For selected people only

Day 2 was considerably busier than day 1 at Analytica 2010. Although final figures will not be released until tomorrow, members of the organisation confirmed during a press breakfast that these looked promising, with day 1 attracting more visitors than the same day in 2008 (for those of you that don’t know this, Analytica is a biannual event).


In terms of product launches, however, the day was quite quiet, with a number of companies presenting “first time shown in Europe” type releases. At Millipore’s booth, for example, I was shown their automated handheld cell counter and some attractive looking water purification kits. At Thermo Fisher Scientific’s I was treated to a whole tour where they showed me their newest products and had demonstrations of their handheld XRF alloy analysers - if you have recently purchased expensive jewellery you may want to go to their booth and check it is really worth every buck - and Raman spectrometers - I can’t help but wonder how long it will be until these are ubiquitous in airports around the globe to check the contents of passenger’s bottles. And to round up the day I also attended a seminar on the Syro Wave, a microwave and parallel peptide synthesiser that Biotage had launched in mid-February and I had not yet had the opportunity to see for myself.

Day 3 was quite short as I only had the morning at the show, which allowed just enough time for a visit to PerkinElmer’s booth, where I was taken for a private preview - “for selected people only”… it is the first time in my life I’ve been called that! - of a new MS system based on the Flexar LC platform that shows much promise and will formally be unveiled on 23 May at ASMS (we’ll keep you posted on this).



And then it was time to come back home. The show is not over until tomorrow but that is it for me until 2012.