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This past Friday, we had the opportunity to present Symtext at the National Angel Capital Organization’s Spring Co-investment Summit. As this was the first time I’d attended, I thought I’d follow up with this post to relate a bit about our preparations, the presentation and the aftermath.

The Application
Everyone running a startup has an executive summary, deck, business plan and financial projections. But that does not mean these are necessarily in good order, up to date, and readily configurable to VC or angel investment applications. I found myself doing a lot of revising and rewriting as I completed the Angelsoft form, from One Line Pitch (max 150 characters) to Describe Your Business Model (max 210 characters) to Describe the Solution You Sell (max 450 characters). This despite the fact that I have probably 50 versions each of business plans, exec sums, decks and projections. (And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Plans and projections and the underlying models that inform them are iterative in nature: as new information is gained, milestones surpassed or rendered needless, the documentation needed to express the business to investors and partners changes and evolves.) Anyway, what I liked about the application — beyond actually making the cut! — was that it produced a reusable 1-page distillation of Symtext’s fundamentals. Readers of the NACO guidebook saw 15 of these 1-pagers; brevity counts. (more…)

Lots of talk lately about the business of digital content; it seems to be the topic du jour.

From the PersonaNonData blog the verdict is clear: the Kindle DX isn’t the next big thing:

“In other words, why would the universities want to continue the (essentially) old way of doing business when most observers believe we are on the cusp of a renaissance in educational learning. The Kindle doesn’t do multimedia, it doesn’t do color and most importantly it doesn’t do networking because the Kindle is a closed system. This is a short sighted collaboration between schools and Amazon that doesn’t really suggest any major change.” (more…)

The news

Everyone has heard the news about the new super-sized Kindle.  But it’s very interesting to note how it’s being rolled out.  Six U.S.  universities are trialing the Kindle: Case Western Reserve, Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State.  Terms weren’t revealed in GalleyCat’s post, but given the regular discussion about the potential economic benefits to content providers of saving on print distribution costs — to the extent that some say publishers could simply buy readers a Kindle and still save money — it’s a fair bet that many publishers are ready to give this a shot.  The pilot’s business model could work like this: School buys Kindles for students.  Publishers provide bulk digital pricing to Schools.  Students receive Kindles, pre-loaded with their texts, paying only the discounted digital content fee. Publisher gets a smaller fee per student, but gains 100% adoption.

The implications

Very much a big step in the right direction, but from a pure content point of view this is just the first step.  Delivery of generic, static content, i.e., an entire text with limited interactivity, still leaves us with the old transmitted content model: from author to student, via publisher and professor.  The content remains generic, and so an eco-system of discussion, debate and interaction around the content itself cannot truly develop.  And if the content remains both static and generic, it’s likely still subject to both piracy and students’ inattention. (Not all Schools will mandate purchasing Kindles, the DRM will get hacked, so pass-along is still a factor.)

What’s really needed has yet to arrive: fully personalized, experiential, rights-managed content for web and device that is buildable, even conversational.  And it’s there that the big win for publishers, professors and students awaits.

I don’t know who could be working on that…

The news

FlatWorldKnowledge and Lyryx have announced a partnership. FWK is a publisher of open textbooks for higher education. Lyryx specializes in the design, development and delivery of online learning and assessment tools and employs current Internet technologies to assist professors in their teaching efforts and help students achieve their learning objectives.

From the press release:

Claude Laflamme, president of Lyryx Learning, said, “We are excited to work with Flat World Knowledge in changing the model for the delivery of learning resources. Online learning and assessment tools are transforming the ways people study and learn. By working with a ground-breaking partner like Flat World Knowledge we can help accelerate this transformation.”

Flat World Knowledge has developed a delivery platform that offers a suite of expert-authored business and economics textbooks that are freely available online to students, and at low cost in print, audio, and other formats.

The implications

FWK focuses on developing content, Lyryx enlivens it with assessment tools. But the key is FWK’s direction: value-added, low cost content that is independent of the traditional publishing world, and positioned as a direct alternative. If Lyryx helps significantly accelerate FWK’s market penetration it could cause discomfort to FWK’s publisher competitors.  But will profs specify FWK Lyryx enhanced open textbooks in enough numbers to justify the investment? That’s the bet, for which we’ll have to await the outcome.

For a startup it’s really gratifying when thought leaders rally to the cause.

We had a moment like that earlier this week when Tim O’Reilly blogged about “Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.”   Read his post soon, but here are a couple of key points:

• “O’Reilly, as authors and publishers, has long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book, not just its price or format”
• “The web itself, full of links to sources, opposing or supporting points of view, multimedia, and reader commentary, provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online.”

My career includes time spent working in the B2B content aggregation space. It was always interesting to me to see how subscriptions to the printed newspaper ran quite inexpensively ($20-30 per month, but sometimes gratis) while we could host a database of newspapers and receive subscription payments in the thousands per month.  We were able to do this because we configured the content for the medium in which it was consumed, and used that medium to add intrinsic value that our customers were willing to pay for.  Making newspaper content searchable, comprehensive, immediate, customized, and easy to access and consume led to sales.

It strikes me that this is O’Reilly’s argument with respect to books, and it is certainly Symtext’s.  Simply offering books and chapters online isn’t what gets customers excited.  It’s the value that can be added to those books and chapters that gets customers excited, and that is what drives enjoyment, learning, consumption and purchase.

This leads to the problematic part of adding value to content, and that is the fragmented demands of the crowd. It’s one thing to say we want to add value, but what, and for whom?  Adding value can be tantamount to customization; regardless, there are costs to be wary of.  So here’s a sacrilegious thought: what if we stopped trying to guess, and let specifiers (university professors, for example) — who already act as gateways to small, focused clusters of consumers (like students, to follow the example) — have more control over what they want? Let them determine what sorts of web value they’d like to add to the content they feel they need.  Who knows what they’d do if given the chance to transform the textbook into an interactive learning space?  (What we now call a Liquid Textbook.)

If you agree with me so far, then you might also agree with me on a possible way forward: emergent communities forming around content, conversing, creating culture — adding their own value — and transforming previously static content in a way that will lead to real, intrinsic value for readers, be they students, professionals, or consumers.  In turn that should translate to higher adoptions and less piracy for publishers.

(Written with input from @rayluk and @acroll)