Do any of these problems sound familiar?

1. Tired of installing and configuring complicated, clunky bioinformatics software.
2. Want a faster, easier way to get new members up to speed.
3. Need a grant website that's simple, fast to update and doesn't require a web developer or IT person.
4. Lack a transparent, user-friendly way to track who's working on what. And keep a history of it.
5. Looking for a better way to share files with team members.

My name is John, and as the founder of Lab Engine these were just a few of the problems I encountered while working at the Protein Data Bank and various research labs at the University of California San Diego.

Setting up a simple grant website and installing software were the most prevalent problems I dealt with in IT. Often researchers would try to learn HTML or download a content management system only to find that they're wasting too much time on it. The grant websites usually required the same sort of pages:

• News
• Publications
• People
• Data

It should be possible for researchers to have a website that doesn't require any technical knowledge. And more importantly, it must be very easy and user-friendly to maintain.

We've all been there: you join a research project, you get a stack of articles to read, team members answer your questions, you attend meetings with the PI and after a few days, weeks or even months you get a good grip on the material. Wouldn't it be so much easier to direct a new team member to an internal website where they can get all relevant publications, find answers to previously asked questions and ask new ones?

To address these issues I set out to write software that's easy to use, streamlines tasks around the lab and helps people collaborate more effectively. The final result of this venture is Lab Engine, so give it a try and see for yourself how it helps you get more research done.