[mende]

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea a lot, and I firmly believe web technology should be introduced to academia. It is just I don't see how you differentiate yourself from other service. For instance, the frontpage of PubUp seems strikingly similar to the "papers" page at Mendeley.

I'm completely open to an alternative service (or even a complementary one). So... I guess what I'm trying to say: Give me, one of your intended customers, a compelling use scenario or value-add proposition that might compel me to switch.

[mrstew]

I think you've gotten the wrong end of the stick with Mendeley. It's a reference manager with social features, some of which could be used (with work on the part of the user) for discovery / post-publication review.

PubUp, in contrast, looks like it is designed specifically for those two things.

Presumably to use PubUp I don't need to store my PDFs in Mendeley, to have signed up to their web component, to have found a group of people whose opinions I trust, yadda yadda.

On a tangent Mendeley also certainly hasn't sewn up the market: the majority of researchers still use one of a couple of older, more established desktop apps for their reference management. That's certainly not to say that it's not a good product, it is, or that they won't become an incumbent eventually, I reckon they probably will. It's just that scientists are a notoriously hard bunch of people to reach.