Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And now its time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this mornings flashback, we are going to roll back a couple of weeks where our own Erica O'Grady attended the 2009 Mix Conference in Las Vegas and sat down with Murat Aktar and David Anthony, the co-founders of Bondi Digital Publishing. We enter the discuss where Erica asked them to tell us about Bondi Digital Publishing.

David: Well, our company helps magazine publishers to basically breathe life into their back issues and we help them to make money off of their archives, simply put. But there's more to it than that because those are generally their print archives. They haven't been digitized before, so there's an entire process of how do you bring to life old magazines essentially that have great content in them. There's wonderful articles, and we work with a lot of big iconic magazines like The New Yorker and Playboy and Rolling Stone. So I mean this is really how do you get it from a stack of paper magazines to something that's actually usable in a digital form, and that's actually been the purpose of our company since 2004.

Erica: So tell me about how you decided to work on this project and how your company came to be.

Murat: Well, it started with an assignment that we won in 2004 with New Yorker magazine. And we came to it from a little bit different background, to give you a bit of context about how David and I began working together. I was involved with a company called Sterling Sound, and we're a mastering studio, so we do all the final creative work on recording projects. And in 1998 the DVD format was really starting to take off, and we didn't really have a sense at the time of how much of an impact DVD would have on the music business. It wasn't inconceivable at the time that DVD could be the successor to the compact disc, so we felt a bit vulnerable not knowing very much about it. And so we had met David who was running another company a very specialist company at the time in New York who was a kind of an early promoter about the DVD format, imagine going in into a meeting and saying, "No, no. This isn't a CD. This is actually a DVD and it has a whole different feature set and it does all of these things and here's why it's great."

But that's what happens when you're one of the people that's trying to make a business out of a new format, and that was David-what he had been doing for about 4 years back when people legitimately didn't know what it was. So we ended up forming a company together that was in with a view toward doing work in the music business which made sense because Sterling has a lot of contacts. And we did it. We worked on that for about 7 or 8 years and we did DVD authoring, the more interesting stuff that we did was production special features production, concert filming, very, very high-end interactive DVD experiences, and it was a lot of fun. We go to work on some great projects. We got to work with the Rolling Stones, and we did a concert production for a band called Slip Knot in Europe and Janet Jackson and Lenny Kravitz and a bunch of others.

Erica: You gloss over Janet Jackson and Lenny Kravitz and a bunch of others.

Murat: And a bunch of others. And so in 2004, we got contacted by The New Yorker, and they were interested in putting together a DVD ROM box set of their archive and David years before had like trying to conjure up things to do on DVD had said well, what about this? Maybe we can put some magazines on it and he had worked with a group and developed actually very kind of forward-looking approach at the time and so The New Yorker remembered that from about 6 years before, and they called us in, and we went in without really having much experience in the specific thing that they were looking for, but we had a point of view on it. And because of all the thinking that we did over a pretty short period of time, we sat down and we wrote a kind of a very kind of I think thoughtful and considerate-and the reason I say that is because I went back and read it recently, and it actually made sense still, and we're still thinking the exact same thing which I'm a bit surprised about because usually just months later you kind of look back at your earlier stuff and say-

Erica: -because technology changes so fast too.

Murat: Yeah. And so anyway we won the assignment, and that's how we got into it create an installed software application that can give a user the ability to browse and search through half a million pages, 4000 issues? And so there was a lot of problems that we were trying to solve for-how do we make it fast? How do you make it easy? How do you blast the stuff up onto the screen? How do you make the page turning experience? How do you give people enough resolution to read and zoom and all those things? So it was a new set of challenges and we enjoyed it, and from that we moved on to the other projects that we were involved in.

Erica: So the newest thing that we saw today was actually Rolling Stone digitized. And is it every issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine?

David: Well what we were showing today is basically a sneak peak. So we're launching a comprehensive site in the summer called covertocover.com what we showed today was about 50 issues of Rolling Stone fully searchable. As you saw you can speak to the speed it was very fast. It serves very, very quickly.

Erica: The people that I really think it's really going to benefit are people like my parents and my grandparents and people who are going to take a look back at a history that they remember and search through things and really embrace that.

David: Well-and I mean it's funny because what Murat said when we looked back at our proposal for The New Yorker, and something that you said. You said even a few months technology changes really fast and what we realized is that without knowing it directly, we wrote our entire proposal was based on the user experience. I mean we had some technology in there but basically everybody else was approaching this as a technology problem. Technology, technology, technology. And because we were really digital experience builders from our DVD days building interfaces, we came out and we said, okay, how many pages do you have? You have half a million pages? Oh, my God. How do we make that palatable? How do we make that interesting? How do we make that something that somebody will go in and actually browse like they would a magazine rack? And really the funny thing is is that it took us 5 years to find a way to do it on the web. I mean we searched, and we tried different things, and we looked at different technologies, and we looked at different kinds of approaches, none of which were really very compelling as digital magazine experiences. So what you're seeing now is really the culmination of-well since 2004 really. I mean in our original ideas was always the web. I mean 2004 the web was big then and it's big now. So we had always thought we were going to do this but we never really have the experience designed.

Erica: Fantastic. The theme really for the year is social media. Are you planning to incorporate some of that in cover to cover so that people can share with their friends.

Murat: It's something that we're very interested in incorporating Scott showed an example today about the ability to copy a deep link to an article and the steps that we have to take to get from a paper magazine to get it into the format to show, it's a process that we refer to as the manufacturing process, and it involves the kind of the easy part of scanning it. That's the first thing that happens but it's also the easiest thing. And then-

David: -right, you slap a page on a scanner.

Murat: And then the hard work starts. There's a very kind of detailed specification and we have to do-we have to zone each page. There's a lot of manual work in there, and we have to create an OCR and then correct it. And there's a certain amount of tagging that goes on, so everything that's included in this database, the kind of the main concepts that we had initially is there's this unified database that's not only for each issue in each magazine, but it's for everything that would eventually go into the site, so you can search across magazines or you can filter in the search within a magazine. So there's this unified database for searching, and then the issues are presented as exact digital representations of the paper issue. So everything that sits in the database is at the entry level which means photos with metadata attached to them, articles, advertisements. And so each one of those-

Erica: -can you have interactive advertisements as part of a business model for this?

David: We're looking at it. We had a conversation on that very subject early on and I think now that the site is live the things that we've been looking at and kind of thinking about and batting around with people will be much easier for them to visualize and say, now wait a second. If we could do this from here then we're not talking off of a PowerPoint at that point. We're talking about something that you can actually go and see on the web. But back to the point, the point is that every article, photo, cartoon, advertisement is an entry that's deep linkable. So that gives us enormous amount of kind of a social networking environment and it gives people the ability to comment and forward and copy and tag and all of those things. So we're tremendously excited about doing that, so that's why we're so excited about this move of the platform onto the net.

Erica: How long do you think it'll be before this is the future of publishing, before they stop making the paper copies and we-

David: Right. It's a great question and of course nobody knows, but we have our-

Erica: Your prediction, though.

David: Yeah. So right now we're really concerned with archives. Covertocover.com,every single issue of Playboy, every single issue of Rolling Stone. Obviously, we're talking to other people too. We launched playboyarchive.com. That's live.

Erica: Congratulations!

David: Thank you. Thank you. So basically one issue from every single year that Playboy's been in existence for free no strings attached. Go up, check it out, flip around, have fun. The interesting thing about that is that now people for the first time the public's going to get a chance to play around with this and see. So really our focus now is on bringing these rich archives back to life. Because the thing that's so incredible about it, Murat kind of alluded to it, is that this doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist that if you go to playboyarchive.com, I think it's in 77 or 78, there's an interview with Jimmy Carter. This is a world-famous interview because he did it before he was elected. He said, "I've lusted in my heart a million times," and he talks about this really earnest thing and it's a super famous interview, and Playboy's very famous for its interviews because these are no holds barred. There's nothing off the record. You know it's a very intense interview. If you googled that before, you would see references to it, oblique references to it, but you'd never actually see the original piece as it is with everything that's in Playboy.

David: So people have gotten this post-Google syndrome where if I don't see it on Google, it didn't happen. If it's not in the ten hits on Google, then it's sort of non-relevant anymore. But yet there's this really rich history and I'll tell you another example of it which is I was talking to the folks at Ebony magazine. And Ebony was started in right after World War II, so really at the very, very first rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement, that's when Ebony started. And Black people would say something very different to Ebony than they would to the mainstream White press.

So what you ended up with in Ebony was sort of the recorded history of the Civil Rights, the Black Movement, it's really the recorded history of Black America. It doesn't exist except in those pages. And until that becomes digitized and people can find it again, it's essentially lost. Right. Right. So that's where our focus is now, and yes I think we will turn our focus to the future and present issues and future issues as well. But at the moment, taking you through entire histories very quickly, that's our focus.

Murat: But there was an interesting thing in your question about magazines and what does it mean and-one of the things that I would like to-it's really more a personal comment that anything else-is I really love the formatting of magazines. I love the flow of them, and I hope that whatever happens whenever it happens I hope that that doesn't get lost because the people that put those things together are geniuses. I mean if you can lay out a magazine and you know how to move the pages around and give it that kind of the pacing and flow, I think that that's why so many of them are still very popular. I understand that it's a difficult business and that ad revenues are down and all that, but I think that people really enjoy the format. I really think that the ideal thing would be that these things co-exist; that the magazines continue.

Erica: You're a game-changing technology, not a disrupting technology.

David: In terms of print and in terms of the legacy of print and I would say the craft of print, we support that. We're sort of an intension of that rather than a replacement for it.

Erica: Well, will any of the issues be available for people to subscribe via RSS and things like that or-

David: Yeah, RSS in terms of sort of like Digg-like recommendation engines, we've got a lot of ideas swirling around. Our biggest thing right now is launching Cover to Cover this summer which it's 260,000 pages of magazine content that is going go live this summer all at once. So that's our first priority but yeah, absolutely. I mean we love those kinds of things. And we also love the fact that you can sit down, find an article, hit a button and send an email to your friend and say, "Check this out." And that's a print magazine, not a web link.

Murat: We've been very focused on this one thing and now by having it actually be live and people looking at it, we're hoping to get millions of ideas back from people that we never even thought of that people that are miles ahead of us in their thinking on what we can do with this thing that's been exciting and I think we're already starting to see some of the feedback come in.

Erica: I have one final question. What do you want your personal and professional legacy to be?

Murat: Personally, I don't want anything to change. I've always wanted to enjoy what I do and I've always done that.

Erica: Fantastic

David: Essentially when we were maturing as a company, the majority of magazines were now pretty available to people I'd be really happy.

Russ: Okay and that wraps up Erica's session with Murat Aktar and David Anthony, co-founders of Bondi Digital Publishing. Check them out at CoverToCover.com. And that wraps up this mornings Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And now its time for Tech Talk with The Planet, so lets welcome Kevin Hazard.

[Tech Talk with The Planet]

Russ: You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. Stay tuned for Jason Pontin, Chief Editor and Publisher for Technology Review and hear what he has to say about stimulus dollars directed at technology.