Emu Bob

ECM Acquisitions I Didn't Notice

2008-07-11T16:03:34-07:00

These two acquisitions happened so quietly during the festive season last year that I didn't notice until today.

Firstly Australian ECM vendor Harvest Road hit the chopping block on December 21st 2007. They appeared to completely melt down last year and sold their assets to Italian vendor Giunti Labs. Founded in 1841, Guinti has to be one of the oldest content management companies around so hopefully their product has found a stable home. CMSWire has some more info.

Then Blackboard closed their acquisition of San Francisco-based Xythos on New Year's Eve 2007 for $25.5 million. This is appears to be a solid valuation of 4.5 time sales - their sales for 2007 were around $5.7 million. The valuation seems more appropriate for a software as a service company and they were mainly a licenses company but then again this is still a reasonable deal for Blackboard shareholders as BBBB is trading at 4.8 times revenues. The much larger, well funded Blackboard is a nice home for their products. Xythos' solid WebDAV-compliant repository has always seemed impressive, at least technically.

Xythos was founded in 1999 and raised a Series A of $6.3 million in 2001, a Series B that there is no info on and then a $4 million Series C in 2003. In 2001 Red Herring mentioned that their Series A had a post-money valuation of $20.2 million so a $25.5 million sale over 6 years later isn't exactly a home run but a whole lot better than nothing.

Top 10 Tips of Digital Entrepreneurs

2008-07-02T18:34:19-07:00

Brad Howarth spent some time talking to a variety of entrepreneurs, including me, on what it takes to be successful for an article in SmartCompany. The collection of secrets are:

Make every dollar count
Become a global economist
Don't lose focus
Listen, adapt and change
Cultivate free advice
Learn to sell
Become a name dropper
Keep your team informed
Be wary of consultants and advisers
Be talked about

My original three 'tips' I sent to Brad for the story were:

1. Focus
Initially Ephox targeted the broadest possible market we could. As a start-up in Australia this meant the small business market before trying the education market. Both of these efforts resulted in some great media coverage but few sales. When we started to focus on partnering with larger software companies such as IBM, Oracle and Vignette we were able to access much larger opportunities, build alliances and tailor our product development. Large customers do see value in the ‘next big thing’ but more often than not their concerns are around more mundane issues such as integration costs, reference sites and quality.

2. Sales Execution
Despite being a highly technology-oriented founder I always had a great appreciation of the importance of sales and marketing. However, appreciating the need for sales and marketing and translating that through to significant sales was another thing. We wasted a lot of business development and marketing activities on opportunities that were difficult or impossible to translate into sales. It is critical for a startup to have a professional discipline around the sales process and the day-to-day execution of sales.

3. Think Long Term
Continuous improvement of product, sales, marketing, engineering and operations takes time to add up and take hold. Ephox took three years to get its first $1m in sales, 18 months to get the next million, 12 months for the third million, 10 months for the fourth, 8 months for the fifth, 6 months for the sixth, 4 months for the seventh and is now on course for its first $1m month. I have always had an unshakable belief that if we improve every part of the business every day of every year our efforts will translate into superb results over time. In my experience, the cliché that starting a business is a marathon and not a sprint is completely true. A smart, committed and passionate team who share a view of the long term is essential.

Australians Fatter

2008-06-25T15:18:10-07:00

In a high steaks competition Australians are now apparently out-eating Americans at the Obesity Games.

Bloody hell, lighten up!

Apple Design Awards

2008-06-19T22:19:39-07:00

Apple announced the winners of their design awards last week of which their were two notable winners.

The first is Screenflow. It looks like superb screen recording software that I am downloading as we speak.

The second is Aussie start-up Remember The Milk. I use RTM quite a bit and highly recommend it. Their iPhone app is great. Well done!

IBM Gets Closer to Web 2.0

2008-06-15T22:31:15-07:00

A few years ago our marketing director and I were chatting with an IBM marketing executive about search engine optimization. We were amateurs when it comes to SEO but we held court for more than an hour and they took several pages of notes. The one thing we knew about SEO was that inbound links improve your ranking.

I mentioned how Microsoft, IBM's sworn enemy, appeared to be quite capable in mobilizing its many bloggers to improve its rankings. Surely IBM, with 386,558 staff, must have a built-in channel that could improve its rankings via links on its employee's blogs? Nothing dodgey... simply a suggestion that the world's greatest portal software was WebSphere and wouldn't it be great if that was what you truly felt that way, Valued IBMer, you could consider a link. It would only be a matter of time before IBM could rise to the top of search engines in their chosen keywords if just 0.1% of their staff used their blogs to link to "service-oriented architecture", "grid computing" or "anything else".

Whilst this may actually be a bad idea as IBM may end up banished from search results entirely, IBM's lack of basic insight seemed to be from another era. A few years on and somebody amongst 386,558 people has clearly started to get the Brave New Web. IBM has launched the IBM Resource Center (or 'Diggable Resources') powered by the Web 2.0 darling Digg.

So far Diggable Resources appears to be an isolated good idea within Big Blue. The small number of "diggs" says that huge army of IBMers still need a kick along. For this idea to truly be successful they need the general public to participate but 370,000 people can certainly give it a good kick start.

The Power of Checklists

2008-06-01T21:27:49-07:00

Adrian recently wrote of the checklist our developers use before declaring that a bug fix or enhancement is truly finished.

In discussing the benefits of checklists Adrian pointed to an article from the National Review of Medicine about the crusade of a Dr Peter Pronovost. The cause that the John Hopkins professor has taken on is somewhat simple but devastatingly effective. His thesis is that the usage of checklists in Intensive Care Units can dramatically decrease complications and therefore deaths and costs.

Compelled to read on, I discovered a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande offering an in-depth review of what the good Dr Peter has been up to and I highly recommend reading it. In discussing Dr Pronovost's results:

Michigan's infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

His initiative has saved more than fifteen hundred lives in Michigan alone. Do you recall the coverage the so-called 'Subway Hero' Wesley Autrey received last year? He was undoubtedly brave and heroic but where are Dr Pronovost's front page headlines?

When asked how much it would cost for him to do for the whole US what he did for Michigan, he said:

About two million dollars, maybe three, mostly for the technical work of signing up hospitals to participate state by state and coordinating a database to track the results. He’s already devised a plan to do it in all of Spain for less.

When I am unfortunate enough to find myself or a loved one in an emergency room I sure hope they use a checklist. Of all the people in need of funding and support in healthcare research, Dr Pronovost should be at the top of the list.

As Adrian points out, checklists must also be widely applicable to fields beyond medicine. I am sure they would have an impact anywhere where experts are relied on to 'practice an art' yet are busy and stressed. Based upon Dr Pronovost's research, if we all swallowed some humble pie and submitted to a checklist or two the world would be a better place.

I am off to write a checklist or two.

Ephox is in Europe

2008-05-30T16:46:25-07:00

Ephox is now in Europe! I have just signed the lease for our new offices near London.

We are moving into the ground floor of Gainsborough House on Thames Street in Windsor.

The location is superb. The building is located right next to a pedestrian-only bridge over the Thames River. The beautiful Eton is just across the bridge and if you look up you can see the imposing Windsor Castle. There are many restaurants, pubs and shops around. It was almost too picturesque! I am hoping the great surrounds will enable us to build a strong, fun culture.

An appealing thing for me was the office is very close to the train station. Getting to central London involves catching a 6 minute train to Slough and then a 15 minute train to Paddington - very reasonable.

We are now recruiting several account managers to work alongside our CTO Adrian Sutton (who now lives in the UK), our European MD Mark Whitehouse, and, shortly, myself. I am planning to move to London for about 12 months starting in July.

Scaling Web Apps

2008-05-28T00:53:21-07:00

The approach that Facebook is taking to scale features from 0 to 70M users is quite interesting:

The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact of many real users hitting many machines by means of a "dark launch" period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends without a single UI element drawn on the page. With the "dark launch" bugs fixed, we hope that you enjoy Facebook Chat now that the UI lights have been turned on.

Transportation

2008-05-27T11:29:17-07:00

The US Embassy was fun today. I arrived at 8am for my 8.30am appointment and the queue seemed reasonable. I was number 4 out of 9.

Except that the DHS had only one person to work their way through the queue and they didn't even arrive for another 2.5 hours. At about 11am he finally started seeing people and I was out by 1:30pm. G'ah - I think I reread every article in the paper 3 times.

But, in case the DHS reads this, thank you so much for letting me back into the country. Or at least for considering to let me back into the country... apparently I have another round of stuff to go through when I land :)

London Tube Map

2008-05-26T11:46:30-07:00

The famous, traditional London Tube map has only a tenuous link to actual geography. For example, Paddington, Bayswater and Notting Hill Gate are shown running down the map as if they went from north to south. They in fact go from east to west along the top of Hyde Park.

For anyone trying to decipher this sort of thing I have found this nifty Tube Journey Planner that overlays the tube stations on Google Maps.

Links for 2007-05-11 [My Web 2.0]

2007-05-12T00:00:00-05:00

Business Crawls onto Web 2.0

Links for 2007-04-17 [My Web 2.0]

2007-04-18T00:00:00-05:00

Two views of Web 2.0 in business

Links for 2007-01-25 [My Web 2.0]

2007-01-26T00:00:00-06:00

Links for 2007-01-14 [My Web 2.0]

2007-01-15T00:00:00-06:00

Links for 2007-01-12 [My Web 2.0]

2007-01-13T00:00:00-06:00

Links for 2007-01-04 [My Web 2.0]

2007-01-05T00:00:00-06:00

Knowledge Management 2.0

Links for 2006-12-22 [My Web 2.0]

2006-12-23T00:00:00-06:00