DataJoy is our second product (we're also the team behind ShareLaTeX (www.sharelatex.com)). We realised that a lot of the technical problems we had solved to make ShareLaTeX possible could also apply to more general environments, like Python and R which are also very common in academia. We're hoping to make these tools easier for scientists to use, both when getting started and when collaborating on their data analysis, data clean up, statistics, etc. Let us know what you think!
ShareLaTeX is a fantastic product, thank you for making it. It's very much a Google Doc for LaTeX. I used it very extensively when I was in university. Given how many auxiliary files are generated/needed when compiling LaTeX, keeping those files in the cloud was very painless.
I think an interesting avenue to explore with that product would be more templates/easy-to-start documents/quick tutorials.
LaTeX is the standard in some parts of academia (math, CS, stats) and not others (my brother, a biochemistry student at a public research university with 30k+ students, say nobody has even heard of it there) - I think the amount of market that is still using Word for academic papers (often because they do not know of LaTeX or think they don't have time to learn it) is very significant. ShareLaTeX is definitely a step in making LaTeX more accessible for that segment but there's definitely a long road ahead too.
