Mar 10 2010
Here’s a brilliant piece on the sequencing technologies in 2010, written by Dan Koboldt over at his MassGenomics blog.
Something had been bothering me about the sequencing-company presentations this year, and I finally realized what it was. During AGBT 2009, every player was gunning to take over the world. This year it seems like every sequencing platform has a niche in mind.
Click here to read the rundown of the high-throughput sequencing technologies
Feb 16 2010
Today Pacific Biosciences announced the initial members of their partner program, and CLC bio is included as the only high-throughput sequencing data analysis software provider.
We have thought carefully about what it takes to successfully introduce a new generation of technology to the marketplace, and putting in place an entire ecosystem of complementary solutions has been one of our strategies from the beginning, states Hugh Martin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pacific Biosciences.
From CLC bio’s start 5 years ago, it has been a core strategy for us to be an independent, cross-platform software provider, whether it relates to operating systems or high-throughput sequencing instruments. We’re currently supporting all the second generation sequencing instruments from Illumina, Applied Biosystems, Roche 454, as well as Helicos. We’re continuing that strategy with the 3rd generation sequencers starting to come out this year.
Jan 14 2010
With a plan of revolutionizing the software for genetics and genomics, CLC bio was founded by brothers Bjarne and Thomas Knudsen on January 4th 2005. We first started out with a free program - what is today known as CLC Sequence Viewer - which was launched in the Summer of ‘05. Later that year we launched our first commercial product and soon after more followed. All along we found ourselves having considerable success with our formula of delivering advanced bioinformatics algorithms wrapped in a user-friendly graphical user-interface.
Right from the start we had a global mindset, wanting all scientists working with bioinformatics and molecular biology to have our applications installed on their computers. We focused heavily on driving potential users to download our software directly from our website and had considerable success in doing that. One year after the first release we reached 100 000 downloads, 400 000 two years later and in 2008 we crossed the magic barrier of 1 million downloads.
But it wasn’t just good decisions all the way
Our venture in to FPGA technology with our Bioinformatics Cube was very interesting and we made some nice implementations of known algorithms, but basically two things weren’t as we originally expected. The market was smaller than anticipated and we were simply too good accelerating the same algorithms with SIMD technology on existing computer hardware. That in essence has taken over for most of our FPGA development. But the Cube surely works well in itself and looks nice - and people still talk about it when we’re at conferences and exhibitions, so something apparently was done right.
Some marketing guy *cough* also bought heaps of nicely designed cardboard boxes for the software, in anticipation that people would like to have their avant-garde software shipped physically after purchase. How wrong! All the boxes, minus a couple, are still in the basement and would at some point make a very nice bonfire in the parking lot…
Oh, and there was the very first board meeting which was in crisis mode, shortly after starting the company: The company was named “Geniematics” back then, but an American company who had a product with a similar name kindly sent a letter asking us to use another name for our company. A couple of months in naming despair ensued before settling on the acronym “CLC bio” which to this day remains a secret. Contrary to popular belief it’s not “cake loving company” although we do like cake. A lot.
Recent years
In 2007 we changed strategy, focusing primarily on Next Generation Sequencing data analysis. That was probably the single most important decision in the company’s history and has lead to the market position we have today, with some very ample solutions for analyzing high-throughput sequencing data from all the major NGS platforms. A fact also stressed when our enterprise platform, CLC Genomics Server, won the Best of Show award at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in 2009.
Here five years later, after revealing some very positive fiscal numbers from 2009 last week, we can honestly say that the future has never looked brighter for CLC bio!
Dec 03 2009
As a little fun project, we have developed our take on how the word “BIOINFORMATICS” sound… take a listen!
Bioinformatics by CLC bio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Sep 21 2009
You can find the answer to this question as well as other interesting facts about us and our customers and partners - all written in a very nice article by Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Davies, in the newest edition of Bio-IT World’s Magazine.
Click to read “CLC bio Satisfies Next-Gen Bioinformatics Cravings”
