It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote though.
It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.
It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.
It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.
It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.