About our Company

1999

Extra Byte was born on January 4, 1999, as a one-man Company, registered by PhD Stanislav (Stan) Sykora. For a long time, it was run from Stan’s home office in Castano Primo, located in the vicinity of Milano, Italy. At that time Stan’s idea was to do Science, more than profit, but the business was actually not bad, either. Building on his NMR competence Stan became a regular participant at many scientific meetings, published tens of papers, ran a very popular website (Stan’s Hub, still ticking) and an equally popular NMR Blog.

Image: “Valtice NMR”, Czech Republic, 2005

2018

In 2018 Stan met PhD Ester Maria Vasini, an energetic physicist with a PhD from University of Bologna, and they decided to join forces and transform Extra Byte from a one-man show into a “real company” taking the form of business Associates (Snc in Italy). The new Extra Byte Snc was registered on 24 January 2018.

Image: “EUROMAR”, France, 2018

2021

It proceeded to grow and gather strength in the form of business, the first employee, and several external collaborators, until it became clear that the next appropriate move would be another transformation, this time into a Limited enterprise (Srl in Italy). The current Extra Byte Srl was legally born on 9 March 2021 and it presently operates from nice offices in the central square of Castano Primo (Piazza Mazzini 80). An advantageous location, considering that the town is 15 minutes drive from Malpensa, the main, international, Milan airport.

Image: “GIDRM international conference”, L’Aquila, 2019

Naturally, during all that time, our modus operandi, and our mission kept changing. Presently, our goal is to become a significant global player in the area of community-friendly, independent player in the development of STEM software.

We cherish math and algorithmic challenges, especially when they can be translated into C++.

Above all, we love solving problems, not complicating them!

Should you have a hard-looking problem, please send us a feeler.
And should you like working with us, please send us a CV.

Our Mission

Extra Byte strives to excel in scientific and technical computing, with no strings attached. Our proven historic expertise is in NMR of all kinds (spectroscopy, relaxometry, imaging), which is therefore our starting area. However, we are ready to move beyond that boundary, towards all STEM branches.

Our strong point is the development of novel algorithms for scientific computing as well as refinement of the characteristics of existing ones (efficiency, robustness). Most such algorithms are actually templates applicable across a whole range of scientific data evaluation areas.

Whenever this activity requires competence and R&D in hardware, even electronic engineering, we cultivate that aspect as well, be it independently or through collaborations with OEM’s (original equipment manufacturers) on specific data acquisition problems and requirements.

We are strongly community-oriented, promoting scientific computing software that combines low-cost with high quality. Like mathematics, we consider algorithms and even individual function codes as public tools; commercially, our target is developing (and helping people to develop) complete applications.
We are also strongly interested in GxP, particularly in the area of data acquisition, formatting, archivation, and evaluation practices.

An important part of our mission is to promote practical applications of diverse scientific metrology fields, bridging, via scientific computing, the gap between academic R&D and its practical applications in Industries as well as in public Institutions.

Our Team

Owner

Stanislav Sykora

Stanislav Sykora (Stan) currently works at Extra Byte of which he is an Associate (Partner). Stan’s original education is in Nuclear and Technical Physics and in Chemical Physics (PhD). However, since he lived though many seasons and thus has accumulated many interests and worked in many fields; particularly Magnetic Resonance in all its branches (spectroscopy since 1964, relaxometry, imaging, theory, technology, and applications), but also in Electrical Engineering, Software Development (since 1965), and Math (from Applied to Number Theory). Extra Byte has several open projects, the most important of which are ‘Automatic molecular structure verification (ASV) based on NMR spectra’ and the ‘Td-Relax NMR Relaxometry library’.

Owner

Ester Maria Vasini

Ester Maria Vasini (Ester) currently works at Extra Byte of which she is owner with Stanislav Sykora. Ester graduated in Physics (MS) and Environmental Engineer (PhD).

Ester has started her adventure with NMR in 2009 (BS), specializing mainly on Relaxometry and Imaging. For Extra Byte she is in charge for the management of the project ‘Td-Relax NMR Relaxometry library’.

R&D scientist

Giovanni Selva

Giovanni Selva
works at Extra Byte as R&D scientist. Giovanni graduated in Nuclear Physics at the University of Milan in 2018.

After some months spent teaching in high school, he started his NMR adventure with Extra Byte in 2019.