The Mekentosj Story

Design software for research.

We are Mekentosj, an independent software company that writes innovative software for researchers.

It all started way back in 1995 when Tom and Alex both signed up to study Medical Biology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Tom is originally from Twente a region in the east of The Netherlands, while Alex lived in Aalsmeer, a flower city not too far from Amsterdam.

They became good friends pretty soon afterwards. After their study they both ended up at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in 2000, where they did their PhDs together.

While doing their PhDs they started building software to address the daily needs in the lab. Soon they realized they were not the only ones who could use those programs and they made them available for free on their website, mekentosj.com. In 2004 they won their first Apple Design Award, followed by two more in the following years. That was when things really started taking off, and the rest is history.

Tom and Alex received their degrees in November 2006, after which Alex moved to Cambridge in the UK for a postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute while Tom moved back to Twente for a postdoc at the University of Twente.

While Tom continues to pursue an academic career, Alex decided that what started as Mek&Tosj would become Mekentosj Inc, and he now lives the indie life.

In March 2009 Matt said goodbye to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge to join the team to push limits further and create revolutionary new software for scientists. Charles followed in May, giving up his job as Chief Scientist at a Stanford startup to start on a great new adventure.

In March 2010 Matt was recruited by Amazon's web services to build the next revolution in Cloud computing and Mekentosj welcomed two new adventurers to our expedition. Constantine Nicolaou, Matt's long time collaborator from Sanger, joins from Beirut, along with Mark Bate, legendary architect of the largest Xserve cluster in the southern hemisphere, who dials in from Melbourne, Australia.

June 2010 marked the arrival of Finnish-born Matias Piipari, Mekentosj's first full time iOS developer, after a very successful launch of Papers for iPad in April earlier that year.

With the number of Papers users growing, the arrival of Christine Buske as our very first Papers Genius could come at a better time in February 2011. Christine does her best to improve every possible aspect of the Papers user experience. More and better information on the website, tutorials, documentation, support, you name it. There's no question our Papers geniuses can't handle.

In September 2011 the mekentosj team received some serious extra iOS development horse power in the form of Ben Schuster-Böckler. From sunny Barcelona Ben is working on the next generation Papers for iOS and it will come as no surprise he aims at making it nothing less than revolutionary.

The first few months of 2012 already have brought 2 new faces to the mekentosj virtual office in the cloud. Matt Petty joined us as our new Livfe lead developer, taking our initial first steps with Livfe and turning it into all the goodies we envisioned it to bring to Papers, we really can't wait to see what he can do with all this online paper power.

We also saw the arrival of Kaisa Piipari to the support team. Kaisa is our first aid expert when it comes to problems or questions regarding Papers. In addition, together with Christine Kaisa brings some serious girl power to the team as well!

By designing new and innovative software we aim to make the lives of scientists easier and hope to improve science as a whole.

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