By Steve Crosby
Small Times Managing Editor

June 5, 2001 — During the seven weeks since we launched smalltimes.com, tens of thousands of people have visited the site from nearly every state in the U.S. and from 33 other nations. Even better, our traffic has more than doubled since the early days and continues to grow steadily.

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Steve Crosby

Apparently we aren’t the only ones who think there’s a need for a site devoted exclusively to coverage of small technology – MEMS, microsystems and nanotechnologies. As a growing stream of microscopic applications move from the laboratory to the marketplace, there’s a growing awareness by business decision-makers and consumers that small tech offers faster, stronger, less costly means to replace products made today and solve problems we will face tomorrow.

We’re building on our strong start with some important improvements, evident on today’s page:

* Patents – We’ve created an archive of small tech-related patents, accessible by clicking on the “patents” button to your left. We’ve started by posting recent U.S. patents and will expand the archive in the near future to include older U.S. and related international patents.

This archive will be updated weekly as new patents are issued.

* More staff-written news — Our daily staff-written centerpieces have quickly become popular reading for the business community, venture capitalists and researchers in government, academia and industry.

Beginning this week, we’ve added more stories by our staff to the page each day. This expanded coverage will continue to grow to include same-day coverage of important small tech developments and sidebars that go into greater depth on our topic of the day.

We’ll add expert columnists in this spot in the future.

* Message board – Later this week, we’ll open a message board for readers to use for debating the issues of the day. Our opening discussion will examine a critical issue facing academic researchers: do they follow tradition and publish small tech discoveries in scientific journals or look out for future legal and financial interests by keeping quiet until their research is patented in the United States and overseas?

Senior staff writer Tom Henderson is preparing a story that looks at the entrenched positions and very real concerns held by each side in this debate.

And we still have our in-depth analysis of the latest business developments, breaking national and international small tech news updated daily, an archive of news sorted by category, a timely small tech stock report and an industry calendar.

We welcome your thoughts, especially your suggestions for how to make smalltimes.com a useful, one-stop destination for your information needs. Feel free to contact me at [email protected].

If you’re at the 2001 Sensors Expo in Chicago this week, stop by the Small Times booth, #734, and introduce yourself.