ChemNews.Com VOL 6 NO 3

Chemical information is like crude oil-you know you need it, but you can't use it as is. As the consumer, you want somebody else to collect it, process it, and deliver it to your local gasoline station so you can buy just a tankful at a time. For today's chemists, the information delivery pipeline is the Internet, and your automobile is your desktop or benchtop computer.

Chemists are "consuming" more information all the time, and info providers are responding with better organization and easier access. Perhaps these factors explain why CambridgeSoft's WWW site is such a beehive of activity. Starting two years ago, the ChemFinder WWW service began offering free lookups of common chemicals, with links to WWW-resident info. Now, ChemFinder is the busiest chemistry Internet site of value, with 2,000 to 3,000 chemists launching 15,000 searches every day. Adding to a bouquet of earlier awards, ChemFinder received a prestigious Select Site designation from the editors of the Dow Jones Business Directory in May 1998.

Today, the ChemInfo Net database (available for free) has structures, information, and WWW links for more than 75,000 chemicals-twice as many as the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook combined. It has become a reference standard for many researchers and educators, and has been used as a regular part of college chemistry courses.

Premium Searching for Just $49

Recently CambridgeSoft introduced ChemInfo Ltd, offering improved searching and priority service from the ChemInfo Net database. For just $49 a year-or $29 for a 3-month trial-subscribers use the ChemDraw Plugin to enter structural queries, as well as familiar text-based searches, and get results faster from a dedicated server. More general searches are allowed (e.g., you need only the first three letters of a name), and the maximum number of hits returned is ten-fold greater than for Info Net. For students, this is a great way to get help with that chemistry course for less than the price of a textbook!

ChemInfo Pro & Ultra

Responding to the demand for more WWW-resident information, ChemInfo Pro has opened for service with the ChemACX database of over 100,000 chemical products, including the complete catalogs of Sigma-Aldrich, Fisher/Acros, Lancaster, TCI America, and others. ChemInfo Ultra contains all this and more, for a total of over 250,000 chemical products (see table).

Beta-testers responded enthusiastically to the new ChemInfo Pro offering. Dr. Chris Litten, Head of the Combinatorial Chemistry Section at the Swedish biopharmaceutical company Karo Bio AB, gave an industrial user's view this way:

"Chemists need a quick, efficient, inexpensive way to search for compounds, building blocks, and reagents. Before ChemInfo Pro, we were forced to search manually in multitudes of catalogs that were often out of date, or resort to expensive and often hard-to-use online databases. With the well-known and Ôindustry standard' ChemDraw interface (via the ChemDraw Plugin and a WWW browser), ChemACX brings to the desks of chemists an excellent tool for doing those formerly tedious searches. I for one will be using ChemInfo Pro as a routine tool in my laboratory."

High-Volume Customer Source

Chemical suppliers find ChemFinder to be a high-volume source of customers. Popular sites get up to 2,000 daily "referrals" as people follow links to them. With such demand from chemists, no wonder suppliers are eager to use CambridgeSoft's ChemFinder WebServer.

Travelers on the Internet now have a new "gas station" where they can fill up on a growing choice of chemical information and supplies. And now these travelers will leave their paper-bound colleagues far behind, for, as beta-tester Prof. Ronald Kluger of the University of Toronto says, ChemInfo Pro is "a superior alternative to a shelf full of catalogs." Or as Dr. Stephen Molnar, Consultant at the Foundation for Chemistry in Columbus, OH, explains, "This is truly an amazing product. The ability to quickly search multiple databases for information on chemicals is useful...This has catalog page-turning beat hands down!"