San Diego’s MindTouch Launches Next-Generation Version of Content Development Platform

To MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson, websites are becoming the primary storefronts for most businesses and their chief way of interacting with their customers.

And in this age of metatags and search engine optimization, Fulkerson says each page of website content viewed by customers represents a business opportunity—a chance to generate new customer leads, increase sales, and generally increase business. As a result, Fulkerson contends companies should be using more sophisticated software tools than Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker to generate and manage their content—whether the content is internal or online. He contends that such content authoring tools also should make it easy for different groups in a company to collaborate on website content as it gets developed—so the interests and concerns of marketing, product management, customer service, and even business sales are addressed.

With this in mind, the four-year-old San Diego startup is launching a new version of its collaborative application development platform today. The company says its MindTouch 2010 business collaboration platform was specifically designed to enable product and service documentation created for online content to be used to help companies generate revenue while also reducing their costs. (In one case, Fulkerson says the average cost of handling a customer support call went from $150 per call to a nickel, using self-service documentation integrated in the MindTouch 2010 platform.)

As I reported in September, MindTouch initially developed its software as a free, wiki-like open source program, which the company says is used today by more than 18 million people. MindTouch 2010 represents the next generation of the more robust and comprehensive platform the company developed as a commercial product for customers with more extensive content development needs. It’s available as both an enterprise software installation and as a software as a service offering. Fulkerson says the company’s customers include Intuit, Mozilla, and Autodesk design software.

Fulkerson says MindTouch 2010 address many of the existing problems that companies encounter in terms of creating and managing content created as word documents or PDFs by incorporating what he calls “the three pillars of strategic documentation.” MindTouch identifies these pillars as:

—Authoring. The new platform offers customers a multi-user, XML-driven platform that supports all types of rich media.

—Discovery. MindTouch 2010 publishes content in a Web-based format, and incorporates the use of content semantics and search engine optimization tools. The company says results of an integrated “adaptive search engine” improve over time as the adaptive search engine learns for user patterns.

—Curation. MindTouch says its “curation analytics” represents a new class of analytics that enables a business customer to analyze its documentation by quality, aging, and customer behavior in aggregate or by specific topics.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.