HNers tend to talk about good companies solving real problems and this seems like a very real, important (albeit admittedly unsexy) problem to me. Kudos for trying to tackle this problem.
This seems like a really promising idea, and the execution is excellent. My only concern (as a scientist) would be whether people would continue to use it. Researchers aren't known for being organised at all, and the system of 'if what you're using is about to run out leave a sticky note on the lab manager's bench with the product #' seems to work.
In terms of freezer boxes, my lab used to have a web based system once upon a time ago but people would forget to update it after they took out the samples so we switched to a binder tied to the freezer, that worked a lot better with pages of grids.
I personally like this but I feel as though it might be one of those products that is attractive while its still new but people will become lazy and stop using it.
It's easy to forget to update something on the computer when you're busy doing long experiments.
Do you collect usage stats? It would be interesting to see how usage varies from a single research group over time and whether or not this decline happens.
Afterthought Edit: I can see how large groups ( > 25 grad students / post-docs) might be forced into using a computer based solution for scheduling and ordering as it's not feasible to use that much paper but is there really an advantage for small groups (3-8 members) which comprise the majority of research groups?
To me this is like using Sharepoint to manage documents for a group consisting of two people, a dropbox or email would be just as effective.
A few grad students and I started something quite some time ago out of MIT called OpenWetWare.Org that was meant to help organize things like this and included calenders, lab notebooks, stocks, lab webpages, simple sample tracking, et cetera using a wiki (when they were all the rage :-). When we had buy in from the whole lab it's awesome, but as you mention, over a couple of years, much of that initial enthusiasm faded. In looking at which worked, and which didn't, it really comes down to how much the PI of the lab cares about this stuff; if s/he uses, appreciates, and instills it into lab practice, some of those groups have continued to use it to this day with really in-depth information. In most others, it tends to fade because it is not a priority and is usually seen as a waste of time by the PI.
I'm about to start a lab (at UCLA), I'm trying to figure out how best to begin making such a culture... but it is an interesting problem that does need a solution.
Impressive! OpenWetWare is extremely useful, my supervisors old lab from when she was a post doc uses OpenWetWare to store all their protocols and calculations, it was very useful when she changed institutions for us to get a copy of those, you saved me a lot of time from having to email people for their protocols.
In my opinion lab environments aren't really like start ups in terms of culture, students have their own way of doing things and trying to force them to do things a particular way is detrimental to their performance and attitude. Since students are around for at least 6-7 years there is not really the issue of turnover and the necessity of keeping things uniform so that a replacement can pick up work right away. Whatever system you use a new student will still need several months to adjust and learn the basic skills necessary for research, during that time they can develop a system of their own so it's not really downtime. As a student I think trying to force such a culture is a mistake, you'll develop a reputation if you hardball it. Most PIs take the attitude of we don't care as long as the job gets done and things are labelled for safety sake. That seems to work quite well.
Thank you for creating OpenWetWare! It actually became a really great tool for looking up protocols from other labs. I know many people who still use it fervently!
Hmm, interesting. I have a lot of samples to organise and keep track of, so I started using a couchdb database to do so, but (simple though it is) it takes
time I'd rather not spend. That said, it seems like a difficult problem to solve for the general case. So I'll keep an eye on this with interest.
This is actually really cool. I don't use freezer boxes at all, but a map system like that would work equally well for, say, keeping track of what's in TEM grid holders[1] which I do use.
This is what I meant when I said in my original comment that I think this problem is a difficult one, because so many different scientists are using so many different types of inventory. But I'm sure it's possible, and I wish you luck :)
I suggested this to my lab when I was at M.D. Anderson, and they were in the process of migrating when I moved last summer. I should check back to see if they stuck with it.
We use Quartzy at the moment but its just so clunky, especially ordering and facility scheduling. I [used to] work in a facility that almost exclusively provides user services (for 200-300 researchers and students) and scheduling of all our equipment is rather important. I've spoken with you guys in the past about this, and while you say there are plans to do things like weekly interactive calendars (instead of that silly printable one), programmatic addition or even an API (I've wound up scraping and using some of your private calls to build our own calendar app for quatzy)...it has yet to happen. I can only hope that you'll invest a good portion of this on the UX / software integration side. Also, your ordering catalog search sucks, a lot. It doesn't find 90+% of the Hampton products we try to order.
