Welcome to 2008

I'd like to start 2008 by wishing all of Geospiza's customers, collaborators, and supporters a Happy New Year! 2008 is going to be an exciting year and I'd like to share three reasons why.

First, we are building on work we began in 2007, which was our 10th year of business! In the last half of 2007 we added two new products. Along with FinchTV, Geospiza now has four discrete products that are designed to meet the specific needs of our core lab, research, and enterprise clients. In addition, our web-based products can be delivered in two ways to meet your IT capabilities. The first way is our traditional, install-on-your-hardware, model to deliver Finch, and the second way is to deliver Finch through software as a service (SaaS). The bottom line is that our customers now have more choices at wider variety of prices for meeting their genetic analysis data management needs and budgets.

SaaS is particularly interesting. In SaaS, software is provided through the Internet as a subscription with an annual, quarterly, or monthly fee. SaaS takes advantage of the tremendous computing infrastructure available on the Internet and allows us to deliver systems quickly and cost effectively. The SaaS model also eliminates the lab's headaches associated with IT. Hardware planning, backup strategies, backup testing, systems administration and the like go away. You visit our site, contact us, and we set up the system, just like that. This means we can deliver scalable software systems at prices that small or large groups can afford. It also gives you more planning flexibility because these systems are easier to grow and change.

The second thing we are excited about is the next generation of DNA sequencing instruments; we like to call these Next Gen. When I think of the kinds of questions that can be asked with millions of DNA sequences from single samples the possibilities are endless. Transcriptome profiling, promoter mapping, variation discovery, and genomic sequencing all take on new dimensions. For a company that's been working on data management and analysis problems in DNA sequencing like we have, Next Gen data handling and LIMS problems are the just the kind we like to solve. We've been spending a lot of time in the past few months learning with our customers about the how the "fire hose" of data is going to affect them and have been busy working on products to meet the coming challenges. We'll be presenting our ideas and new products at the coming AGBT and ABRF conferences in February.

The third thing we are excited about is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 technology and applications continue to make it easier and easier to share data, present ideas, link information, and make web apps more dynamic and interesting. Scientific discovery happens when connections are made. These connections come from trends observed when large data sets are mined and (or) when contextual information is linked together. Web 2.0 creates the framework for these activities and we are building new features based on Web 2.0.

As we move forward in 2008, SaaS, Next Gen sequencing, Web 2.0 technologies, and connections with our community will be the themes that focus our research and development and influences our product roadmap. FinchTalk and our newsletters will be two of the tools that we will use frequently to communicate what we are doing and share ideas. Throughout the year we will post articles on FinchTalk about how to do different kinds of things with Finch products, introduce new products, and share past and current research results for discussion. Be sure to check back often - even better add FinchTalk to your RSS feeds.

Todd Smith
Chairman and CEO
Geospiza, Inc