eBook followers will remember that Oprah endorsed eBooks early on, even choosing one of the early eBook readers as one of her Favorite Things. Now she has caused a bitstorm around an eBook version of Suze Orman’s book Women and Money.
The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s “Women & Money” were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, , for a period of 33 hours.
“I believe `Women & Money’ is the most important book I’ve ever written,” Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. “So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.”
The download offer “has built excitement for Suze’s book across all formats,” Julie Grau, the book’s publisher, said in a statement.
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If you follow XML in the financial services arena, you undoubtedly know about XBRL, the emerging standard for financial data reporting that is really taking hold at the SEC and the regulatory agencies of EU countries. But a lesser known but equally intriguing standard is RIXML, the Research Information Exchange Markup Language. RIXML.org is a consortium of buy-side and sell-side research firms, and vendors, that is defining an XML-based standard for categorizing, tagging and distributing global investment research.
Like XBRL, RIXML has great potential to enhance how financial analysts work with financial content. With rich, XML-encoded financial information, you can imagine analysts finding ways to better filter information, to develop powerful queries and reports, and to commingle research content from various sources. I was talking to colleague Geoff Bock about this, and we both know financial analysts who do all this now, but do it with Excel. They are the ultimate Excel power users, and they consume and model vast amounts of financial information. And they typically do this under tremendous time pressure.
XBRL clearly has traction–9,540,000 Google hits, lots of vendor support, and a roadmap to mandatory SEC adoption (warning, big PDF file!). RIXML is a more nascent effort–9,740 Google hits–but its potential impact is significant. Financial reporting and research data already has an important lifecycle. We see it in the markets every day, though most of us only from a distance. XML has the potential to make this lifecycle much more efficient, much more content-rich, and much less dependent on the manual efforts of those frazzled financial analysts. Instead of 16-hour days during earnings season, maybe they can work, heck, 14-hour days! (Actually, their managers will likely just give them a few more companies to cover…)
By the way, an obvious question to ask about RIXML is how it might integrate with XBRL. This too is nascent, though the two organizations have signed a very general memorandum of understanding. You can also find a related presentation here (PDF again).
UPDATE: The SEC has launched a new website, Financial Explorer, that enables users to generate custom data from the underlying XBRL-encoded reports.
Are you investigating technology for protecting your company’s high-value documents and other intellectual property? Is better content security on your company’s plate for 2008? Need to know the current state-of-the-art regarding enterprise rights management?
Gilbane Group is conducting a survey of companies that are investigating, adopting, and using rights management solutions for high-value enterprise content (contracts, HR policies, product strategies, regulatory compliance certifications, and so on). The results will be included in our upcoming study on Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness.
We are seeking input from IT, content management, and IT security professionals across multiple industries (excluding consumer media companies, which are outside the scope of this study). Some familiarity with enterprise rights management (ERM) or information rights management (IRM) is necessary (i.e., respondents need to have at least heard of the term).
The survey is online and takes about fifteen minutes to complete. In exchange for participation, qualified respondents will receive the aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Respondents who fill out the survey in full and provide a valid email business address are also entered into a random drawing for a free one-hour phone consultation with the Gilbane ERM analyst team. Take the survey now. Contact us if you have any questions about the research or qualifications to take the survey.
This week’s thoughts come from the pile of serendipitous reading that routinely piles up on my desk. In this case a short article in Information Week caught my eye because it featured the husband of a former neighbor, Ken Krugler, co-founder of Krugle. I’d set it aside because a fellow, David Eddy, in my knowledge management forum group keeps telling us that we need tools to facilitate searching for old but still useful source code. In order to do it, he believes, we need an investment in semantic search tools that normalize the voluminous language variants scattered throughout source code. That would enable programmers to find code that could be re-purposed in new applications.
Now, I have taken the position that source code is just one set of intellectual property (IP) asset that is wasted, abandoned and warehoused for technology archaeologists of centuries hence. I just don’t see a solid business case being made to develop search tools that will become a semantic search engine for proprietary treasure troves of code.
Enters old acquaintance Ken Krugler with what seems to be, at first glance, a Web search system that might be helpful for finding useful code out on the Web, including open source. I have finally visited his Web site and I see language and new offerings that intrigue me. “Krugle Enterprise is a valuable tool for anyone involved in software development. Krugle makes software development assets easily accessible and increases the value of a company’s code base. By providing a normalized view into these assets, wherever they may be stored, Krugle delivers value to stakeholders throughout the enterprise.” They could be onto something big. This is a kind of enterprise search I haven’t really had time to think about but may-be I will now.
One thing leading to another, I checked out Ken Krugler’s blog and saw an earlier posting: Is Writing Your Own Search Engine Hard? This is recommended reading for anyone who even dabbles in enterprise search technology but doesn’t want to get her/his hands dirty with the mechanics. It is short, to-the-point and summarizes how and why so many variations of search are battling it out in the marketplace.
I don’t want end-users to struggle too much with the under the hood details but when you are thinking about enterprise search for your organization, it is worth considering how much technology you are getting for the value you want it to deliver, year after year, as your mountains of IP content accrue. Don’t give this idea short shrift because search is an investment that keeps giving if it is chosen appropriately for the problem you need to solve.
So says Tim Bray. And he would know; he helped invent it. Tim’s post is a very nice “where are they now” that gives credit to the interesting collection of folks who worked very hard on XML in the early days.
Hat tip, Dave Winer.
FatWire Software announced that it has acquired Future Tense Solutions, its Australian-based reseller. Prior to the close of the acquisition, Future Tense had exclusive rights to sell and distribute FatWire products throughout Australia and New Zealand. With this acquisition, FatWire gains a presence and direct access to customers in the region. Nigel Trinca, managing director of Future Tense, assumes the role of vice president of FatWire Australia and Future Tense co-founder, Bill Prescott, also joins the company. Future Tense Solutions was founded by a team of former Open Market colleagues who worked with FatWire’s product, Content Server. http://fatwire.com
Integration versus Acquisition, that is. Certainly the latter does not preclude the former. And we expect that it will most certainly not.
SDL and Idiom are making a strategic industry announcement with this move, with both obvious and subtle impacts on both the translation and content management industries. Most obvious is the influence it can have on the impact of integrating workflows, a year-long discussion we’ve having with the Gilbane community. Bringing more visibility to the Global Content Lifecycle and hopefully, more conversation on adding value throughout is a positive event. Ramifications on the state of content management interoperability, LSP neutrality, and market uptake for Idiom’s deep investment in the SaaS approach will be more subtle impacts, which will be important for our community to understand.
We’ll keep you posted as always, but note today’s facts:
- This is not SDL’s first foray into merging the translation and content management technologies, demonstrated by May’s Tridion acquisition and the more recent investment in Trisoft, strengthening an already “deep” partnership albeit with no public announcement. Tridion caught the attention of marketing content management professionals; Trisoft should have caught the attention of techcomm content management professionals. Idiom will capture the attention of both.
- As we discussed in Gilbane Boston 2007, organizations that understand the impact of multilingual communications on efficiency, brand, and revenue are moving globalization strategies upstream to “bake in” quality at source content creation. One of my favorite quotes during our Quality at the Source session was from Richard Sikes from the Localization Institute, who reminded our audience that “the whip cracks loudest at the farthest end.”
- The acquisition announcement will trigger more conversation on topics included in our 2008 Globalization Wish List, in particular the idea of “closing the gap.”
See our post on the main Gilbane analyst blog. And stay tuned.
SDL continues to execute its growth and expansion strategies with today’s announcement that it has acquired Idiom for approximately $22 million US. The current plan is to operate the Idiom business as an autonomous unit under the direction of Idiom CEO Mike Iacobucci.
The acquisition raises all kinds of questions, of course. Idiom is one of the companies with big potential to bring innovation to the language services industry, which has been ripe for change for some time now. More resources to execute could mean more value for customers sooner. Will the Idiom technology (and SaaS offer) reach its full potential as an agent of change under SDL? What about the impact on buyer choice — how will the acquisition affect companies coming into the market? Stay tuned for analysis of these and other key questions coming out of today’s news.
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