Please shell out a few minutes to help the IKS Project identify business needs for semantic CMS by participating in a survey. The results will help the EU-funded project to work towards an Open Source interactive knowledge stack.

There are two different sets of questions, depending on your background:

• IT Executives of CMS Vendors
• IT Executives of CMS End User Companies

Thanks for participating in the survey and please spread the word!

I’ve just published an article that explains how a PHP-based product can gain a good position in the market and be made appealing to customers by using marketing communication. The focus is on products licensed under an Open Source license. Yet, most of the recommendations also apply to proprietary offerings.

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.

Rome is a great city and it will host a bunch of great people (including me ) at November 12-13. This is when the second IKS Project workshop will take place. The goal of this workshop is to start working on an Open Source software stack that allows other Open Source projects and software vendors to leverage semantic search technologies.

IKS is an EU-funded project with an overall budget of 8.5 million Euros. The first workshop back in May saw two dozen of bright Open Source CMS minds discussing a semantic stack in general. This time, it will also make sense for non-CMS-related Open Source projects and vendors to join.

There will be interesting presentations from some key figures at the second workshop in Rome, such as Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research talking about “The Role of Semantics in Search”.

If you’re up to joining the Open Source Web 3.0 train, then hurry up, because the October 22nd deadline for registering for the 2nd IKS workshop on semantic search is approaching quickly. See you there!

For the launch of Jahia United Content Bus, InitMarketing has created a video explaining the concept. Hope you like it as much as I do.

I interviewed Jeff Whatcott about marketing Drupal and Acquia at Gilbane Boston conference. He was then VP Marketing, Acquia and recently moved to work in the same role at Brightcove.

Jeff is probably one of the brightest software marketing experts out there and in this interview, he shares some valuable insights. Most notably, he explains how Acquia offers extended functionality in the cloud for Drupal and builds a business around this combination of Open Source and SaaS that also leverages network effects. In a way, this could make Acquia the Google of the Drupal community.

As with all InitMarketing.tv videos, you can

• download, embed, rate, comment, etc. the highlights
• watch/read the full video interview

The EU-funded IKS Project invites FOSS companies and projects to take part in building a software stack for knowledge management that is Open Source.

IKS is funded with 6.5 million Euros by the European Union and 2 million Euros are being invested by the consortium partners which makes up for an overall budget of 8.5 millions. The project will run for 4 years.

Financial support is available for 50 yet to be selected companies/organizations who agree to evaluate the IKS software stack as early adopters as well as 100 individuals who are members of a related FOSS project and who would like to actively engage in IKS project development. The budget for contributors to IKS is meant to alleviate the entry hurdles, e.g. for travel and accommodation for attending the IKS workshop end of May.

The premier focus of IKS is on FOSS content management systems and how they can make use of the to-be-developed IKS technology to let content objects behave the way they are supposed to across varying applications. Additionally, IKS also aims at cooperating with FOSS projects helping to implement semantics-aware software.

Wernher Behrendt, one of the initiators of IKS, exemplifies the project’s vision as follows:

Think of a task that has been defined in a project management software. Ideally, the project management software allows you to edit the task as you would expect it, for example, you can extend the ending date in case the work will take longer. Now, what happens if you want to transfer your work plan to the Web content management system that powers your Web site to display it to the public?

You will most likely create a screenshot of the work plan in the project management software, upload the screenshot in your WCMS and include it on a Web page. In between, you have lost all information about what a task is and how another application should treat it in case you want to edit it within the imported work plan.

This is where IKS comes to the rescue, because its software stack will not only provide a layer that takes care of metadata information (e.g. Ontologies, RDF, …), but will also be able to deal with information on how to process a content object across different applications.

If you’d like to join, IKS provides further information on its Web site and how to get in contact with them. Contribute to IKS as a…

• CMS vendor
• CMS end user
• Open Source developer
• CMS consultant, regional technology transfer organization, anyone else

InitMarketing has made its calendar of world-wide conferences and trade fairs related to Free and Open Source Software, IT and specific industries available to the public.

It currently includes 122 events in 17 countries taking place in 2009. 43 of them in Germany, 69 in USA. We use this calendar when planing events for our customers, thus we’ll regularly update it. Please let us know of any events which are not on our radar yet by commenting to my blog or commenting at the bottom of the events page.

InitMarketing helped Magnolia launch the new Magnolia On Air at Gilbane Boston Conference 2008. Magnolia On Air is a content management solution for the broadcast media built on top of Magnolia Enterprise Edition.

Boris Kraft, CTO Magnolia, talking to a conference participant in front of the Magnolia booth.

I am also here in Boston, enjoying the conference and meeting lots of people from the OSS CMS space.

A video interview with Boris Kraft, CTO Magnolia, the Simple Open Source Content Management System, just got published on InitMarketing.tv. Boris discusses various aspects of marketing Magnolia.

Here’s an excerpt of the part I find most interesting:

Question: You’re building up the Magnolia office in New York. Is there a difference you realized between how to market your open source product in Europe compared to the US?

Boris Kraft: I think there are many differences. The expectations are different in the US, there are all these images we have in our heads about how the US economy works, about how the consumers are, and a lot of that is actually true. It’s much more hype, marketing is very very important, and the whole process is very fast, so it’s much more hype than substance – that’s my experience so far. So, coming from an European country – like Magnolia International sitting in Switzerland – this is a part where we typically have a very thoughtful way of doing things. We like to produce quality, and it takes longer, this is very difficult for us to deal with: To have this “Swiss mind set” and come to the US and basically clash with the “US mind set”. I kind of have to be there and say “we are the best, we are the greatest, we have everything tomorrow” whereas here we would say “yes, well, actually we can do this, yes” – you know, it’s a very different perception…

You can watch the interview highlights (4:44), the full interview (12:38), or read the transcript of the full interview.

Wolfgang Maass contacted me and asked if I would like to join the board of experts of an EU project they are going to propose. They are actually also looking for Open Source CMS companies (vendors or system integrators) who would like to join as a partner.

The EU project proposal entitled „Interactive Knowledge“ is currently being developed by a consortium which is led by Salzburg Research. The objective is to develop a “next generation semantic content management framework” based on existing frameworks, but with significant technological improvements ranging from RDF-storage to easy definition of workflows and business rules, and to dynamically re-configurable web interfaces.

Some more info on the objectives in Wolfgang’s words:

Our experience is that many smaller content management solution providers find it hard to make full use of the new standards such as RDF and CSS 3.0 when it comes to keeping solutions maintainable, re-usable or when it comes to cross-media publishing on mobile and other platforms. Increasingly, content management needs to interface with the “Internet of things”, e.g. you can get additional health information about a certain food product, by entering the retail store’s product code into a web-based content management system or into your mobile PA.

This is what the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project will offer:

• 50 smaller CMS companies can become early adopters (small grants of up to 12.000 Euro are possible)
• 7 European SMEs who have content management systems will be offered to become full partners in this project and act as requirements experts as well as getting their own frameworks benchmarked with respect to their semantic capabilities. There are budgets between 80.000 and 200.000 Euro available, at a funding rate of 75%.

So, the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project proposal is an excellent opportunity to benefit from a large scale R&D effort.

I know Wolfgang for quite some time and he told me that the project administrators have a very good track record in this type of project, are experts in the field and can assist with the administrative entry hurdles. This is good, because it will avoid that the EU bureaucracy and lazy project partners will eat up your valuable resources. I know how important this is because I have experience as a work package leader on behalf of eZ Systems of the successfully finished tOSSad EU project.

If you are interested, please send an email to wolfgang dot maass at hs-furtwangen dot de no later than this Thursday, March 20th, 2008.

See you at the kick-off meeting after the EU accepted the proposal