What a week, I went to Denmark for the traditional annual meeting of CAPEC. My goal was to gather feedback on Cheméo, especially with respect to the modelling part of it. The other part of Cheméo is the documentation part and is basically a convenient way to search and access physical and chemical data.
This documentation part was really well received. Many engineers are at the moment using Google when trying to get information about chemical structures, the ability to get a specialized one stop place to get access to these information was really appreciated. One of the critical factor was speed but also the direct link to the data source. They are going to use Cheméo as way to search but then double checking with the original source. They think Cheméo as a Google for chemical properties.
The modelling part is more complex, as you can read in the overview, but I was able to run an informal session showing how it works. With one of the company engineer, we created a model and refined it in about 15 minutes and at the end he told me that doing the same with the tools he has take him nearly a full day. A future happy user and ready to become a customer.
It is always extremely hard to evaluate the value you bring to the users of your software tools but it is also a critical part to then set the price point and derivate from it a sustainable business. This is why the modelling/analysis part of Cheméo is going to be free from now until October this year. The goal is to get people to use the software on real problems and be able to provide us with feedback on where we need to improve and for them to really evaluate the value we bring. This is the non scientific part of the business but it needs to be done right to keep the scientific part happy.
The next 6 months are going to be fun.