Although it’s not a science social network, I recently came across a new site called Lappiz which presents the tagline “Learning has evolved“.

From the official about page, Lappiz is:

“… a collaborative web tool that allows students, especially those in higher education, to share academic content between them. Its purpose is purely educational, providing students universal access to all kinds of documents that might be interesting in a particular area of study.”

Rui Marinho, co-founder of Seegno, the Portuguese company that created Lappiz, was kind enough to answer a couple of my questions:

You’re a biomedical engineering student, right? How did you get involved into creating Lappiz?
I am currently attending the 4th year of the Integrated Masters in Biomedical Engineering, at University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. I have chosen to specialize my studies in the Medical Informatics branch, one of the four available in this Masters.

Lappiz was developed at Seegno, a startup based in Braga, Portugal, which I co-founded with Jorge Pereira and Tiago Ribeiro. My involvement on the idea that made Lappiz what it is today started within my academic life at University of Minho, where the concept was firstly tested. It then became our pet project at Seegno and followed a partnership with Innovation Point – with which we had already cooperated in developing the Gasmappers application.

How did the name Lappiz come about? What does it mean?
Nowadays, a meaningful name and a valid international domain are a difficult pair to get together. Specifically, working on this service as a brand is a demanding effort. We had several brainstorming sessions to come up with a simple and somewhat meaningful name.

We wanted something that could vaguely relate to being a student. In Portuguese, Lappiz is pronounced “lapis”, which means “pencil” in English. It is also vaguely recognized in the english language through “Lapiz Lazuli”. Since Lappiz is all about the academic life where the process of handwriting and taking notes is common, we found it to be an appellative name, while still being able to have a qualified international domain.

Did the idea to create Lappiz come out of necessity or was there a niche you noticed that needed to be filled?
In a way, it came out of necessity, since none of the existing systems at the time actually matched what we had in mind. The idea of Lappiz was born in University of Minho, where the concept was initially tested on a more restricted set.

Some of us, at Seegno, while students at University of Minho, ran a first test between students of Informatics Engineering and, later, Biomedical Engineering. We then approached Innovation Point to see if they were interested in participating on the further development of this idea. After founding Seegno, the partnership came to life in order to launch Lappiz on a global scale.

There are (a lot!) of social networks out there, what makes Lappiz stand aside from the pack?
Most social networks have a high relevance and penetration on a global level, but they are generalist in nature, as they focus on bringing in large quantities of people. Lappiz targets a more specific audience, with a purpose in mind that goes beyond simple socializing,befriending strangers and putting yourself out to the world. It has an associated concept that responds to a concrete need, namely in terms of presenting each participant as a valid source of academic information.

Although Lappiz has some features found in other social networks, it is particularly focused on sharing information resources like study notes, exercises, trials, exams, practical works, reports and thesis. There are several features available for this very purpose, and many more are planned. Dynamic organization, personal activity follow-up, feedback, peer review procedures, resource management, bulk uploading and tag assignment are some of the distinctive functionalities of Lappiz. Also, in the near future we plan to expand the platform and its functionalities in very significant ways.

Facebook integration is also a key feature of Lappiz, and as a member, you have immediate access to Lappiz, without the need to register, bringing with you your personal friends’ network. After this step, you can then enjoy an academic trip without the rigidity of the institutional platforms. Discussing topics or asking questions to the community are now simple and intuitive processes. In a way, our focus on integrating with other platforms is a statement on our intent not to compete with other social platforms, and rather be a complement to a specific population – students and ex-students – which is already typically a user of those platforms.

From a quick first glance, Lappiz seems to provide some of the functionalities that social networks like Epernicus already provide, how do you think your site differs?
There are many social networks available worldwide, and many more are emerging. Our approach, since the initial prototypes, was to position Lappiz as a tool to explore the overlaying of students and their learning interests and not as competitors to world-wide social platforms. This is one of the reasons why we have such a deep integration between Lappiz and Facebook.

Unlike Epernicus, Lappiz’s social tools work as a complement to the fundamental collaboration effort for a better academic success, and not as a professional network constructor.

Lappiz is available in English and Portuguese. Being from Portugal, knowing the Portuguese education system and the average Portuguese students, what do you think the uptake will be?
The idea of having both languages demonstrates our effort to captivate the attention of both foreign and Portuguese students, including those in programs like Erasmus. We have an ambitious plan that aims to register 10.000 Portuguese students in the first few months, and 100.000 students until the end of the year, between Portuguese and foreign students. We believe Lappiz will become a reference in the academic area.

These estimates are a result of the number of students that enter higher education institutions in Portugal and foreign countries. In Portugal, about 70.000 new students join these institutions every year, contributing to a universe calculated to be of around 300.000 students. Abroad, every year more than 4 million new students also enter higher education institutions.

One of Lappiz’s goals is to “simplify students’ lives”. What particular tools does Lappiz provide to do so?
We have built several tools that simplify students’ lives. For instance, they may keep track of the activity in their university, course or subject, in order to be always alert of new resources, replies to questions they made, new discussions and so on.

As you are aware of, academic studies often rely on numerous digital documents. Students using Lappiz are likely to submit these files to share with their colleagues, additionally including work of their own. We have implemented a bulk uploading tool which allows students to submit several simultaneous files in a painless way, with built-in features like tagging, which will facilitate future searches.
It is also important to distinctly identify the best content available. As Lappiz grows, it is expected that the available resources increase largely. By integrating feedback and peer review procedures, we are allowing students to identify the most interesting, informative, important and helpful resources.

Lappiz’s also has a simple filtering system which allows users to select criteria such as Most Recent or Popular entries, and it is also possible to filter it by type of content, such as resources, questions or discussions. For instance, one can choose to see what are the most popular resources on a university or the most recent questions on a subject.

Have you had support, financial or other, from your University or any other institute to create Lappiz?
Lappiz is the result of a partnership between Seegno and Innovation Point. We haven’t had any support, financially or other, from University of Minho or any other institute.

Is there a defined business model already set up for Lappiz? Publicity, premium features, etc?
The current business model predicts an advertisement-based support. We are confident that in the near future we will be able to provide services of added-value that are useful and interesting for Lappiz’s community. On the other hand, we do not want to fill the platform with intrusive elements just for the sake of generating revenue. We expect to deliver highly targeted advertisements and services.
Online business models are complex and we are still studying this matter. However, Lappiz will remain a free platform for the purpose it was built for, independently of the revenue model applied in the future.

Is there anything else you’d like to let my readers and/or Lappiz users know?
I want to thank everyone for their effort on testing Lappiz since its early stage and to all the people who have submitted feedback about it. I would also like to let your readers know that Seegno focus in exploring innovative ideas and in the development of Information Solutions, meeting the higher standards in technical quality, simplicity, aesthetics, robustness and user experience. As an open company, we are interested in new ideas and in bringing projects to life – you may reach us at any time – we would love to hear from you!

Interview with Rui Marinho from Lappiz

A while back I found Mendeley and have been using it for my thesis research. Zotero still has space in my daily motion but it’s for non-PDF related tasks, but I digress.

I’ll be writing more about my experience with Mendeley and all the cool new features they have recently been pumping out or their London offices.

Meanwhile, I got the chance to interview Victor Henning, one of the three Mendeley co-founders and here’s the outcome:

When and how did the idea to create Mendeley come about?

A few years ago, Jan and I were meditating high up in the Himalayan mountains, and on the seventh hour of the seventh day we heard a voice telling us to create Mendeley. True story. But since no one believes it, here’s what we usually tell people:

Soon after Jan and I had started our Ph.D.s in 2004, we realized that finding relevant literature was quite difficult if you were working in a field of research that you didn’t know too well. So we had the idea for a 3D visualization tool which would automatically group papers into related cluster, then map out relationships between academic disciplines and theories.

However, we soon realized that, first of all, we would need data for this. That’s where we got the idea for developing software which could extract metadata, keywords and cited references from your collection of research papers automatically, then create this 3D visualization for you – that was in 2005. That’s when our focus shifted to bibliography and reference management, with a social twist.
Interestingly, our first alpha and beta versions of Mendeley (which were released in early 2008) still contained the 3D visualization tool, but we took it out for the public beta release because it was too slow and clumsy – but we’re planning to sneak it back in again at some point.

So, over time, the idea evolved to what it is now: A combination of desktop software and social network for managing and sharing academic papers, with research statistics, recommendation engines, and an open, semantic research paper database coming down the road.

Why Mendeley? Where did the name come from? Were there other potencial names before settling on Mendeley?

When we started developing the desktop software, our working title was “Literacula” because we imagined how it would sink its teeth into literature and automatically suck the metadata out of it. Besides, the cheesy “B-movie monster” sound of the name made us giggle. Unfortunately, no one else liked it, let alone knew how to pronounce it.

So after going through a whole bunch of other bad ideas, we thought that derivations of scientists’ names might be a good thing: There was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev (alternatively spelled Mendeleev), who developed the periodic table of elements, and Gregor Mendel, who is often called the “father of modern genetics”. We liked the analogies to our vision: Just as Gregor Mendel studied the inheritance of traits in plants, Mendeley will enable you to trace how ideas and academic theories evolve and cross-pollinate each other. Dmitri Mendeleyev formed the periodic table based on the properties of known elements, then used this data to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered – and Mendeley will help you discover new literature based on the known elements in your library.

This was the short version – if you want to read the full story behind our naming choice (including the list of bad ideas we had!), you can find it on our blog, here.

Was the success of Papers, the award winning Apple software application, an added reason/motivation to develop Mendeley?

Neither Jan nor I are Mac users, so we hadn’t heard of Papers until sometime in 2007. At that point, we were already working on Mendeley almost full-time. I believe the first version of Papers was released in 2006, right? But yes, the good reviews for Papers were an added motivation once we discovered it. We also met Mek (its main developer) a couple of times last year – he’s a really nice guy.

How has the general uptake been? Have the reviews been positive?

The reception and the reviews have been very positive so far. I think yours was probably one of the first! Of course, many reviews have pointed out that it’s still beta software, so there have been a couple of bugs and stability issues, but by now we have a pretty stable version that researchers around the world use productively. For example, Dartmouth College’s library recently named us the “Best Bet for PDF Management”, and many researchers tell us they’ve replaced EndNote with Mendeley.

Your software seems to aim at being both Desktop and web-based. Although the desktop version has seen further progress, is the web-based version planned to be as fully functional? And where does social networking fit in?

Yes, the plan is to offer the same functionality on the web that we offer on the desktop – that is managing, tagging and sharing your papers, automatic metadata and reference extraction, full-text search, a PDF viewer and annotation tool, and more. You’ll see many of these features on the web in the coming weeks and months.

The social networking aspect of Mendeley has been and will be centered around the research paper libraries of our users. First of all, you need to be contacts with another user on the Mendeley network in order to share research papers. We’ll also enable users to make their library public (entirely or parts of it), so that users can discover other researchers with similar interests. Based on the papers in their library, we’ll also match researchers with similar interests to each other – provided they have opted in to that, to preserve privacy. I did my Ph.D. on the role of emotions in decision making, and I would have liked to meet other Ph.D. students researching the same topic – on Mendeley, they’d be recommended to me automatically.

Also, when you have a profile on the Mendeley network, you will soon get personalized research statistics about your own publications. Say you’ve published a few papers and you’d like to know who’s reading them: Mendeley will give you a breakdown of your audience by academic discipline, geographic region, research interests, academic position etc. Again, to preserve privacy, it won’t let you identify your readers individually, unless they’ve chosen to make their library (and thus the papers they’re reading) public.

And it’s also FREE, which is obviously very attractive for the typical grad student. Are there already specific plans on how you will monitize your services?

The voice in the Himalayan mountains left us specific instructions about that. In any case, whatever is free will always stay free! We won’t charge for any of the things which are available now. Later this year, we will add additional premium features which will be available for a very reasonable monthly fee – e.g. less restrictions on sharing papers, more upload space, customized access to research statistics, or additional group management and collaboration tools. We’ve also had requests from private sector R&D departments for an in-house version of the Mendeley sharing server.

Further down the road, we’ll also look into advertising on the website. Also, we’ve had some interest from academic publishers about using Mendeley as a distribution system – very much like an “iTunes for research papers”.

Mendeley’s current chairman is Stefan Glaenzer, which previously held the same position at the ubiquitous Last.fm. How has his experience helped with the project’s development? How was he brought aboard?

Jan and I know Stefan since 2003. He was a guest lecturer in Entrepreneurship at our university, the WHU Koblenz. Together with two of our professors, he published a book with case studies about start-ups, to which Jan and I contributed a case.

So when we had the idea for Mendeley, he was the first person we tried to get on board as a business angel. That was in the summer of 2007 – Last.fm had just been sold to CBS, so it was great timing for us as Stefan was looking for a new challenge. He holds a Ph.D., too, so he knows the problems that researchers are facing on a daily basis.
Moreover, there were many conceptual similarities between Last.fm and Mendeley’s vision, so we managed to snag him as a co-founder! Before Last.fm, he had founded Germany’s first auction website (before eBay) and one of Europe’s biggest blogging platforms, so his experience with pretty much anything has been invaluable. Where to focus at which stage of the start-up process, how to hire the right team, how get further funding – he’s been helpful in all of these areas. He was also the one who introduced us to Skype’s founding engineers, who are now our investors as well. Combined, they obviously know a lot about building large-scale client-server-applications, and how to make them user-friendly, fast and safe.

One last question: Since all three founders of Mendeley studied in Germany, how come are you based in London, UK?

What did Rick say again in Casablanca? “We came for the water”. We just love rain, that’s why we’re here. Also, our third co-founder, Paul, was already working on London as a freelance web developer; Stefan was already here because of Last.fm; we wanted to be an English-language company because science is mostly English-language, too; and there are great universities in front of our doorstep – Imperial College, King’s College, UCL, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge, just to name a few. And apart from the weather, London is a nice place to live. Just consider this: We rented our first office from Monty Python’s Michael Palin and met him at work almost every day.

Interview with Victor Henning from Mendeley