Because of this huge array of data all generated for different purposes, data privacy and control is not an easy matter. One argument is that Kappa Prime is a place for researchers to come and share information so surely all the information should be open? The rebutal is that this is personal information and peoples data is a valuable thing. Of course, there is the already all-knowing Google machine. Do we want to feed it any more nuggets of information about us?

The conclusion we’ve come to is to split the data we collect at Kappa Prime into four parts: Personal profile data, user libraries, descriptions of papers, and private comments.

Private comments are only ever viewable by the user that left them. Descriptions and discussions of papers is a community discussion - open and un-anonymous. This is viewed in the Wikipedia style and is open to all. Personal profiles and libraries are left configurable by the users’ to choose the exact privacy settings they desire.

Our goal is to strike a balance between giving users control over their own information and encouraging interaction and information sharing. We want to create an environment where users feel confident sharing their data with the research community.

I attended almost every meetup between September and March but then something happened. Fewer and fewer people began to attend and the people I used to know as regulars didn’t show up anymore. I became more involved with Kappa Prime and eventually I gave up. It doesn’t make sense to spend an entire morning to meet less than a dozen people, right? Many people who used to attend Open Coffee said the meetup was dying.

Today’s Open coffee that I visited after a long break was a big surprise to me. Just like in good old times, several dozen of entrepreneurs, programmers, designers and investors were happily networking in Starbucks on the first floor of Esprit on Regent St.

If you thought Open Coffee was dead, you were wrong. It’s alive and well. See you there next Thuesday at 10 o’clock.

Of course there is DrinkTank, which is the meetup for startup founders and Minibar, where early-stage companies can pitch to the audience but it’s not enough.

Yesterday’s Minibar was sponsored by Winston & Strawn, an international law firm with offices across the world, including, of course, London. They specialise in technology and they’re quite happy to work with startups even before they raise huge amounts of money. And yes, they’re really friendly!

Last night, Danvers Baillieu from Winston & Strawn announced Bootlaw, “a free boot camp for internet and digital professionals who want to learn more about the legal issues they face”. As far as I know, this is the first and the only free event on legal issues for startups organised by a City law firm. The demand is high: a few people joined the group on meetup.com minutes after if was created.

Generally, legal issues are a problem for startup founders because in most cases they’ve got technology or business background, so I will not be surprised if this event will be heavily oversubscribed. I’m definitively looking forward to it.

We met Mendeley at their office in North East London, and had some interesting conversations about managing bibliographies and sharing data.

While on the topic of competition we thought we’d put together an informal list of other websites overlapping with the aims of Kappa Prime and Mendeley.

• CiteULike
• Zotero
• dblp
• CiteseerX
• Rexa
• SPDF
• Google Scholar
• Sci Link
• Ologeez
• Citeseer
• Bibsonomy
• CDS
• RefWorks
  
• Academia
• PubMed
• Scopus

If you can think of any others please post them in a comment.

There were two kinds of pitches: full pitches and short ones. Nine startups were given 5 minutes to describe their venture in detail, while ten startups, including Kappa Prime, were given 30 seconds to give a pitch. My feeling was that 30 seconds is probably too little to describe what a company is actually doing but 5 minutes are way too much. It usually takes one or two minutes to spark interest and if a startup can’t do it, it doesn’t make sense to abuse the attention of the audience. Maybe 3 minute pitches and more time for QA session is an option?

One of startups that gave full five-minute pitch was WatZatSong.com. As it’s easy to guess from the name, they help you to find the name of the song that you’ve been humming for the past half and hour but couldn’t remember the title. The best thing about this service is that you don’t have to upload a mp3 file to their server (though you can) but you can just call their number and sing a song over the phone. The founder, Raphaël Arbuz, says that even if you really can’t sing, there is a good chance the song will be recognised.

Another startup among those who pitched for full five minutes was Snagsta.com. The idea is simple and bold: to use your social network to filter the best recommendations for stuff like books, holiday destinations etc. The reasoning is that some of your friends have a better idea of what you might like than other people. Right now they’re in the private beta but I’m waiting for the launch.

Back to the TCPitch: it was a great opportunity to present Kappa Prime to the startup community in London, meet new people and learn what other startups are working on. Looking forward to the next TCPitch event, it promises to be interesting!

Doing research is not only about searching for papers, reading them on your own and trying to come up with new ideas. It’s essential to talk to other people, know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what they are reading. I exchanged ideas with Simon, discussed papers and shared books. I remember one day I was talking to my supervisor about a particularly good book on algorithms; it turned out he was interested in the book but as it was very recent he didn’t know about it yet.

Exchanging ideas is probably just as important as thinking on your own, we want to focus on making Kappa Prime a tool to share information without hassle. It’s great to know your way around your own collection of papers but it’s far more interesting to know what your colleagues are working on. If you are a student you’re probably interested in sharing and discussing papers with your peers. Imagine being notified about what your colleagues (or your students) are reading and discussing today. Found a great paper you want to recommend to colleagues? Discovered a misprint in a manual? Wrote a new article yourself? Share this with your scientific community in a couple of clicks. That’s what I call sharing and exchanging information and that’s the main purpose of Kappa Prime.

We’re focused on making Kappa Prime a service that helps researchers to exchange information. We started with collaborative bibliography management as one of the most obvious needs but our long-term goals are more ambitious. Any information that researchers need – most important papers, conferences, funding opportunities, hottest topics in science – will be shared on Kappa Prime, helping scientists to do great research. We also aim to make Kappa Prime a great place to tell the world about your research and teaching. Well, all of this is expected from a good scientific community web-site, right?

1. When you first log into to Kappa Prime, you’ll find yourself on the newsfeed, this is the homepage where you can see what people are reading and new users.
2. Start by visiting my library, it’ll be empty at first. To fill your library either click add publications then import publications one-by-one or click import multiple publications and upload a whole bibtex file. Alternatively you can search for publications in other peoples library in the top left search box and click on publications you have read or would like to read.
3. Once publications are in your library you can link them together with relations, add public and private comments, tag them and, search and browse quickly any way you choose.
4. After adding some publications to your library head over to My Page. Click edit my page and fill in some details about yourself. Why not upload a picture? If Kappa Prime contains any papers written by you they will be automatically matched to your profile. Click selected papers to choose which ones are displayed.
5. Once you’ve uploaded your library and built your page you can start organising your current publications and associates, and discover some new ones!

We are building a service that helps researchers to keep abreast of the latest developments in their field. It’s easy to imagine Kappa Prime working for a large number of users but it’s actually quite difficult to achieve it. So we started with the aim of making Kappa Prime useful to a very small local community of scientists, which will grow later to embrace most researchers.

Anyway, there is still a long way to go, so I get back to work.