Mark Logic Lands $12.5M in Capital to Sustain High Rate of Growth

I'm pleased to report that Mark Logic has announced the closing of a $12.5M round of financing from Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital.

While most VCs are surely doing some portfolio triage in response to the current economic environment, and while that means that duo-syllabic, business-model-free, web 2.0, social-something start-ups will not have easy access to funding, the flip side of the "too sick to save" part of triage is that some set of companies -- presumably the promising ones -- will indeed have access to capital on favorable terms. People seem to forget that triage means "to divide in three groups" and that while things may indeed be grim for the group III patients, that things can be pretty good for the group I ones.

Industry rants aside, we're quite happy to have closed this round because it will help us to sustain our current high rate of growth. Recall that Deloitte ranked us the 4th fastest growing IT company in Silicon Valley in last year's Technology Fast 500 rankings.

You'll also notice some perhaps subtle changes in our positioning that we've rolled out with the financing announcement:

• Our corporate soundbite has changed from "provider of the industry's leading XML server" to "a provider of infrastructure software for information-centric applications."

• Numerous changes to the company's boilerplate which reflect the new focus on information-centricity and the changing nature of our customer base.
  

All of the changes reflect our increasing view that XML will be the means to an end and that the end is information-centric applications -- applications that are not solely data-centric and handle the 20% of enterprise information that is nicely structured in short records, but that tap into and unlock that value of all of an enterprise's information. Whether that information fits nicely into traditional software infrastructure and databases or not.

Thank you to our customers for helping us to achieve the success we've had thus far, thank you to all Mark Logic employees for your hard work in driving that success, and finally thank you to our investors for their continued belief in and support of the company.

My Favorite Wolfram Alpha Query

There's been so much hype about the would-be, Google-killer, computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha, that I've been reluctant to blog about it both because I'm not eager to contribute to the hype tsunami but also because I'm so overwhelmed by the number of articles I've bookmarked that it would take hours to sort them out into a coherent post.

To give you an idea of how much Stephen Wolfram thinks his work, the "quick introduction" video is 13 minutes and 23 seconds.

In short, I think Wolfram Alpha is "Powerset meets semantic web." What do I mean by that?

• Powerset was all about natural language for query formulation and the non-elimination of stopwords. They accused search engines of making you grunt in "pidgin English," eventually leading to the creation of grunting pidgeons t-shirts.

• Semantic web is, in my opinion, all about the web as queryable database.

Wolfram Alpha is about putting those two ideas together. Wolfram Alpha will use the contents of the web to get you an answer -- as opposed to a link that might contain an answer -- to your question. (It is like MarkLogic in returning answers, not links.)

But with all the hype and pre-positioning, I think this thing is way more likely to be the next Cuil (total crater) or the next Powerset (expedient early $100M exit to Microsoft) than the next Google. Ironically, Google itself didn't come with massive pre-hype. They just built up a great business.

So, rather than take a deep, heavy approach to Wolfram Alpha, I thought up a fun example instead. I asked Wolfram Alpha: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Here's what Wolfram Alpha said, which wasn't bad:


More information:

• Wake us when Wolfram Alpha can solve an actual problem (Valleywag)
• Wolfram Alpha: The next Google or the next Cuil (Mashable)
• Harvard posts the Wolfram Alpha video (TechCrunch)
  

Great Write-Up from Kurt Cagle on the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference

Just a quick post to say a few final things with regard to the 2009 Mark Logic User Conference.

• Thanks to everyone for making it, truly, the best conference we've done to date.
• For those many who loved the opening video, there is a high-quality version of it here
• I look forward to seeing you next year where we will work hard to make it bigger and better

In talking with our marketing VP, Tracy Eiler, about the conference, we realized that back at Business Objects we were somewhere in the $60M to $85M annual revenues range before our user conference had 400+ people in attendance at the opening keynote.

And, finally, I wanted to highlight a great write-up of the conference by Kurt Cagle on the XML Today blog.

Excerpt:

Yet the Mark Logic conference was different first in that it’s core product is so fundamentally built around XML-based technologies. The importance of this in and of itself should not be minimized. Most user conferences tend to involve major conferences that have effectively defined themselves clearly and established their dominance in their respective fields. For all the pervasiveness of XML I cannot think of a single company that has advanced to the point where they have these critical pieces of community - a developer network, an ecosystem of commercial vendors and a strong (and growing) customer base - solely on the basis of XML.

What’s more astonishing is that in a year where Apple cancelled a critical MacWorld conference, where companies are reeling left and right from the effects of the economy, and where tens of thousands of programmers and IT professionals are either now unemployed or fearful for their jobs, the attendance at this year’s Mark Logic conference exceeded that of last year. Many of the people who attended this year did so on their own dime, a testament to the importance that they attribute to this technology and product.

OpenTable Has Been Chosen: A Successful IPO

One of my favorite kids' movie scenes has always been the inside the claw game sequence in Toy Story. The heroes (Buzz and Woody) are trapped inside one of those games where you drop a claw and try to win a novelty gift, in this case a mutant alien doll.

Buzz: Who's in charge here?
Dolls (looking up): The claw!!
Another Doll: The claw is our master!
Another Doll: The claw chooses who will go and who will stay!
...
Doll (grasped by the claw): I have been chosen! Farewell my friends!!

I love the accidental assignment of reverence to a game of chance. I love the perspective it provides on the "why me" situations we all inevitably face. And I love it as a metaphor for business situations.

For example, wearing my MBA hat, I'd say that if you want to get picked by the claw:

• You need to be inside the machine, not anywhere else (e.g., on the loading dock)
• You need to be at a good place inside the machine (e.g., after analyzing a pattern of where the claw drops more or less frequently)
• And the rest is up to some combination of chance and external forces

Applying this to start-up companies, if you want to do an IPO:

• You need to be a growing private company
• You need to get yourself into the IPO window by hitting a set of size, growth, and profitability parameters
• And you need the claw to pick you

This week, the claw chose OpenTable, the online restaurant reservations service founded in 1998, which today includes 10,000 restaurants and seats an average of 2.8M diners per month. Let's take a quick look at their numbers:

• 2007 revenue: $41.1M (+51% over 2006)
  
• FTQ07 revenue: $29.4M (FTQ = first three quarters)
  
• FTQ08 revenue: $41.3M (+40% over FTQ07)
  

• 2007 operating income: -$0.9M
  
• FTQ07 net income: -$0.7M
  
• FTQ08 net income: $0.3M
  

So we see revenue growth of about 40-50%, profitability of about breakeven, and size of about $50M. (If you apply the FTQ08 growth rate to 2007 revenue, you end up figuring around $57M in 2008 revenue.)

All in all, I'd say this is pretty well in line with my estimated IPO window of 50/50/0 -- i.e., $50M in revenues, 50% growth rate, and 0% operating margin.

As of 12/31/08, they employed 297 people.

Prior to the offering, which raised $60M for the company, its capital structure included:

• Benchmark Capital: 26.4%
• Impact Venture Partners: 17.5%
• IAC/InterActive Corp: 10.9%
• Integral Capital Partners: 7.5%

So, in aggregate, it appears that investors own 62.3% of the company for which they paid, in aggregate across three rounds, somewhere between $54M (as per Tradevibes) and $84M which is the total of preferred stock plus additional paid-in capital which presumably includes exercises of common. I don't have time to reconcile the difference right now, but let's call it $60M so we can continue the math fun.

Now, somewhat surprisingly, the stock had a big run-up after it came public. Per this TechCrunch story, the stock rose almost 60% on the first day, giving the company a market capitalization of $600M. That means the investors' aggregate return is about 6:1 ($60M to buy a portion currently worth $360M -- i.e., 60% of $600M). Remember that all these numbers are very rough and I'm reasonably sure the price varied greatly between rounds. But, overall, a healthy 6:1 for the VCs isn't bad.

The San Jose Mercury News dramatized things a bit with this story: OpenTable IPO Ends Drought, Brings Hope to Valley. Excerpt:

But the recent paucity of IPOs has caused alarm for the venture industry,and has intensified a continuing shakeout among valley VC firms.

The benefits of a healthier IPO market should ripple through the tech economy. Investors will use returns from successful IPOs to provide financing for seed-stage and mid-stage companies. Other investors will flock to invest in the valley once they see big payoffs as tech firms go public.

University of San Francisco business Professor Mark Cannice said the activity could "allow the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial machine to shift into a higher gear in 2009 and 2010."

Overall, I'd say it is good news for the valley and, I'd argue, the individual investor (see past rants), if the IPO window does indeed open again.

For more information:

• The OpenTable S-1
• OpenTable Shares Soar Nearly 60% in IPO Feast (AP)
• OpenTable IPO Harkens Back to Dot-Com Heyday (MarketWatch)
• Investors Find Appetite for Tech Offerings (New York Times)
• OpenTable Shares Surge on First Day of Trading (Mercury News)
  

Highlights from 1Q09 Venture Capital Survey

Every quarter, the San Jose Mercury News publishes the results of and commentary on a venture capital (VC) survey. The lead article in this quarter's survey, Steep Plunge, provides some indication as to how things went.

Highlights from the VC survey:

• $3B in VC invested in 1Q09 nationally, down 61% from 1Q08
• $1.2B invested in the San Francisco Bay Area, down 43% from 4Q08 and down 61% from 1Q08
• 173 Bay Area deals done in 1Q09, down 26% from 4Q08 (suggesting deal flow got hit less hard than deal volume)
• Clean technology investments off 84% from 4Q08

The last line of the story says it all:

But with venture industry undergoing its own shakeout, VCs are under greater pressure to target the best opportunities for scarcer dollars, rather than place more bets in expectation that at least one will pay off big.

Other related coverage in the section:

• Silicon Valley Startups Slash Costs to Survive Downturn, an article about how companies are weathering the storm.
• An op-ed piece, Time To Stop Blaming Sarbanes-Oxley for IPO Troubles, by columnist Chris O'Brien with which I don't particularly agree, but from which I nevertheless learned some interesting facts.

SAP's Clear, New, World

Despite my marketing background, I've never been a big fan of the corporate branding programs of technology companies.

• I never thought "Sun was the dot in dot-com," though they did end up the 0 in web 2.0.
• I never understood the whole "liquid" campaign at BEA
• I almost died when PwC firm re-branded itself "Monday."

So I had my natural skeptical reaction to SAP's "clear, new world" branding campaign launched today. I have to say I was also amazed, per the AMR post below, to find that SAP apparently has a president and CEO of marketing (Marty Holmish).

Since I'm pretty busy at my user conference, I won't do an analysis, but just provide a few links here:

• Clear, The Moment I Met You, I Swear by Bruce Richardson at AMR.
• Software Leader SAP Launches Global Brand Campaign press release.
• BI Tool will Create 'Clear' Enterprises in PC World.
  

Congratulations to the 2009 Mark Logic Innovation Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Mark Logic Innovation Awards:

Berico Technologies – Berico started working with Mark Logic last year on an information fusion project for the U.S. Government.

Booz Allen Hamilton – Booz Allen has been working closely with Mark Logic for the last two years. Mark Logic recognizes Booz Allen for its technical vision in finding new and innovative ways of providing solutions to their U.S. Government customers.

Catalyst – Catalyst is using MarkLogic Server as the platform for its next generation release of Catalyst CR, one of the fastest and most scalable e-discovery solutions on the market.

JetBlue Airways – JetBlue has implemented a dynamic corporate publications system called BlueGuru, which powers the airline's corporate safety and compliance initiatives.

John Wiley & Sons – In March 2009, John Wiley & Sons delivered its new publishing application, Wiley Custom Select.

Springer – Springer has launched two products this year based on MarkLogic Server. The first is AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns, and subject experts within scientific research.

The McGraw-Hill Companies – Business Exchange, a new product launched in recent months, is a site where users can track, create, and participate in business news topics; develop profiles based on interests; and network with other business leaders.

Here's a picture we snapped at the awards ceremony:

User Conference Opening Video

Here is the wonderful opening video made by Tracy Eiler and Susan Marfise that we showed at the opening of the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference.

Follow my Tweetstream at the Mark Logic User Conference 2009

While I'll try to blog on a few sessions, I think most of my communcations will be short, via Twitter. Here is where you can find my Tweetstream from the conference.

Here is a way to monitor the conference hashtag (#MLUC09) overall via Twazzup. Or, if you prefer, you can do so with Twitter search.

Notes from James Surowiecki Talk at Mark Logic User Conference 2009

James started out by telling the story of an ox-weight guessing contest analyzed by Francis Galton. He thought the crowd, whose average guess was 1,197 pounds vs. a reality of 1,198, was a mix of a few smart people with a lot of dumb ones. In reality, the crowd was smart.

Under the right conditions, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent; even smarter than the smartest member of the group.

The jelly bean experiment usually produces:

• 3-5% accuracy
• Average better than 95%+ of anyone in the room

Who Wants to be a Millionaire example:

• Phone-a-friend: "experts" get the right answer 2/3rds of the time
• Audience poll: the crowd gets the right answer 90% of the time (and consider who the crowd is!)

Google's entire business is built on the Wisdom of Crowds on the Internet -- by using link structure as a voting mechanism.

Wikipedia a phenomenal example of collective labor (dk: despite the Maurice Jarre hoax revealed today)

Described another example of studying craters on Mars where groups did as well as geologists trained 5-7 years. Excerpt:

The result, in NASA's words: "the automatically computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters." And these people weren't even being paid.

The racetrack is his favorite example of collective intelligence. The odds on horses are almost perfect predictors of race outcome. (In a study of seven-horse races at Belmont,) favorites predicted to win 33% and won 34%, fourth favored 12% of the time, won 12% of the time, et cetera. Almost perfect judgment. And the crowd of betters is not exclusively experts. A lot are not: cranks, rookies, those seeking a nice day at the track. "I only bet on chestnut-colored horses" -- but somehow when you aggregate those bets, you get an accurate forecast.

There are companies starting to use these tools -- e.g., prediction markets, attempts to use a market-based tool to predict outcomes. First one was done at a b-school at the University of Iowa. Idea: markets do a relatively good job (in general, not recently!!) of forecasting in a variety of circumstances. Can we use them to predict non-financial things? So they tried presidential elections. Since 1998 that market has done a better job than Gallup polls -- election-eve forecasts off by 1.2%.

Now there are public markets for lots of things and lots of bets (e.g., will Michael Jackson be convicted, dk: will Lance win the 2009 Tour de France). See Intrade which call every sentate race correctly and 49/50 states in the recent presidential election.

HP, in the 1990s, set up an internal prediction market for printer sales. 25-30 people done on lunch hour, small financial incentives. That market was more accurate than the elaborate forecasting system 3/4ths of the time.

Eli Lilly doing this to forecast which drugs will make it through clinical trials. Microsoft used to predict when software projects will finish!

Reality is in big organizations information doesn't often get from where it is to where it needs to be:

• Hoarding: information is power
• Fear, afraid to say what they think. Does boss want the truth?
• Perverse incentives: budgeting systems get gamed

Obstacles get in the way. With right collective intelligence tools, the only incentive is to be right.

But it only works under certain circumstances:

• Dysfunction: rioters, lynch mobs, market crazes
• Corporate meetings: after 15 minutes we end up all now dumber than we were when we entered!

Three basic ingredients needed:

• Aggregation: way to aggregate individual judgments into collective one. There are lots of way to do this: odds, markets, averages. Not talking about the suggestion box where a guy at the top selectively picks ideas.
  

• Diversity: the collective opinion does not necessary equal "consensus." The more diverse, the smarter and better the decisions. Diversity means different types of mistakes get made -- uncorrelated errors. Diversity eliminates groupthink. The longer homogeneous groups talk, the dumber they get. Technique: Devil's advocate, invented by the Catholic Church -- appointed someone when considering canonization (i.e., Sainthood) process they would appoint (literally) an advocate for the Devil.

• Independece. Want people relying on their own judgment and not immitating others. How many people wake up and say "I look forward to conforming today." But we are nevertheless immitative beings. Experiment in Times Square: a guy gazes up at a window. When you put 5 people on a street corner looking up, 45% of others look up. With 8 people, 80% gaze up. Don't go around the room asking people for a conclusion at the end of a meeting -- want independence.
  

Actuary joke: three acturaries are hunting. First guy shoots at a duck and misses 20 feet to the right. Second shoots and misses 20 feet to the left. And the third guy shouts out "we got it!"

Alternate side of the street parking example. He lives in Brooklyn. If the other cars have not been moved to the other side, he doesn't. And he's never got a ticket.

Note that talkative people tend to dominate group discussions. This would be OK if talkative people were smart. However, there is no correlation between talkativeness and intelligence.

Submarine story: the USS Scorpion, lost at sea. Hopeless task to find, transmissions too infrequent. John Craven built a diverse team to try and locate it: scenario analysis. Asked the group to bet (using bottles of Scotch as the incentive) on scenarios and on variables (e.g., rate of descent). Ran the data through Bayes' algorithm. Ship was eventually found 220 yards from where the model driven by Craven's men predicted -- and no one member of the team had actually predicted that spot.

Wow!

Great speech!

Fred Wilson Presentation to Google on Disruption

I don't need to comment much here other than to say the obvious -- I wouldn't be embedding this talk if I didn't think it was excellent.

Below find a presentation by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York City, who writes the well regarded A VC blog. He's presenting this at Google's campus in Mountain View, California this Wednesday at 10:30 AM -- so you're getting here about 1.5 days before Google is!

Disruption

View more presentations from fredwilson.

Check Out the Mark Logic User Conference Blog

Well, it's almost here. The Mark Logic 2009 User Conference is this week in San Francisco, Tuesday through Thursday, May 12-14, with pre-conference training sessions available tomorrow, 5/11/09.

I've blogged about the conference about 10 times already so I won't do that again here.

Instead, in the news department, I do have two items to report:

• Last week we launched an official Mark Logic User Conference blog which will feature contributions from several people, but the lead blogger will be Scott "The Content Wrangler" Abel. I'd like to thank Scott for doing this and ask everyone to check out the blog. Scott is not only a great writer, but he's an expert in all-things-content so I'm sure the blog will be outstanding.
  

• We have announced the official Twitter hashtag for the conference: #MLUC09. The conference hasn't even started yet and there's already some healthy activity.

I look forward to seeing you next week. I guess it's time to start working on my slides for Tuesday morning. Or can that wait until Monday?

Precision, Confidence, and When The Dead Peaked

The other day I found this New York Times story, Bring Out Your Dead, about The Dead's "resurrection" tour this Spring, and it both cracked me up and got me thinking.

Excerpt:

I asked [a guy I'd met] when he thought the Dead reached its peak, game to try out a half-formed argument for 1975 or thereabouts.

“Well, I agree with the people who say it was May 8, 1977,” he said.

Take a minute to think of the different levels at which one could answer the question, when did The Grateful Dead peak?

• By album (e.g., Workingman's Dead)
• By decade (e.g., the 1980s)
• By song (e.g., Touch of Grey)
• By era (e.g., the Pigpen era)
• By keyboardist (e.g., the TC period)
• By year (e.g., 1987)
• By date (e.g., May 8, 1977)

Clearly the specificity with which you answer a question is some implicit sign of knowledge. Ask a layman the height of Mount Everest and you might get "about six miles." Ask a mountaineer and you'll get "29,029 feet."

Sometimes other factors drive specificity. Ask my friend Jon Temple how long he worked at Business Objects and he'll say "36 quarters." I say "9 years." The difference? Jon was in sales and I was in marketing. So specificity can also reflect mentality. (By the way, it's my 20th quarter at Mark Logic.)

But I loved the Deadhead's answer because it wasn't just a precise date -- which itself would have been astounding given the band's 30 years of touring -- it was a whole level beyond that:

• Awareness of the existence of
  
• A group of people who believe it was May 8, 1977
• And concurrence with their opinion
  

Wow.

The article goes on to discuss the Grateful Dead's taping culture and its consequences, which I've long believed provides a forgotten roadmap for media companies in dealing with digitization.

In Praise of Bezos on The Kindle 2 Launch

Communications coach and author Carmine Gallo recently did a pithy piece on BusinessWeek, entitled How Amazon's Bezos Sparked Demand for Kindle 2.0, that identifies 8 successful communications techniques that Bezos used.

This is a great checklist for any marketer:

1. Set the stage
2. Provide context for numbers
3. Conduct a demo
4. Paint a picture for customers
5. Show customers using or talking about the product
6. Share the stage
7. Use analogies
8. Articulate a powerful vision

I always say: using analogies should be like [insert your own -- get it?], automatic second nature to any marketer.

Norm Walsh on The Content Wrangler

Check out this wonderful interview of industry XML guru and Mark Logician Norm Walsh on The Content Wrangler, entitled Endless Possibilities: Norm Walsh on the Changing Nature of Publishing.

Favorite quotes:

• On how long he's been doing XML: "I’ve been doing XML since we spelled it SGML"

• On joining Mark Logic: "As soon as I started talking to people at Mark Logic and had a chance to play with the server, I knew I’d found a group of exceptionally sharp folks who shared my passion for XML."

• On transforming to a database mentality: "Instead of grabbing everything I might need and then filtering through it, I should push the constraints down into the database. Instead of applying XPath expressions to a document I had in hand, I could apply it to the whole database and get nearly instantaneous answers."

• On self-characterization: "I’m a document guy. I think that most of what’s really important to an organization is bound up in documents one way or another."

• On MarkLogic Server integration: "Full text, structured and geospatial searching, for example, are all independent features, but you can compose them together arbitrarily and it “just works” *at speed*."

• On XML ubiquity: "As far as XML goes, we’ve reached a point where it’s used in everything from traditional book publishing to mobile phones to gas pumps. I bet some part of your communication with the world passes through XML more often than you realize on any given day. Everyone using a recent version of Microsoft Office or Open Office is using XML, they just might not know it. I think widespread, general acceptance is upon us."

• On imprint-bias towards relational databases: "If you weren’t already biased by the tabular database systems that you already have, could you imagine in a million years that you would look at an XML document and think, yeah, let’s decompose the elements in this document and put them in columns in tables?"

The full interview is here and I've made a Wordle of it below.

Mark Logic CEO Blog Wins SIIA "Best Corporate Blog" Award

I'm thrilled to report that the Mark Logic CEO Blog, authored by our PR guy Jason Tidwell -- just kidding, authored by me -- won an SIIA CODiE award last night at the CODiE awards gala dinner at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

It's great to see the blog continue to get recognition from ReadWriteWeb, from corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil, from CNBC, from "WebMama" and now from the SIIA, because I work hard to follow a sensible, reader-centric, and sadly rather rare approach:

• I write the blog myself. Nothing is ever ghost-written.
• I write about topics that interest me, regardless of how or whether they relate to selling our software.
• While I do certainly highlight Mark Logic items (e.g., events), I am vigilant in ensuring that the blog does not turn into an advertisement.
  

Thanks again for your support. Lest I forget, we also won best database management system in the software division awards.

End of the IPO Drought in Sight?

See this post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, guest bloggging on Business Insider (nee Silicon Alley Insider) and re-posted on his own well regarded A VC blog, entitled The End of the IPO Drought is Coming.

The five key points of the argument are:

• VCs have been in the penalty box for the dot-com era for nearly 10 years. It may well be time to let them out.

• There are a lot of solid companies in the IPO pipeline

• Many of those solid companies have annuity business models

• When investors want to buy small company stocks again they are going to want to buy simple, one-product businesses they understand that drive growth and aren't too fancy (i.e., no financial tricks). That's what VC creates.

• Sarbanes-Oxley is now well sufficiently well understood so that compliance costs are dropping.

I agree with the first 4 points. On the last one, I'm not yet convinced. Certainly, experience has made things better, but my friends who run small public companies still describe SOX as a 2-4% tax on revenues, which is doubly difficult because these companies often have single-digit margins to begin with, and ergo end up unprofitable after SOX costs.

In addition, he discusses the NVCA (not to be confused with the NCVA at whose events I recently spend too much time) and its proposed four-point plan to restore liquidity to venture capital.

Publishing Content Reusability Chart from StartWithXML

The other day I was reading the report from the StartWithXML project by O'Reilly Media and IdeaLogical, and I encountered this chart which was so good I thought I'd have to share it here.

The chart shows different types of publisher content organized in a two dimension graph with potential for reuse on the X axis and content complexity on the Y axis.


I like the chart for a number of reasons:

• It smashes the myth that content reuse is only for long-lived STM or educational content.

• It reframes the debate from black & white to gray. Too many times, I've heard people say content type X is or isn't reusable. In reality, it's a matter of degree.

• It shows that certain types of non-STM, non-educational content are indeed highly reusable -- e.g., reference, tourism, and cooking.
  

The chart comes from the report, StartWithXML: Making the Case for Applying XML to a Publishing Workflow ($149), which is aimed primarily at "trade" (i.e., book) publishers and educating them on the benefits of XML. Historically, trade publishers have been laggards in embracing XML, perceiving both a lack of need and a lack of potential reuse.

Today, with e-books on the rise and the need to deliver book content in multiple e-book and non-traditional book (e.g., large print) formats, trade publishers are increasingly moving towards XML. But, they shouldn't be focused just on content delivery; they can be equally -- if not more -- focused on content repurposing and reuse.

Suppose you had a collection of travel guides which contained information on hotels and restaurants in a number of French cities. You should like XML because:

• You want to deliver content to multiple formats easily: print books, e-books, the web, iPhones, etc.
  

• You are already reusing content of necessity and would like to make changes only once. A great restaurant might be in both the Brittany and the Best French Restaurants guides and when its phone number changes, you want to change it only once (and approve those changes only once) in your contentbase.
  

• You want the opportunity to cherry-pick and/or slice-and-dice your content to create new products quickly. For example, you might grab the 20ish cities in which the 2009 Tour de France stops and create a Tour de France 2009 guide. Or, if you had recipe content, you might want to slice the recipes that require less than 30 minutes into a Quick Meals cookbook, or those with less than 500 calories into a Light Meals cookbook. Or, perhaps do both with Light Quick Meals or, while we're at it, Light Quick Vegan Meals or Light Quick Mediterranean Meals?
  

If you like the chart, you might well like the report, so go check it out. And if you don't want to pay $149 for the report, at least check out the rest of site, which has about 10 interesting and relevant presentations from people at companies like Hachette, Cengage, Ingram, and others embedded via SlideShare.

10 Lessons from a Failed Startup

I found this great post on VentureBeat, 10 Lessons from a Failed Startup, where entrepreneur Mark Goldenson tells you the ten things he learned from his failed internet TV network for games, PlayCafe.

Here's a summary of the ten things Mark learned:

• Find quick money first
• Content businesses suck (or, do it for love and expect to lose money)
• Know when to value speed vs. stability
• Set a dollar value on your time
• Marketing requires constant expertise
• Control and calculate user acquisition costs
• Form partnerships early, even if informal
• Plan costs conservative and err on the side of raising too much [money]
• The key to negotiating is having options
• Knowing isn't enough
  

You can read the complete post here, which is passionate and full of first-hand, hard-earned wisdom.

Let's hope Mark has better fortunes on his next try which, per the bio, is going to be an innovative venture in web health care. Good luck with it!

New White Paper: XML in the Enterprise Case Studies

I'm pleased to announce (and embed) a new white paper from Mark Logic entitled XML Impacting the Enterprise: 5 Success Stories in Tapping the Power of XML.

The white paper provides an overview of XML, XML servers like MarkLogic Server, and provides 5 examples of companies and how they use MarkLogic to centralize information, improve content reuse, speed the development and the reduce the cost of building content applications.

Here is the white paper in Scribd, e-paper format:

XML Impacting the Enterprise

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Too Funny: Twitter Founders Interviewed in 140-Character Responses

Hats off to Maureen Dowd at the New York Times for the creative idea of interviewing Twitter founders Biz Stone (great name, reminds me of fishing guide Jack Trout) and Evan Williams in 140-character format.

Excerpt:

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)

I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.

ME: You say the brevity of Twitter enhances creativity. So I wonder if you can keep your answers to 140 characters, like Twitter users must.

Clever idea. You can read the full article here.