Organizers of the Balisage Markup Conference 2010 have published a complete program listing, as well as details about the Pre-conference Symposium: http://www.balisage.net/2010/Program.html http://www.balisage.net/longhaul/LHProgram.html Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.

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[ANN] XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML and Balisage 2010 Details

One of the things that irritates me about Silicon Valley culture is its blatant ageism.  I dislike it for several reasons: Let’s start with the easy one:  it’s illegal .  As an employer you should be looking for someone qualified to do the job, not someone of a specific age.  While certain job requirements may end up setting a de facto lower bound on age (e.g., it’s hard to have a top MBA and 5 years of second-line management experience before you’re 30), age is not something you should talk about in the recruiting or management process.  People who would never say “let’s go find a Baptist to do this job” or “let’s go find a woman” will say things like “let’s go find a 32-year-old,” seemingly unaware it’s the exact same kind of discrimination. The media, probably for the simple reason that it sells more newspapers, drives a distorted perception of age and entrepreneurship.  They love the oneupsmanship of “you found a 17-year-old entrepreneur , well we found a 13-year-old one ” (who, by the way, is also a social media consultant).  They love to write stories like How This Kid Made $60M in 18 Months , despite the fact they aren’t true .  They continue to both directly and indirectly promote the age-entrepreneurship myth despite the fact that the average of technology company founders is 39. In addition to over-promoting the whiz kids, the media almost never does any follow-up, telling us what became of the wunderkinds ten or twenty years later.  That’s why I was surprised to see this story in today’s New York Times, For A Mogul Money and Magic Have Limits , which details the dog’s breakfast whiz kid Halsey Minor has made of things since making a fortune off CNet during the Web 1.0 era.  Find the lessons in this quote:  “he thought he was a billionaire, spending far more than he had … but he really was a multi-millionaire always thinking I’m going to make the big score.” The asymmetric media coverage gives people a distorted sense of reality:  (1) that they must start a company before they’re 30 or they never will, (2) that after 30 they are washed up, (3) that the odds of succeeding in a venture are way higher than they are, (4) that skills are more the determinants of success than luck, and (5) that youth/energy are more important than experience.

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Questioning the Tech Wunderkind Image

Today, in what I consider a surprising move, French PLM and CAD vendor Dassault Systèmes announced the acquisition of French enterprise search vendor Exalead for €135M or, according to my calculator, $161M.  Here is my quick take on the deal: While I don’t have precise revenue figures, my guess is that Exalead was aiming at around $25M in 2010 revenues, putting the price/sales multiple at 6.4x current-year sales, which strikes me as pretty good given what I’m guessing is around a 25% growth rate.  ( This source says $21M in software revenue, though the year is unclear and it’s not clear if software means software-license or software-related.  This source , which I view as quite reliable, says $22.7M in total revenue in 2009 and implies around 25% growth.  Wikipedia says €15.5M in 2008 revenues, which equals exactly $22.7M at the average exchange rate.  This French site says €12.5M in 2008 revenues.  The Qualis press release — presumably an excellent source — says €14M ($19.5M) in 2009 revenues.  Such is the nature of detective work.) I am surprised that Dassault would be interested in search-based applications, Exalead’s latest focus.  While PLM vendors have always had an interest in content delivery and life-cycle documentation (e.g., a repair person entering feedback on documentation that directly feeds into future product requirements) , I’d think they want to buy a more enterprise techpubs / DITA vendor than a search vendor to do so as in the PTC / Arbortext deal of 2005.  Nevertheless, Dassault President and CEO Bernard Charlès said that with Exalead they could build “a new class of search-based applications for collaborative communities.”  There is more information, including a fairly cryptic video which purports to explain the deal, on a Dassault micro-site devoted to the Exalead acquisition , which ends with the phrase:  search-based applications for lifelike experience.  Your guess as to what that means is as good as mine. I think those who position Exalead as “ France’s Google ” are misguided.  Exalead was very clearly an enterprise software company that used its Internet search site as a demo of its capabilities, much as DEC long ago used AltaVista as a demo of the Alpha chip or Vivisimo (until the recent sale to Yippy) used Clusty as a demo of its clustering technology, or for that matter, as MarkLogic uses MarkMail as a demo of our XML server .  In there ever was a European attempt at Google, it was Quaero , which I always viewed as the Airbus of search

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Quick Take on the Dassault Systèmes Acquisition of Exalead

“Balisage: The Markup Conference” (http://www.balisage.net ) is an annual peer-reviewed XML conference: how to create markup; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space). Come to lovely Montreal, Canada from August 3rd to 6th for four action-packed days of angle brackets! Here’s a baker dozen (or so) sampling from the much larger list of Balisage 2010 presentations: * gXML, a new approach to cultivating XML trees in Java * Java integration of XQuery – an information unit oriented approach * Reverse modeling for domain-driven engineering of publishing technology * Managing semantics in XML vocabularies * XML pipeline processing in the browser * Where XForms meets the glass: Bridging between data and interaction design * Schema component paths for schema analysis * A streaming XSLT processor * Multi-structured documents and the emergence of annotations vocabularies * Processing arbitrarily large XML using a persistent DOM * Automatic upconversion using XProc * Scripting documents with XQuery * XQuery design patterns * Parallel processing and your XML data Want to travel on the weekend so you can talk about angle brackets for an extra day? Then register for the pre-conference symposium on August 2nd, “XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML”

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[ANN] Balisage 2010 – XML Conference – Schedule
Posted!

Scott Fillmer portfolio and resume review.

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The Portfolio Project

Today at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting, we discussed the document license for HTML 5. We discussed use cases from the HTML Working Group that call for a more open license than the current W3C Document License . The result of discussion among the Membership is that there is strong support for: a license that allows the reuse of excerpts in software, software documentation, test suites, and other scenarios; a license (or licenses) that are familiar to the open source community; processes that encourage innovation and experimentation about Web technology, so that work can be easily brought to W3C for standardization; making the HTML Working Group a forum that is conducive to participation by the community at large; ensuring that the HTML 5 specification remains valuable to the entire Web community (see an update from Philippe Le Hégaret on HTML that he presented to the Membership)

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Update on HTML 5 Document License

A small addition has been made on the RDFa distiller service (pyRdfa) : there is now a possibility to upload an XHTML file to be distilled, beyond referring to a URI or copying a text to a text box. This feature has been asked for by several users. Both the upload and the text box alternatives use POST, whereas distilling via URI-s uses GET

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Small add-ons to the RDFa distiller

A few days ago W3C opened a new wiki on Semantic Web Standards : … It is not the goal of this wiki to supersede other community wikis […] instead it is to provide a “first stop” for more information on Semantic Web technologies, in particular on Semantic Web Standards published by the W3C. Communities around such standards are also welcome to use the Wiki for their purpose The new wiki makes use of Semantic Media Wiki (and thanks to Denny Vrandecic to have helped in setting up things). A good example is the way Semantic Web tools are handled (the structure was greatly inspired by a similar collection on the SemanticWeb.org site).

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SWSWiki

On Wednesday, January 6th, 2010, Mark Logic will host a webinar where two of Mark Logic ‘s XQuery experts will respond to Oracle’s recently published white paper ( PDF ) which attacks Mark Logic and its implementation of XQuery. The webinar features: Mary Holstege, PhD. Principal Engineer at Mark Logic and member of the W3C XQuery and XML Schema working groups.

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Mark Logic Hosts Webinar to Respond to Oracle XQuery Attack

Following is the full text of a guest submission I did for the Enterpreneur Corner section of VentureBeat . Given the tumultuous events of 2009, it’s easy to forget the world didn’t come to a standstill. Life continued and Silicon Valley kept innovating.

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Eight Predictions for 2010: Guest Post for VentureBeat