Huge summer update: incoming. It feels insane to say that it is already July. Preparations for America’s birthday (can anyone say grilling on top of our garage!) are well underway, and I’ve logged my first month at my internship at KeraFAST. I’ve also managed to keep myself busy with a few other muses, but first, more on that internship.
This summer I’m working as at KeraFAST as their eMarketing Intern. It’s been a position that I’ve been pushed to learn a lot, and I’ve seen some pretty cool results already. KeraFAST is a small, (currently 10 people,) startup with an office located in Boston’s innovation district. What we do there is essentially market used biology reagents. Let me go further in detail:
Biology lab creates/clones some sort of reagent, whether it be antibodies, viruses, plasmids, vectors or really anything. These compounds will usually be completely novel and unobtainable anywhere else except by creating them yourself. The labs will create extra of these in case experiments go awry, and often will end up with leftovers. These materials will the usually sit in the freezer for up to years since they are so specific in their use. They will either be confine to freezer purgatory for eternity or will be requested by other researchers through a time-intensive, arduous Materials Transfer Agreement. This MTA will often result in no financial return for the institution for the providing laboratory.
What we do is we find these labs with extra materials, and then they identify what materials they would like to sell on our website. We then actively market those compounds on an ecommerce platform. This frees the labs from the burden of fulfilling MTA’s, returns the lab’s material and labor costs with royalty payments shared with us. We offer royalty payments that are multiplets time larger than commercial licensing, and we allow labs to sell items that are low in stock. This gives back to the providing institution and allows procuring institutions to more easily find reagents that will further their research creating a global science community.
What I’ve been doing for KeraFAST has been an area exciting and new for me. I’ve been optimizing our Google Adwords campaigns in conjunction with Google Analytics to ensure that our paid keywords are gaining the traction we want and converting to sales. This project has been eye-opening to the power behind Google Analytics and Adwords as free tools to analyze emarketing.
Other than a bit of gardening, barbequing (a lot of that actually,) and brushing up on Spanish on my commute, I’ve been picking up a new skill. I recently finished the CodeAcademy course for HTML5 and CSS, in which you rebuild the AirBnB website. I would highly recommend the course to anyone looking to dip their feet in coding, as I found HTML to be a very straightforward language to pick up. The free course provided by CodeAcademy gave me the perfect amount of freedom and wiggle room. I recently redid the AirBnB site with pictures of Corgis! Check it out! (http://www.codecademy.com/es/betaPro09669/codebits/xAlAGa)
Lastly, through my extensive attempts at growing anything, one plant has sprouted. Of the many, many, seeds I planted this summer, one sunflower has grown. This survivor gives me hope that someday, I will be able to grow at least 1/20 plants that I sow. I could not be happier with how this guy is doing, and hopefully he’ll grow to be as tall as I am. Well, that’s all for now. More summer posts coming include some more cooking, queing, coding and hopefully a taller plant.
This summer I’m working as at KeraFAST as their eMarketing Intern. It’s been a position that I’ve been pushed to learn a lot, and I’ve seen some pretty cool results already. KeraFAST is a small, (currently 10 people,) startup with an office located in Boston’s innovation district. What we do there is essentially market used biology reagents. Let me go further in detail:
Biology lab creates/clones some sort of reagent, whether it be antibodies, viruses, plasmids, vectors or really anything. These compounds will usually be completely novel and unobtainable anywhere else except by creating them yourself. The labs will create extra of these in case experiments go awry, and often will end up with leftovers. These materials will the usually sit in the freezer for up to years since they are so specific in their use. They will either be confine to freezer purgatory for eternity or will be requested by other researchers through a time-intensive, arduous Materials Transfer Agreement. This MTA will often result in no financial return for the institution for the providing laboratory.
What we do is we find these labs with extra materials, and then they identify what materials they would like to sell on our website. We then actively market those compounds on an ecommerce platform. This frees the labs from the burden of fulfilling MTA’s, returns the lab’s material and labor costs with royalty payments shared with us. We offer royalty payments that are multiplets time larger than commercial licensing, and we allow labs to sell items that are low in stock. This gives back to the providing institution and allows procuring institutions to more easily find reagents that will further their research creating a global science community.
What I’ve been doing for KeraFAST has been an area exciting and new for me. I’ve been optimizing our Google Adwords campaigns in conjunction with Google Analytics to ensure that our paid keywords are gaining the traction we want and converting to sales. This project has been eye-opening to the power behind Google Analytics and Adwords as free tools to analyze emarketing.
Other than a bit of gardening, barbequing (a lot of that actually,) and brushing up on Spanish on my commute, I’ve been picking up a new skill. I recently finished the CodeAcademy course for HTML5 and CSS, in which you rebuild the AirBnB website. I would highly recommend the course to anyone looking to dip their feet in coding, as I found HTML to be a very straightforward language to pick up. The free course provided by CodeAcademy gave me the perfect amount of freedom and wiggle room. I recently redid the AirBnB site with pictures of Corgis! Check it out! (http://www.codecademy.com/es/betaPro09669/codebits/xAlAGa)
Lastly, through my extensive attempts at growing anything, one plant has sprouted. Of the many, many, seeds I planted this summer, one sunflower has grown. This survivor gives me hope that someday, I will be able to grow at least 1/20 plants that I sow. I could not be happier with how this guy is doing, and hopefully he’ll grow to be as tall as I am. Well, that’s all for now. More summer posts coming include some more cooking, queing, coding and hopefully a taller plant.