Coming back from vacation and catching up on what my portfolio companies announced last week is often fun. Three companies – NewsGator, FeedBurner, and Rally Software were particularly active last week.
NewsGator led the charge with a bunch of announcements including mobile stuff (the acquisition of Smartfeed and a J2ME aggregator), the public NetNewsWire 2.1 Beta, a very close to final FeedDemon 2.0 Beta, synchronization with Windows Vista and IE 7, and the launch of a private label newsreader with Newsweek.
FeedBurner was also part of the Newsweek announcement as they will be providing management for Newsweek’s feeds along with incorporating FeedBurner services such as FeedFlare. Technorati was also listed in this release as they’ve been working with Newsweek since last summer. I’m gonna make sure I renew my subscription to Newsweek to express my appreciation (yes – the irony is intentional.)
My friends at Rally Software – who happily count NewsGator as a customer (how else could NewsGator iterate on so many products so quickly) – won the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellent Award. I normally don’t get excited about awards, but I like ones that are named after over caffeinated sodas (I’ve always preferred Jolt over Mountain Dew), even if they are intended for products that have “jolted the industry by helping to create faster, easier and more efficient software.” To finish things off, Rally also announced that they are working with Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland to teach Advanced Scrum courses. No – this has nothing to do with rugby.