Random Ramblings about stuff I see going on in biotech, internet and the stuff I read.

Monday, August 29, 2005

TechEx and Technology Transfer

So I gave in and got a TechEx account. I am unhappy about this, as I am paying to get what is free becuase Universities are too ?Lazy/incompentent/myopic? to make their web sites searchable. I have to pay some thousands of $$$'s in order to be able to run crappy searches on a site with a horrible UI. This makes no sense to me. Universities are already making the technologies appear on their own web pages, but they prefer to do extra work in order to send me to a portal that makes me pay. SO - they seem to be conspiring in order to make it as hard as possible for me to find stuff.

TechEx is better than nothing, but that is far from a ringing endorsement. The response time to things is pathetic. You click "discard" and then it goes out for a coffee. Google, with about a bazillion more things in it, is faster and I don't have to pay for it.

So - you may get leads from TechEx of me, but I won't tell you that is where I found it and will never say anything at all about it.

Oh yeah.... many universities have only partial listings up on TechEx, so that in order to get the full listing I still have to go to the Tech Transfer offices web site....which leads to all of the problems that I have previously ranted on about here.

This isn't rocket science folks... Make your stuff findable and it will be found. Make me pay extra in order to only find a peice of what I want, and I am just annoyed. Still have to do the deals, so I will still find you, but you could make both of our lives so much easier if we left TechEx out of it.

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