ASM2010

We had a great time at the ASM2010 in San Diego this year. San Diego is a great town, and even better with a bunch of scientists gathering in the bars and restaurants! Many great people stopped by the booth. Both old MacVector users, new ones, and people just interested in our software. Some of the more interesting things that we chatted about include how people are using the increasing availability and price of short read sequencing to “brute force” their analysis. However, with the relatively short bacterial genome (it was a microbiologist’s conference!) the problem is too much coverage! So we’ve already started discussing what we can do, so expect more short read assembly tweaks.

It was also very interesting to see that this was the year that Twitter really came of age as a useful tool for immediate communications!  Want to hear what’s the hot new poster being shown, which room is buzzing with a talk, then if you followed the #asmgm hashtag you quickly found out.  The only glitch being that a few early tweets used the #asm2010 hashtag (including us, ooops!). It was nice to see @comprendia and @jimhu at the booth.  Some other notable tweeters at the ASM were @phylogenomics, @Microbeworld. Here’s a tagcloud of the tweets during the conference.  Although we’ve only just, relatively speaking, started a MacVector twitter account, a few of us have been using Twitter for quite a few years now and it’s really great to see a useful, dare I say geeky, communication tool become mainstream at such an event (and a science one at that!).

A few people also completed our online survey at the booth, which is now closed, A lucky researcher at the University of Queensland will be receiving an iPad, and everybody who took the time to send us feedback will receive our gratitude.  We’ve had an unprecedented level of response from this survey. It seems that all of you want to run MacVector on Windows.  We also had a great number of feature suggestions, which we’re ploughing through now. As ever these will start to appear in the next few releases.

At this point we should show you a few nice piccies of how the booth looked, but we goofed and forgot to take any!  Actually there was so many visitors to the booth that we hardly had time to grab a coffee or even attend any talks, of which there were some interesting ones.  All in all an enjoyable conference.

We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans next year.

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