, and I know that I learned a lot from the presentations.

Some of the hightlights for me were:

• the positive reaction we received to the things we are working on - applications for biomarker discovery, lead discovery, and network analytics in particular
• hearing about the strategies and approaches to deployment in an enterprise environment, from Pfizer, Lilly, BMS, and Astellas
• a thought-provoking keynote from David Shaywitz - some agreed, others didn't so perfect to stimulate discussion over dinner and drinks\
• some really compelling application presentations in the break-out sessions.  It was also interesting to see a balanced distrubution of our attendees across the 3 break-out rooms.

The agenda is posted on this site, and will contain further links to the presentations when they are available.

We've been busy over the last few weeks getting everything lined up for the event next week.  We have a great roster of presentations - both from the team here at Spotfire and from our customers.  I'm looking forward to two days of dialog and expect to learn alot there.

I'm also planning to use this site as a way of capturing some of the key points.  I hope to share some of the highlights of the event with those people that cannot attend the event in person, and I hope that some of the discussions that we start in person in Princeton will continue in this online forum.

The agenda for the meeting is available, and with the permission of the speakers, we plan to post presentations and Spotfire files linked to each presentation.

 

 

We're putting a great agenda together for the User Meetings in September and October.  The agenda and registration links are available here: http://goto.spotfire.com/lsforum08/ 

We've got a lot to share, and the customer presentations are going to be as interesting for everyone.

 

We've finalized the dates for our 2008 user meetings:

• September 22-23 in Princeton, NJ
• October 13-14 in Basel, Switzerland

We're putting together a great agenda with presentation and training on the recent Spotfire product developments, some announcements on new products from us, and a great list of customer and partner presentations.

 As with previous events, I'm expecting these to be a great opportunity to learn and share with other members of the Spotfire community.  Were also working on ways to incorporate this community site directly into the meeting - I'm going to ask each presenter to make their Spotfire files available on this site so that attendees can have a look - in real time at the meeting or when they're back in their office.

 We're collected a lot of feedback from our customers on what makes a successful and productive event.  We're always looking for more, so if you have suggestions please drop me a line.

 

Confirming the recent comment on my earlier post, there certainly seems to be an apetite for pharma industry conferences in Switzerland.  I've just left the Drug Discovery Leaders Summit - an event that was very good from a number of perspectives:

- high-level attendees and presentations

- a nice venue - the Montreux Palace Hotel

- short, interesting presentations that paint a picture of where the industry is and where its going.  The 25 minute format was great and I'd like to see more conferences use this.  Its easy to point people to other information on the web for details that only a subset of the audience is interested in.

There is a saying that 50% of marketing spending is working; the only problem is figuring out which half it is.  Until you work in marketing you don't know how true that really is.

Yesterday we did a webcast with Ira Haimowitz of Wunderman on how they help their clients make more informed decisions about which part of the marketing spend is working and which parts not.  Their Marketing Performance Evaluator is a great example of the potential for marketing managers and executives to take advantage of analytics; and its a great example of the way the Spotfire platform can help our partners differentiate their offerings in a competitive market.

 

Over the past few weeks I've attended two drug discovery software events, and I've been trying to piece together the story that they tell about the state of the industry. 

One one hand, the BioIT World Expo last month in Boston seemed to be stronger than ever.  I believe it had better attendedance from participants and vendors than last year, and there were some interesting presentations.  Although many of our customers are talking about budget and staff reductions; there was a sense of enthusiasm and innovation at the event.

On the other hand, last week's InfoTech Pharma event seemed to be moving in a different direction altogether.  Whereas last year I remember 20-odd exhibitors and hundreds of attendees; this year had 2 exhibitors and about 50 attendees.  Maybe this is just a statement that London is a better venue than Basel for such an event, but I left with a feeling of decline.

I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of others who have attended these or other events recently.

 

Last week at the InfoTech Pharma conference we presented the Spotfire 2.1 platform (formerly DXP) as our next generation platform for discovery research.  In particular we highlighted the improved capabilities to enable data analysis workflows in screening.

Screening applications, ranging from high-throughput to secondary screening to high content screening, have been a major application area for DecisionSite over the years. With the 2.1 release we now believe that this great new platform is ready for some of the major application areas in research.  There are a couple of things that make this a great improvement on anything on the market today:

• dynamic aggregations and calculations - as you filter data in and out, calculations and summarizations of data (plate, well and replicate averages; Z score; IC50 calculation; etc.) update dynamically as you move the slider
• multiple data set support - allowing you to analyze and navigate across data in different data tables
• API's, including the new "mash-up" API's that make it easy to build and integrate Spotfire with other applications

Here are a few screenshots that show some of what we showed at the conference, but screenshots don't get across the workflow improvement.

 Please let us know what you think - we'd be happy to show you this example in more detail and to discuss how it can improve the productivity of your own screening operations.

 

 

Last week at TUCON (TIBCO's big, annual user meeting) we announced Operational Analytics - the first new offering from Spotfire that combines the strengths of what we do with some of the strengths of what TIBCO does.

While this offering is initially targeted to manufacturing organizations, I wonder if it might also address some of the critical real-time, operational issues in the pharmaceutical industry.  For example, a series of rules that are applied to the incoming stream of clinical trials data to help development teams identify safety issues in clinical trials.  Or a set of rules that are applied to the AERS data from FDA to look for signals and alert pharmacovigilance teams.

 If anyone has ideas about these or other areas in Pharma where event processing and analytics have a play, please let me know.

 Yesterday we announced the latest product release, and we in the Life Science team are all really excited about the new capabilities we have now. 

From the perspective of our pharma customers, this release has something for everyone.

• for sales and marketing groups, the mash-up API enables integration of Spotfire-based dashboards within larger portals.  This is more than just an iFrame - this is providing two-way integration between Spotfire visuals and other applications, meaning that a user might select a physician in a mapping application or an SFA application and see that person highlighted back in the Spotfire dashboard.
• for clinical trial groups, the advances in trend comparison really facilitate a number of the analysis and decision-making workflows.  It is now much easier to compare different clinical attributes to generate hypotheses.
• for research groups, this is the first release of the Spotfire platform which we are recommending for applications in Screening.  With the curve fitting and curve drawing capabilities we've developed something that I believe will be game changing for analysis of plate based screening data; in particular when looking at dose response screens.

We've only had our hands on the beta for about a week now, but we're putting together some great examples and demonstrations.

As we apply this new version to various applications, I'm going to post more detail on these application areas over the next few weeks.

 

As you would probably guess, we in the Spotfire team believe that a well crafted visualization can tell a powerful and informative story. 

I spent a rainy Saturday last weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I found an exhibiton called Design and the Elastic Mind.  Part of the exhibition was a section on visualizations, and fortunately many of them are online.  They told very interesting stories about travel patterns in North America, communications patterns from New York City, and many others.  It's well worth a visit if you share our enthusiasm about visualization, or look at their website if you cannot make it to New York.

 

Every now and then we at Spotfire see a new application built with our software that really impresses us.  Usually cool new applications are a combination of a really interesting data set with some innovative ideas about how to visualize and analyze that data.

Earlier this week some of our guys worked on an application to look at some of the data around this year's presidential election.  This application, on our TestDrive site; is a great example of how combining data from different places and providing interactivity can deliver something powerful.

The premise of this analysis is to get an understanding of the money that is being raised by the various presidential candidates.  The problem is that you don't get a lot of information about where the money is coming from - only a ZIP code.  There are, of course, quite a lot of demographic data about ZIP codes in general so the act of bringing these two data sources together in a single place to let one "shine a light" on the other.

 If you are interested in the election, this application is worth looking; and even if you aren't interested in the election it is illustrative of something I'm seeing more and more - ad hoc integration of different data.  Sometimes it leads to something powerful; and other times not.  The point is that its become so easy to do, that often times its worth a little bit of effort to see what there is to be seen.

 

Today Spotfire is announcing the availability of DecisionSite 9.1.1 which has some important new features for chemists.  Firstly, with this release we have added support for Symyx Draw v3.0 and secondly we have improved the behavior of structure marker labels.

Structure marker labels is a new capability that we just introduced in version 9.1.  For those of you who have not seen or used this capability, its worth having a look.  This capability allows you to render the chemical structure into the marker label, and it allows you to position the labels around the plot where you like.  This is useful both in the analysis process to help track which marker is related to which chemical structure and in the presentation process - minimizing the fiddling that is needed in Word or Powerpoint to articulate your conclusions.

If you've already upgraded to 9.1, the process of upgrading your installation to 9.1.1 is painless, and you'll get better behavior of the re-arranged marker labels.  If you are on an earlier version than 9.1; I'd strongly suggest you take a look at 9.1.1.  The combination of capabilities we introduced in the 9.1 launch with these improvements announced today adds up to a lot of capabilities that improve the workflow of chemists.

This page provides more information on the content of both of these releases:

http://dxp.spotfire.com/products/whatsnew.cfm

In response to my previous post on field dashboards I got one of those questions that drives me crazy, "If Spotfire is used for dashboards, why doesn't Spotfire have traffic lights and gauges?"

Why on earth would I want a big gauge to tell me that I'm at 85% of my target, or a traffic light to tell me that's in the "yellow" caution zone?

It is unfortunate that the first generation of dashboard technologies are so limited in their information visualization capabilities that these useless views have become associated with "dashboards". The good news is that it doesn't take long for someone to see the difference between a well constructed graph that can show them 3 or 4 key metrics, and a gauge that shows them only 1.