What Winning the CODiE Award Means to Knovel
I admit it. Last night, when I attended the 2010 SIIA CODiE Awards dinner I was thinking about having a glass or two of wine, meeting some old business acquaintances, making some new contacts, and enjoying a congenial dinner with colleagues Ross Graber and Meagan Cooke.
We were certainly thrilled to be CODiE finalists in the category of Best Online Science and Technology Service, but we weren’t primed for the win, except when Meagan who is Director of Content Strategies and I, Director of Product Management (Platform delivery) joked about going to the podium to accept the award smiling and holding hands. During the past year, we’ve developed a symbiotic relationship; Meagan’s stellar management of Knovel’s unrivaled content, and my focus on a feature-rich technology platform combine to make Knovel the product of choice among engineers.
We were up against stiff competition in our category: UniPHY, AIP’s literature-based, professional scientific networking platform; and ChemMobi, an iPhone app from Symyx that provides mobile access to chemical reference information. The nominees for our category were announced, and KNOVEL appeared on the screen as Winner. We made our way to the podium to accept the award, surprised and thrilled. As we headed back to our seats, a microphone and camera appeared, then the question, “What does the CODiE award mean to Knovel?” Last night, I was overwhelmed, tongue-tied and surprised by the journalistic assault, so allow me to answer in the clearer light of morning.
The CODiE Award is the acknowledgment of a decade of hard work by our dedicated and visionary product development team under the direction of our fervent, zealous CEO Chris Forbes, as well as the consistent and steadfast efforts of our active customer community and design partners who continue to partner with us to make Knovel a more powerful solution with each iteration.
I’ll admit, I’m still reeling from a 2010 product strategy meeting yesterday morning, which was heady in itself. Because of the grand plans we’re undertaking this year, the thrill of last night’s CODiE recognition was just icing on the cake.


In 1984, when IBM introduced the 80286 microprocessor chip, the MS-DOS operating system was
A similar scenario is brewing today with Web browsers. Knovel is in a much better position because we develop Web-based software. But there, the picnic ends. Our software engineers generally use the latest browser versions, and our engineers typically prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer. (Not a judgment, just my own informal survey and personal preferences.) Our users, on the other hand, use browsers dating back to Netscape Communicator, and a majority of our users are still on IE6. With the advent of IE 8, we are now mandated to test and support a minimum of 6 different browser versions: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5. And not surprisingly, our defect list tracks more IE6 items than any other browser version.
The red flag is up! That means there’s something new to see in 