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Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a lab manager and says "this won't work because my lab won't take the time to walk to a computer and enter information when they want to use a chemical."

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I setup a similar app for my lab when I was starting my PhD. It worked for a while because it was the easiest way to generate a purchase order. But over time, it became harder and harder to get people to keep using it, let along keep things up to date. It's all about how to keep things simple and to make the system easier to use than what they use now, which is likely nothing.

Well, that and I never wanted anyone else touching my enzymes. Anyone that ventured into my enzyme box without telling me was harshly dealt with.

I just realized that the above statement sounds strange if you're not a life sciences researcher... :)

I'm onboard. You know that group that "discovered" that chronic fatigue was caused by retroviruses? And how that discovery was later shown to most likely have been due to contamination of their reagents? That's the sort of shit that you fear when doing research. Although of course you avoid sharing not because of that, but because others didn't share the same superstitions when handling the reagents. :)

We are busy working on an iphone app in 3 weeks and then an android app in a month. Its the most requested feature so your wife is absolutely right that some people may not want to walk to a comp to enter this stuff. The plan is to then integrate with a company like "red laser" so you can just scan the stuff into your inventory. That would be cool!

Be careful to get it right, most inventory control systems in the real world depend a lot on regular manual updating. Department managers at Walmart, for example, spend an hour or more every morning updating their "automatic" inventory control system manually. Most labs, however, don't have the manpower to spend a lot of time keeping an inventory up to date, so if your system doesn't do a good job, they will just keep using the current "intermittent updating" system.

It would be cool to somehow use a digital scale to track supplies. Each time you weigh a reagent, the scale could enter the amount used into Quartzy.

Come to think of it, using NFC might work really well for logging supplies. Stick a NFC sticker (I bet tagstand would hook you up) on items you want to track.

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