Stilo Share Discussion Threads

[stilolosses] 06/1/2017 13:21

OVER AND OUT!!!!!

[stilolosses] 06/1/2017 13:21

To date Stilo has had double digit years of big customer contract wins, huge product launches, Omnimark, Jetview, Saps, Migrate and various other technologies but the only thing that they have never had is the revenues and profits to go with it.

Nothing wrong now with asking for big revenues and big profits after umpteen years of waiting and getting very, very little and minuscule.

Stilo has had many, many, many so called seminal moments over the years but that's exactly what they have been, seminal moments without any real kind of money to go with them.

Any major announcements and client wins mean absolutely nothing unless they don't have money! money! money! to go with it. Everybody knows its going to happen on a small incremental basis in 2017. Anybody who thinks 2017 is going to be the year that means big, huge profits will be disappointed. They live in a place called "cuckoo land! cuckoo!!! cuckooooo!!!!cuckooooooooooooo land!!!!!!!!!



Happy New Year!!

[mudbath] 06/1/2017 10:03

Well there you have it firth;far from being a seminal moment for Stilo,
"Cloud AuthorBridge going live,(and) another major client like IBM coming on board etc, etc, etc, etc for me(StiloLosses) is no major development."

We had better not give up our day jobs then .

It does beg the question though what would constitute a notable occurrence.

Our man with the cricketing analogy will need to deliver a further selection of googlies,possibly even a chinaman,to bat that statement away.

OVER !

[stilolosses] 06/1/2017 08:27

His been posting with the same old broken records for donkey years!

[mudbath] 05/1/2017 22:24

It's good to have Rudy Martinez posting .

[stilolosses] 05/1/2017 22:10

Cloud AuthorBridge going live, another major client like IBM coming on board etc, etc, etc, etc for me is no major development. They have been doing this for many, many, many years. For me the only major development from Stilo needs to generate money, generate some serious dosh, some readies, money, money money!!!!!! is the only development that I consider to have any meaningful value.

Definitely some decent prospects for Stilo in 2017 on a small scale. Anything above 20% increase would be a bonus but anything else will be a kick in the googlies!

Nothing wrong with that after 16 years of broken records and broken promises!

I have high expectations and why not!!

[firth] 05/1/2017 20:52

That's a bold posting Mudbath. I have a lot riding on STL so fingers crossed you are RIGHT. The odds are short that you will be.

[mudbath] 05/1/2017 19:40

Cheers clocktower.
Whilst Stilo event horizons might seem distant,I personally am looking for developments within the next couple of weeks.

[stilolosses] 05/1/2017 18:20

OMG. Well said Clock! Well said! I could not have said it any better. You certainly have a way with words. I have just picked myself off the floor!

Well it didn't happen in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 or in 2016 so far!

I'm sure it will happen long term but in terms of 2017 my expectations are around 20% growth as a bare minimum. Anything less will be a kick in the googlies!

Stilo is that kind of company that is now positioned to do it but as it has proven over the years the progress is going to be a bit at a time. Others will argue that there is nothing wrong with that but I will say that it should have happened a long, long time ago. I obviously want it to happen a lot more in 2017 but we all know that is very, very unlikely for anything else but good old fashioned slow continuous progress in 2017 unless Stilo do something absolutely spectacular!

[clocktower] 05/1/2017 15:08

Are you struggling to release the buckle mud, due to arthritis in your hands, having had to sit on them so long? :-) Happy New Year to you also.

[mudbath] 05/1/2017 12:26

2017

Could this be a year to savour for STL investors ?
We should soon find out imo.
My seat belt is fastened !
Not that it hasn't been for some time now.

Happy New Year.

[stilolosses] 28/11/2016 18:02

Another 660,000 stilo shares sold in one batch for 6.60 pence going straight to Brewins who will slowly increase from there current 19 million plus holdings to 30 or 35 million shares. I was asked if I would be happy to offload my entire holdings today and the answer was "no"!

[mudbath] 28/11/2016 15:07

As you say,clocktower,the Caribbean is not my bag,nor more importantly that of MRS M.

Bakunin,ramping is not an obscene word;it is just wildly misused on ADVFN.

[bakunin] 28/11/2016 14:53

guys
I'm not trying to ramp Stilo.
Just pointing out the potential.
There are, of course, factors tempering whether that potential can, if ever, be achieved, eg will they have sufficient clout, do they have sufficient developers to keep hundreds, let alone thousands or millions, of users productive in the face of the inevitable emergence of bugs/issues that need fixing in real-time once the product is launched? Large corporations will obviously want to assess whether a minnow like Stilo can provide the service that they need before even considering a product like AuthorBridge. On the positive side, they will not have to be debugging complex math/network routing algorithms etc. An editor is not rocket science.

[stilolosses] 28/11/2016 14:42

LOL that was bleeding funny big time clock. I have just picked myself off the floor.

[clocktower] 28/11/2016 14:22

LOL - mud, you already can afford one of those Islands if your huge successes of the past have not been diluted by losses elsewhere, that have not been easily tagged.
Good Luck but I doubt if you would enjoy being there for anything more than a holiday.

[mudbath] 28/11/2016 14:13

michaelmouse-Thanks.
A couple of years ago Bakunin assured me that Stilo would generate sufficient dealing profits to fund the purchase my own Caribbean Island.
I live in hope !

[michaelmouse] 28/11/2016 13:54

Bakunin, mudbath and SL those are fantastic posts which have given me a far greater insight into the history of the company. Bakunin, particular thanks for such a lengthy post regarding Stilo's IP re: intangibles. I won't pretend to understand everything that you have written about Omnimark, Migrate and AuthorBridge, but it gives me a very good flavour.

I hope you're correct about AuthorBridge's latent potential.

ATB.

[stilolosses] 28/11/2016 12:44

I completely and utterly agree that the so called "baby" here is Omnimark. It always has always been. Without Omnimark Migrate and Authorbridge would not exist. If I can recall, Stilo paid quite a substantial amount of money when they bought Omnimark many years for millions. I think the previous owners of Omnimark was a company based in Germany.

Its the very nature of the technology and the very nature of the customers that have resulted in these so called tools of Migrate and Authorbridge taking a very long and incremental processes to get to where they are now. One of the biggest competitors for Stilo when it has come to Migrate has been their clients themselves which has resulted in Migrate revenues remaining so, so low after so many years. Those very clients or potential clients deciding to do the work themselves by throwing their own people at the task. If Stilo's Migrate product was the exclusive product that could do the documentation conversion then the money would have by now rolled in, but it wasn't and didn't.

Going forward, Authorbridge and Authorbridge Cloud will now give organisations the choice of having Authorbridge imbedded onto their own systems or (for those occasional users and smaller organisations) to simply get up and use it in Stilo's cloud system. This obviously is still going to take time. Time to get those clients on board, marketing, converting clients etc but in the meantime those customers that are now converting and coming on board will bring in handsome additional revenue and profits.

[bakunin] 28/11/2016 12:43

Thanks mudbath
I very much appreciate your analysis.
I think there might be another early-stage gem in OPG.
I don't know a lot about doing business in India, but it looks well/conservatively-managed and good on paper.
Any comments if you have the time to take a look?

[mudbath] 28/11/2016 12:01

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful input Bakunin.
Its good to see you according Stilo serious consideration for,like michaelmouse and myself,your endless search is for those companies with latent 10B(or more) possibilities.

Your message,regarding value is adroitly phrased and a pleasure to absorb.
I have laboured for years to convey the gist of your post,obviously without much success.

Interesting !

[bakunin] 28/11/2016 11:21

Re intangibles, value of the IP:
Stilo have been capitalising the AuthorBridge development costs. They have been spending roughly £100k per year on AuthorBridge, which led me at one point to proclaim that it was a simple editor that an A-Level student could develop in his bedroom.
So, the accounting value of the IP is indeed low.
What I didn't consider before my ill-conceived remarks was the fact that it is virtually ONLY Stilo that can actually develop a product like AuthorBridge, despite there being a vast array of XML/DITA editors available. The reason for this is because it will not only be an editor, but also a conversion tool as it will incorporate the technology behind Migrate which in turn incorporates the Omnimark technology. Now, in its heyday, Omnimark was THE standard XML conversion tool. It boasts a complex API for specifying streamed conversion of XML via a regular expression language and other stuff. After Stilo got their hands on it, they did not manage to monetise it in any meaningful way. They first continued the Open Source route of its founders, the route followed by many stalwarts today like Red Hat, and then did a volte-face and became very strict on licensing it out, but the number of developers interested in using it on an annual fee-paying base dwindled - simply not enough mission-critical use cases, so developers contented themselves with DIY conversion using Java regular expression capabilities.
So, Stilo developed Migrate as a service using Omnimark to generate revenue from Omnimark, but the demand for that has been underwhelming.
So, this all explains the historical lack of serious revenue at Stilo.
However, they are still the owners of the Omnimark technology. Which means that only they or their licensees are able to develop eg an editor that has Omnimark conversion technology embedded in it. I would hope that their licensing T&C includes a provision for the necessity to pay royalties in addition to the license fee in the event that a licensee were to develop a product for mass commercialisation.
In other words, it only makes sense for Stilo to develop an editor like AuthorBridge.
What is the need for AuthorBridge?
It is my conjecture that the following has materialised over the past few years.
I would be amazed if Migrate does a perfect job of converting XML to DITA.
After all, the user has to write specific templates to drive the conversion process.
Each user will write different templates for different types of documents.
OK, so a typical Migrate customer will spend time developing templates, then run his documents on Migrate, then open them up in a DITA editor, such as the Adobe one, probably finds that some of the documents need a lot of tidying up, so edits a template, re-runs Migrate, etc. It is not that he is charged each time he uses Migrate, but rather the hassle involved in all of this process that has surely kept Migrate revenue to their low levels (most revenue still comes from historical Omnimark licenses). It probably all works out more convenient than using any in-built Adobe XML-DITA conversion features, but I for one would consider it a big headache. When you are dealing with thousands of documents, they are all versioned and stored away in repositories etc etc, so the amount of manual labour involved will be substantial and only a few customers will be experiencing sufficient pain to want to embark on a wholesale XML-DITA conversion process. The ones that make up the small Migrate revenue total to date.
So, the great promise of AuthorBridge is presumably that the above-described process gets streamlined considerably and ALL of the work takes place within one interface, AuthorBridge, where the user can check out a version of a document from a repository, design his templates, launch the integrated Migrate/Omnimark technology to convert the document, mmediately within the same interface see the results, iterate etc. And, when he is happy with it, if the templates will work ok on other similar documents, probably feed thousands of documents into the online batch Migrate service and pick them all up afterwards in AuthorBridge.
Since Stilo are the only ones who can provide this level of sophistication because they own Omnimark, they have a potentially enormous market ahead of them. Especially as AuthorBridge will exist as both a stand-alone product and a cloud-based product, to my knowledge.
So, once those customers who use AuthorBridge for the conversion facilities have finished their document conversion, it would make sense for them to continue using AuthorBridge going forward. This was always a concern of mine, the limited size and finiteness of the conversion market. But, I was far less concerned about this once Stilo announced that AuthorBridge would be a cloud-based editor, as it is easy to see how large corporations eg IBM can orchestrate the documentation produced by sub-contractors etc via AuthorBridge.
So, why hasn't AuthorBridge already dominated the XML/DITA editor market?
Because of the complexity involved in getting document import/conversion as automated as possible. Development work which, coincidentally, is VERY slow. It is no good taking on dozens of developers, designing new features for AuthorBridge and getting them to code it out as soon as possible. What needs to be developed will be communicated back to Stilo by those already using the product so far, what they need/want, the problems they are having. And this communication path is a very slow one.
In conclusion, although Stilo have spent very little on developing AuthorBridge, its IP value is exponentially higher because of the exclusive ownership of Omnimark.
If they ever get the user complexity down to near complete automation of the conversion process, AuthorBridge will be in great demand and they will have a monopoly position.
An offer for Stilo won't get made imo until the AuthorBridge product is fully developed and bug-free, ready to be monetised on a mass scale and carried forward into other use cases. What Stilo could do with real-time streamed XML conversion, eg aggregating IoT data in XML/DITA format for reporting etc purposes eg AuthorBridge being a kind of IoT dashboard, is pretty mind-blowing. At that point, it would not be in the shareholders' interests to sell out for something like £30m. The technology would be worth far more. The question is what the acquiror would offer the directors in addition to cash for their shares.

[clocktower] 28/11/2016 10:49

SL - Yes followed mud (the fund manager) and this for many years - Management will play this as they have done over the many years, why would they change, other than to start to award themselves higher salaries and big share options to discourage a takeover, if they feel threatened imo.

[stilolosses] 28/11/2016 10:24

I certainly hope not clock. In 3 years from now I would expect management at the very minimum to be generating £3 mill revenues. This is a bare minimum. Nevertheless I can certainly see why you have such a view. I am assuming that you know the history of Stilo over many years.

Anyway, why do you feel this saga will continue? Are your views any different with the new Authorbridge product?