The ASM2011 was a great show. We had a busy booth with some old friends and some new faces. We learnt more about what users need and some of that feedback has already gone into our next release, MacVector 12.5, that will be out towards the end of the Summer. We had fun outside the hall as well. New Orleans is a great city with friendly people, although I never could understand why those guys on the moonwalk knew where I got my shoes.

As with the past few years many people were asking whether we run on Windows (we will soon) and can we deal with the gazillion reads of their favourite organism’s genome that they’ve just been given and do not know what to do with (also coming soon). We’ll be adding reference assembly to Assembler 12.5 that will be great for these bacterial genomes.

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The conference Twitter hashtag is #asm2011 and if we get a few quiet minutes we’ll try putting updates, perhaps even photos, out there. You can follow us for updates and news on MacVector.

Here’s our booth from Philadelphia 20009

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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.

The MacVector team will be attending the ASM 2010 meeting in San Diego.  If you are attending then please do drop by booth 240 (near the laptop lounge) to say hello!  If you are an user, then please do come and tell us what you think. Even if you think it is perfect (come top think of it, especially if you think it’s perfect!). If there’s something that MacVector does not do now that you really do want it to do then let us know.  At last year’s show the two main requests were support of next generation sequencing data and a Windows port.  The first was done last year with MacVector 11 and the latter is in progress.  It’s not just marketing blurb when we say we listen to our users!

We’ll be running impromptu demo sessions, and allowing you to play with MacVector and Assembler on a few Macs on the booth. As we did last year we’ll be handing out MacVector mousepads and other freebies. There will also be some 21 day demo CDs to take away.  You’ll also be able to take part in our survey (either online or on paper!) with a chance to win an iPad.

We’ll try to post some photos via Twitter.  If you also tweet, then please do follow us and say hello!  If you do so and you’re at the show we’ll give you a 10% “show discount if you want to upgrade your license, or buy a new one, or just ask at the booth and we’ll give you a discount as well.

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There were 2 questions that we were asked over and over.

The first was ” Do you have a MacVector for PC?” The answer is “not yet”. Our plan in the 2 1/2 years that our company has been developing MacVector is to first make it the best Macintosh desktop sequence analysis solution on the market, then port it to Windows. I’m happy to say that we are almost there. We hope to start developing a ‘MacVector for Windows’ soon.

The other question asked frequently is ” Can MacVector support Next Generation Sequencing?” The answer is that it will do in our next version, MacVector 11.0, due out later this summer. Our Assembler module ( optional add-on) has been enhanced to provide support for next-gen sequencing machines, reading FASTQ files and assembling them using the latest version of phrap.

I also thought Philadelphia was a great city.  I saw the Liberty Bell.  It was a 6 block walk from the Convention Center.  We found a really cool old pub, too- McGillins Olde Ale House.  It had a great selection of local brews- as well as cheap pitchers of PBR!  There is also a great city market right across the street from the Convention Center where I found the best Cheesesteaks.  I went there for lunch every day!

Here’s a photo of Kevin K. in our booth at the ASM meeting: