Zanadu is a platform devoted to collaborative research on executable notebooks.

Zanadu’s main value added proposition is to

• Manage the production and curate the library of notebooks which are self-contained research documents comprising text (and Latex), code and results windows;
• Considerably streamline the research workflow and review process;
• Let people run the scientist algorithm on their proprietary data from their web browser;
• Enable a flexible dissemination of the research production as executable documents to open or targeted audiences.

Zanadu’s long term mission statement is to actively contribute to the widespread usage of notebooks as the new dominant standard for scientific writing. Notebooks facilitate the critical analysis of scientific research by enabling a clear exposure in a single document of:

• Key concepts and methodology,
• Executable computational procedures,
• Data source which may be verified or altered,
• And live interactive results.

Notebooks have become more and more popular in the scientific community and have generated a thriving ecosystem of toolboxes and extensions to make them the format of choice. At the same time IPython have become as agnostic as possible with extensions to move into other languages with large communities of users such as R.

Zanadu is the first platform for Notebooks allowing a full control of the process from production, review to dissemination, backed by the huge computing power of Microsoft Azure.

Zanadu will contribute considerably to the Notebook revolution.