New business models for life science content
April 28, 2008
Let me start of by pointing everyone to the standard disclaimer.
Now to the good stuff. I have blogged about NextBio in the past. A couple of weeks about I was on the site and noticed that I could use the search engine without having to log in and get some pretty interesting results fast (well presented, well laid out, etc). I also registered and got an account for enhancements to the search experience. So when I got an advance copy of a press release announcing the formal public launch of the NextBio search engine. From the release
Using NextBio, any researcher or clinician can search the world’s public life sciences data and literature - over 10,000 experiments, 16 million articles, and literally billions of data points. Moreover, users can import their own experimental data into the NextBio search engine, share it with the community, and collaborate with others as never before
The release offers more details. There are over a billion data points, tens of thousands of study results and millions of scientific articles. There is a really neat autocomplete feature. Perhaps most importantly one can make correlations across six species, comparing animal models to human data.
Here are some screenshots. What I like most about the service is just the look and feel, very “Googley” if I might say.
For me the more interesting part is the business model. The NextBio model is essentially the freemium model that so many have advocated. They offer a quality free search engine, but revenues are going to be driven by commercial services, both hosted search and local installs. Transinsight, with GoPubMed, is doing something similar albeit not quite at this scale.
I like the direction life science content is taking. It’s only going to be better for science and for the companies working in this space
Hopefully I will get a chance to see the presentation tomorrow here at Bio-IT World. Check the site out, I would love to hear what all of you think.
Further readingh
Searching biological information at NextBio
Technorati Tags: NextBio, Search, Biological Content
