I could have told you about the BioTechnica in Hannover last week in a traditional blogpost (which indeed I did as you can see below), but I prefer to sum it up in 10 words:

1. Huge

The show area is composed of 26 different halls. Hopefully the Biotechnica just occupied 2 of them. You’d better follow the signs in order not to get lost.

2. B32

The exact position of our booth, to be remembered in such a huge complex.

3. Green

The booth color, which actually helped make a difference.

4. Skilled

The people that came visit us, they were either professionals or students who are already used to biomedical online search.

5. Motivating

The feedback we received from them and the ideas they could suggest us.

6. Free

The answer we had to give everytime we were asked “How much does novoseek cost? “.

7. 400

The number of promotionnal items we have been giving away to visitors.

8. 5 hours

The maximum time one can stand without sitting, and it hurts afterward.

9. BioMatters

The name of the company we had next to our booth and we enjoyed speaking with.

10. Seven

The number of beers I managed to drink during those 4 days (“C’mon! I was in Germany“)

If you follow us on twitter or facebook, you may have noticed that we were out at the Biotechnica last week. What’s the Biotechnica? Simply the biggest European show in the field of biotechnologies that takes place yearly in Hannover (Germany).

Obviously, you understand how important it is for us to be there, as we did for major shows in the United States during the year 2009. The importance of the show, the people and companies attending it, its growing influence have made that Bioalma,Spanish -and therefore European- company took the opportunity to go meet professionals, prospects and users from the old continent.

What have we been doing there? Principally meet people and explain them what is novoseek and explain them why it is a great tool. Obviously, some of them would already know novoseek and ask very specific questions.

Nevertheless, one of the main question we were asked, the detail that triggered people’s curiosity is knowing what has to be paid for in novoseek. The answer left them even more surprised as novoseek is a free biomedical search engine. “Free, you have just said? So how do you guys make money?” Well, we make money out of advertisement displayed here and there across the pages on one hand. And thanks to companies announcing via our media platform.

Naturally, we had some time for dinners & bears to follow up with colleagues, users and providers. Its great to be able from time to time to see the faces of people with whom you exchange e-mails, phone calls, twitts…

As you may know we were at the Tri-Conference Molecular Medicine to present novo|seek and we really enjoyed it. Obviously San Francisco is far away from Madrid, I repeat, faaaarr away from Madrid. However, both the show and the city are worth the trip. We arrived in San Francisco a bit late at night and joined the show the day after. Consequently, we had to set everything up in no more than 15 minutes before I gave a talk on novo|seek. Thank you to those who attended it.

That first day was really busy: we had a lot of people coming by -and surprised to face a FREE product- giving us new ideas and sharing thoughts with us on the industry. No need to tell you that it’s been really interesting and fulfilling.
We had the chance to meet Bernadette Torner from GenomeWeb with whom we had a a nice chat and with Yannick Pouliot who works at  Standford School of Medicine at the Lane Medical Library. Interestingly, he instantly understood novoseek and its purpose. He always has interesting new insights and projects going up. Good luck with that!

Apart from work, we had our deal of funny things that really caught our attention. First, the number of Starbucks in San Francisco is amazing. Second, the taxi driver. No matter where your travel to, there are always good stories with taxi drivers. In our case we discussed about the hidden Web and wondered whether to trust someone who has no results in Google or not.

Our trip back was a little annoying. In Philadelphia we remained in the plane for almost 2 hours, the time necessary to take the snow out of it. Although it was really impressive and entertaining, it didn’t contribute to a nice trip. By the way, did I mention that San Francisco is really far from Madrid?

Anyway, thanks to all of you who walked by our stand and didn’t hesitate to give us feedback on novoseek. We are always looking forward to it.
See you at our next show: Bio-IT world.