John Hosken has been closely involved in writing about, planning and implementing technology for the pharmaceutical industry for the past decade. After a career in financial and consultancy marketing, he joined Merck in 1997 as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s first internet strategy managers. He helped the company to get involved in using the web to market to doctors in a wide range of countries, moving to Acurian to develop its franchise in the clinical trials online recruitment market, and then held a range of pharmaceutical marketing posts in various agencies. He has been writing on pharmaceutical marketing and technology topics for Pharmafocus since 2002.