Friday, October 18, 2013

FOR SALE: Content Management System built on Cassandra

Last spring, I attended the Philly Emerging Technology Event (ETE).   It is always a fantastic event, and this year was no different.  One of the new additions this year was an Enterprise Hackathon.  A few large enterprises brought real business problems to the table and offered prizes to help solve them.

The one that caught my eye was the problem of content management for Teva, a large pharmaceutical company.  In looking at the problem of content management, it occurred to me that enterprises these days are dealing as much with internally generated content, as they are externally generated content.

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to build an application that added the dimension of externally generated content to a content management system.  I took a few weeks and built Skookle. (a play on "Schuylkill", which is the main river through Philly)

Skookle is a new perspective on CMS.  It has an HTML5 user interface that allows users to drag and drop files onto their browser (like dropbox, but through the browser).  The file is persisted, with versioning, into Cassandra using Astyanax chunked object storage, and the description is indexed using Elastic Search.  Skookle is also integrated with Twitter.  It watches for mentions of the company, which then show up directly on the user interface.

For a demo, check out this quick video:
http://bit.ly/18rTMOe

Here is the writeup I did that accompanied the submission:
http://skookle.com/skookle.pdf

That contains an estimate for the work that remains to make this a product.

I definitely think there is a lot of potential here for anyone that can re-envision content management, incorporating externally generated content.  Traditional solutions tend to be internally focused (i.e. Sharepoint) or externally focused (Sentiment analysis, etc.)  There is room for a tool that can bridge that gap to allow a user (e.g. brand manager) to see what people are saying (including competitors) and echo/reinforce the good content, and counter the bad... in real-time.

Anyway...
If anyone wants to pickup where I left off,  drop me a line .  Along with the vision, I'm selling the code base.  =)

I think its a great little seed of a project/idea.
Email me: bone at alumni dot brown dot edu


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