We are glad to announce the launch of the biomedical gadgets working thanks to the novoseek’s API. The use of the biomedical gadgets is open to everyone and free. You can get your API Key today and start using the gadgets to extract relevant biomedical information from novoseek and to create biomedical gadgets. In order to create biomedical gadgets, you just have to follow a few steps to publish it on your website or blog.

Gadgets will allow you to publish biomedical information where you want. Gadgets can be published on your blog, website…(where scripts are accepted) and will alllow you to easily extract information from the literature according to your query. With the gadgets you will:

• Enrich your content
• Integrate valuable data
• Display more information
• And no need to know about programming.

There are at this time 2 types of gadgets:

• The Key Concept Gadget allowing you to display the information related to any biomedical concept.
• The Document Gadget allowing you to display the most recent documents related to your search.

Through an intuitive interface, you will create handy gadgets in a few seconds and will be able to publish a gadget where you need it and modifying it as many time as you want. You are also able to create multiple different gadgets.

Let’s have a look at the possibilities brought by the gadgets with a few examples:

• Insert a Document gadget on your Diabetes blog sidebar to keep readers updated on the most recent scientific publications.

Example: 10 latest publications for Diabetes.

• Insert a gadget to show the most relevant disease, pharmacological substances, genes & proteins, chemical substances, organisms, organs & body parts, tissues, biological functions, procedures-techniques, journals, authors -a combination of them or all of them- related to your query.

Example: Tissues, Biological functions and Procedures/techniques related to “chronic granulomatous disease”

• Match the gadget design to your blog’s.

The examples shown previously have a style by default but you can easily change the design colors, width and height during the creation of biomedical gadgets.

Last but not least, we recommend you to watch the tutorial video about the gadgets to see how easy it works.

We’d love to hear from you and know how you are using the gadgets, so feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

Some days ago, we finished the migration of our production site to the Cloud, more precisely to Amazon EC2. I do not know if the “Cloud Computing” needs defining, but in any case I invite you to watch this wonderful video made by the people of Salesforce.com, in which you can find an easy and intuitive definition of Cloud Computing, and a list of its benefits.

What benefits does provide the Cloud to a search engine like novo|seek offer? I am probably going to repeat most of the same arguments listed in the video, anyhow:

• Cost reduction: in the Cloud we pay for what we use: CPU time, storage, bandwidth…
• Easy scaling: for a growing search engine like novo|seek, scalability is critical. For us, the user experience is very important and thus the QoS (Quality of Service).  Dimensioning the servers of an emerging web site is a hard task. If you get short, any marketing or PR action that drives a lot of traffic to the site can get the servers down on their knees.  On the contrary, if you over-dimension your infrastructures, you will have your servers getting old inside your data center. Amazon EC2 let us re-dimension our production infrastructure at the same time our traffic grows.
• Reduction of the Time-to-market and the entry barriers to innovation: The EC2 infrastructure lets us create new server instances fast and easily  with different sizes and performance. If we need to try new text mining algorithms or expand our technology to new data sources, the Cloud will allow us to instantiate all the required servers to meet our extra computing power and we can forget about finding new room in our crowded data center. Cloud computing lowers the innovation entry barriers to small and medium size companies like us.

We know that we are not the only Company in the sector to take advantage of Cloud Computing, BioTeam, for example, is adapting bioinformatics solutions so it can be run in Amazon EC2.

Not only small and medium companies are in The Cloud, big pharmas like Jonhson&Johnson or Lilly, are developing their first projects on EC2 although a recent report from McKinsey stated that Cloud Computing will not reduce costs to large corporations.

The novo|seek team is sure that moving to The Cloud will improve the quality of the service that we are currently providing, and will let us bring to all of you the innovative features cooking right know at our R&D department.

Greetings from the cloud!