Q&A: Interview with Silk Talking Cloud-Based Content Storage and Management

Grazed from Silk.  Author: CloudCow Interview
 

Silk, provider of a cloud-based data publishing platform, recently announced general availability of Silk for Teams, the paid version of its service that lets non-technical users manage their data as easy-to-search collections of web pages and visualizations.

Here is a conversation with the company’s founder and CEO, Salar al Khafaji.

Q: Tell me more about Silk and your recent news announcement.
 

Salar al Khafaji: Silk is all about helping knowledge workers become more efficient. As a cloud-based provider Silk delivers its service without the need for any hardware or software installation, everything is performed directly in the user’s browser. To date, 16,000 registered Silk users have created more than 300,000 individual pages on the Silk, a tally that is growing at roughly 20 percent monthly.
 

Al Khafaji: Today the average knowledge worker spends 40% of their time searching for the information they need to do their job. That’s not surprising if you’re anything like me and have data spread out across innumerable Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. With Silk you can store all of that data securely in the cloud, edit it on the fly, add visualizations and share your results with as many or as few people as you like. Our API is flexible enough to import data from basically any source with some structure that a knowledge worker would use.
 

If you want to see Silk’s solution in action take a look at our page on the world’s nations here. This was put together using data imported into Silk from Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and Freebase.
 

Al Khafaji: Users can visit our website at Silk.co and create a Silk site in minutes. Once their site has been created users can import data from most any data source that you can think of, or input data directly into Silk themselves. Once Silk has some data to work with the system actually gets "smarter." Let’s say a user designates one of the content entry fields on Silk as "location". Silk will automatically assign the "location" designation to any inputted string of content that fits the known pattern for address conventions: street name, city code, country name, etc. Should a user choose to change the title of the section from "location" to "address," Silk would automatically update all pages throughout their site.
 

Silk also allows users to share the content either with others on their team or as an embeddable HTML widget to be placed on other web sites or inside other online document structures. Silk includes several built-in visualization formats including charts, maps and tiled views. All of this can be done directly in a user’s browser. AWS infrastructure allows us to deliver our service globally without downtime, whenever or wherever a user needs it.
 

Al Khafaji: To date, options for organizing content into a more structured format have remained limited. CMS tools, online spreadsheets and online word processing tools are easy to use and deploy. These tools also offer easy input and storage. However, the limited data structure capability of these tools reduces their value. A CMS or a word document cannot attach complex attributes to a specified field, so there is a strict limitation on how much information a user can extract from that content.
 

Conversely, heavy-duty content manipulation tools – such as powerful CRM, SQL and NoSQL data stores – require technical expertise for configuration, deployment and hosting. Putting in place a simple MySQL data store is cost prohibitive for most small, and even mid-sized projects. Such an effort would cost, between operational and capital expenditures, at a minimum $5,000 to $10,000.
 

Silk offers its users the best of both worlds: the ease of use of spreadsheets or Word documents combined with the power of a bulky traditional CMS solution. As a bonus, we’re one of the only providers on the market to write our code entirely in Haskell!
 

Al Khafaji: Early adopters have come from a wide range of industries, including digital marketing, venture capital, government, media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Users include The Guardian, a global video services provider, a leading American digital marketing agency, a large European Union government agency, and hundreds of startups across the EU.
 

Al Khafaji: Silk learns from the data that its users input, as a company we work in the same way. Nothing is more important to us than our users and we are in constant dialogue with them on how the platform is working, what features they would like to see added, etc. Over time Silk will only become more powerful as its user base continues to grow.

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