CMS Watch Escenic Feed

The world is your oyster, but is the Geo-web right for you?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

We all have our computer time-wasters. For some it's games, for others, IM'ing with friends. For me, it's the geo-web. Just as I used to while away the hours with my beloved Rand McNally atlas as a kid, studying the roads and mountain ranges and imagining what it would be like when I got there some day, now I do it with Google Earth. These days I don't have to be as imaginative -- it's all right there on my desktop. Not only can I see the mountain ranges, I can preview the slopes I'll ski on my next vacation in the Alps (if the dollar ever stops being a toy currency). I can search for news stories that happened within a 5 mile radius of the hotel I'm booking, be it in Cleveland, Corsica, or Cape Town.

Web content management vendors Ektron and Escenic, as well as Australian enterprise search vendor Funnelback, are among the few content technology vendors that integrate geo-web map applications with their own. They're often spun under the rubric of "Web 2.0," given that's the moniker put on anything that might also be described as "cool" or "interactive," and vendors of course want to come off as both. Escenic has found a niche supporting news organizations, allowing users to search for news geographically. On the web, Flickr allows you to search for photos that are tagged geographically, simply by clicking on a map. As is often the case, these mashups are heavily reliant on good metadata, or a geographic taxonomy. In other cases, text mining technology will sift through your managed content, look for location-based clues ("London," "Eiffel Tower" or "SFO"), and then assign GPS coordinates to that content as associated metadata, which is in turn fed into the mapping application.

Like many tools that vendors pass off as completely their own, many of the geo-mapping mashups you might see in WCM or enterprise search demos use OEM'd products. Sniffing backwards along that path, I recently chatted at length with the folks at MetaCarta, whose raison d'être is integrating content and maps, delivering what they call "geographic value" to unstructured content. MetaCarta combines text and geographic searches, then plots the results on a map. Smartly, MetaCarta is "map agnostic" -- meaning they'll use Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's mapping system to show the results. Note how it works on the Reuters news site; news is automatically plotted on the canvas of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

As a result of such software, a whole new layer of geo-specific data is added to our content. Standards are emerging to support this geographic tagging, including Google's Keyhole Markup Language, or KML and the Open Geospatial Consortium's GML. If your car or your cell phone has GPS technology, you are creating content just by moving around, or going to pick up milk at the corner store. An interesting new company called Socialight has set up a geographic-based social network letting mobile phone users attach "sticky notes" to locations, so that the next person who drops by can "pick it up." A brave new world of geo-data is emerging, and you will have to manage it.

While this is surely a growing piece of the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that is Enterprise Content Management, there's not necessarily a practical business application for the geo-web in your enterprise. Don't be too quick to be dazzled by the demo; after all, do you really need your CMS to tell you where the local pizza joints are? MetaCarta claims that 74% of documents on the Internet are "geo-relevant," or plottable on a map. Is the same true of the content in your enterprise? Will plotting your documents geographically add value to the experience, or enable you to manage or find content more effectively? Perhaps, but as with any software that may look cool on the surface, be sure to assess your real business needs before you invest.

Norwegian Web CMS vendor Escenic is acquired by local Norwegian company

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:02:00 -0500

While the news was from Tel Aviv, Israel, a Norwegian software company called Vizrt has agreed to acquire Norwegian Web CMS vendor Escenic. Vizrt is focused on the media space, with products for media asset management and broadcast graphics. Judging from a recent company presentation (PDF), Vizrt is active around the world with about USD 62 million revenue for the first 9 months this year, compared with Escenic, which had about USD 6 million revenue in the same period.

While Escenic has been a bit quiet recently, it has been an interesting Web CMS vendor to follow. They are a global player in the media space, but have struggled to move outside this niche, with limited e-government success at home in Norway. Unlike most other vendors who follow a more horizontal approach to the market, Escenic has clearly been engineered and refined for journalists and editors working 8 hours with the system every day. With Vizrt they seem to have found a larger global player who shares the same passion for the media space.

This acquisition comes at the closing of a busy year on the Scandinavian CMS scene. First in Denmark in March Synkron was sold to Dynamicweb and then in August Swedish vendor EPiServer changed owners. Some may say it is not unusual for the Norwegians to follow in the footsteps of their regional neighbors, but as a global vendor with a strong footing in the media space, they may actually be a bit better positioned for international growth. As with any merger or acquisition, buyers should carefully study the impact on the product roadmap, as well as keep close and frequent communication with their vendor contacts.

[Update, January 23]: Changed posting to reflect that Vizrt is a Norwegian company and not Israeli as originally reported.

We release version 10 of The CMS Report

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:01:00 -0400

Our quest to tell the real story about web content management software continues today. In this latest edition of The CMS Report, we've updated all the vendor reviews and added some new evaluation criteria, including system reporting, micro-applications, and content retention -- addressing the increasingly important role of marketers and records managers. With this version, we also make available an optional "European Edition," which adds several new vendors active primarily in that region (Escenic, e-Spirit, eZ publish, GOSS, Immediacy, and Terminalfour). In North America, we begin coverage of Hot Banana and Hannon Hill.

As always, CMS Report buyers within the past 10 weeks will receive the new version gratis. Previous CMS Watch customers are eligible for discounted updates. Look for an e-mail shortly.