Zinio announced today that it is now using MarkLogic’s expertise to power its UNITY multi-device platform. Zinio needed a common repository that would enable reliable, rapid aggregation of magazine content and adapt it for exportation in a common format to smart phones, which brought the company to MarkLogic.

“Zinio faces a huge challenge with the content received from magazine publishers. It comes in multiple and inconsistent formats, and many times Zinio simply receives the PDF document, which is not ideal for a good reading experience on a mobile device. In addition, it’s also difficult to get article level access, as opposed to an entire magazine,” says Seth Shearer, director of media solutions at MarkLogic. ”Then there’s timeliness – getting the content on time so the digital version isn’t lagging behind the print version. Imagine if you received a huge batch of inconsistent content today and had to clean it up and transform it so that it is available for electronic distribution tomorrow – that’s a common scenario for Zinio and creates a huge challenge in terms of the speed in which digital content can be made available.”

That’s where MarkLogic comes in — based on patented technology, MarkLogic’s Server enables customers in industries including media, government and financial services to develop and deploy information applications. “With MarkLogic, Zinio is able to handle diverse content sets and work with multiple formats, transforming content on the way in, and on the way out,” says Shearer. “Zinio’s business model is solidly connected to MarkLogic – as the company bets on its ability to handle content from any publisher and get it to their customer quickly. And its application built on MarkLogic was completed – start to finish – in 14 weeks.”

Zinio is using MarkLogic for a mobile application that manages content aggregation from a common repository, which can be exported to any mobile device. To date, it manages and delivers all XML published content and information that flows from Zinio’s content platform – which stores more than 80,000 digital products – and exports the information of choice to users’ mobile screens. This includes the vast amounts of unstructured information inside published content from text to video and audio clips as well as live links.