After a number of trips across the pond to several of the big American meetings we have decided this year to focus our resources on the smaller meetings and personal visits to customers when required. We will however be represented at both the American Neuroscience meeting in Orlando and Biophysics in San Antonio, as our American distributors will be there.
Things are especially busy here right now, which has been the state of play for some time, so here is an update on where we have been and where we are planning to go.
A look at the past...
February 2002, Biophysical Society Meeting, San Francisco
A thinly disguised excuse to visit this beautiful city during an unseasonal heatwave. This meeting was a good opportunity to introduce ourselves to a new audience and to catch up with some familiar faces. We shipped over a full complement of kit including an early prototype of our image splitter (which is now in full production).
July 2002, Physiological Society Meeting, Liverpool
Our initial reason for attending this meeting was to jointly present an integrating system for combining confocal linescan with analogue data from other sources. This project has been developed in conjunction with Godfrey Smith's and John Dempster's groups at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. The development has been aided and abetted by Bio-Rad, and the first commercial systems will be configured to work with their instruments. As we were presenting anyway it seemed sensible to bring a full trade stand, so we did. Why the Liverpool meeting couldn't have been scheduled to coincide with a Champions League home tie seems a major oversight, which Jez would like to take up with the organisers.
During this period we also attended the 4th UK Calcium Signalling Conference in Leicester and MicroScience 2002 in London. In both cases we were donated booth space by Olympus UK who we would like to take this opportunity to thank. Thank you.
September 2002, Cell Physiology Workshop, Plymouth
September as always means the Marine Biological Association course in Plymouth. Martin and Andy make their annual pilgrimage to help introduce young physiologists to the black arts of optical and electronic recording techniques. We loan out a set of just about everything we make to this course, which gives us the ideal opportunity to use our equipment ourselves in a lab environment. Concurrent with this Martyn was presenting some of the fruits of his labours using the aforementiond black arts at the Leeds Physiological Society Meeting. The data was from his days of biomedical research where he contributed to the early stages of the project before departing for Cairn and a life free from grant applications and short term contracts.
The present and the future...
As outlined in the introductory paragraph, we will be focussing on the smaller meetings and personal visits over the next few months. We will be represented in some capacity at most UK Physiological Society meetings, and have committed ourselves to taking our trade stand along to the Christmas Physiological Society Meeting at UCL
We will also be found at the new Imaging Workshop, which is to be run in Plymouth in April 2003. This latter meeting is expected to follow a similar format to the course at the MBA, but with the emphasis on imaging rather than electrophysiology. More information will be posted here as we finalise our plans, so please check back.
