If you’ve got a Blackberry, you can now get your RSS feeds on it via NewsGator Go! for Blackberry. There’s also a new version of NewsGator Go! for Java that joins NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. Get your feeds, anywhere, anytime. All automagically synced wherever you are for your reading pleasure.
Roger Fillion has a great, detailed article in today’s Rocky Mountain News on Todd Vernon’s experience pitching his company – Lijit – at the recent Venture Capital in the Rocky’s conference. If you missed the conference (or the pitch), here’s Todd’s first slide (that Roger builds his article around.)
I thought Roger did a super job of getting inside Todd’s brain in this article. I also thought that Todd’s pitch on Lijit was one of the best at the conference. I recognize that I’m biased because (a) I’m a long time friend of Todd’s, (b) I’m an investor in Lijit, and (c) he compares me favorably to Paris Hilton. But – if you are an entrepreneur looking to pitch your new company, this is a great example.
The blog “She Dreams in Digital” has an excellent, short article titled Me.dium Takes Social Bookmarketing One Step Further that does a nice job of explaining Me.dium. As my friends list continues to grow, the power of Me.dium grows with it (it’s a quiet Saturday morning – Amy is on Netflix, probably rearranging her queue, Kimbal is on Google searching for nebuchadnezzar (Kimbal – please tell me you are watching The Matrix), and Seth is on the Pepsi site seeing how fast he can type.) If you want to take it for a spin, use my invite code.
NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop and it radically changed the way I read my RSS feeds – again. NewsGator Desktop came out of requirements from one of the NewsGator Enterprise Server customers who needed a rich desktop notifier as part of their implementation. Voila – generalize an enterprise based feature to an app that spans all the NewsGator consumer and enterprise products. Iterate quickly, add some stuff like Keyboard Shortcuts (duh), and you’ve got something pretty amazing.
I subscribe to 734 feeds. Until a few weeks ago (when I started using NewsGator Desktop), I fired up FeedDemon once a day, spent 30 minutes going through all my unread items, forwarding and clipping as appropriate, and then not looking at my feeds again until the next morning. This was efficient, allowed me to get a feel for everything that was going on and spend time with the things that I had clipped (either to think about, blog about, or do something with.)
Of these 734 feeds, there are 50 of them that I want to see whenever someone posts. These are the bloggers and news sources that I find most relevant and interesting to me. Historically, this didn’t work with my approach so I punted and just read everything at one time.
With NewsGator Desktop, I set up a “location” that only has these 50 or so bloggers in it (“location” is one of the incredible hidden features of NewsGator – it makes me crazy that we haven’t done a better job of surfacing it since it is so powerful.) I now have a notifier that pops up every 15 minutes (that’s about the right periodicity for me) that shows any posts in the past 15 minutes from this list of 50. I scan through them quickly (there’s that nice Keyboard Shortcuts thing again), open up any that I want to read in more depth, and mark all as read. They get automagically synced with NewsGator Online so I don’t see the read ones again.
I solved three problems with this – I get to see the high interest blogs throughout the day as they get written with a similar interaction I have with email, once I’ve read them they go away so I don’t have to look at them again (cutting down on the overall time I spend in the morning with them), and when someone writes something interesting that has real time relevance, I can react to it.
I’ve been doing this on all my computers for three weeks. The novelty has worn off and it’s now part of my use pattern.
I love stats (I guess the “official” software term for it is “analytics.”) My very first angel investment was in a company called NetGenesis which was one of the first web analytics companies (back in 1994). It’s a regular theme in my investing – either directly in companies like NetGenesis and Service Metrics (where analytics is the product), or indirectly in companies like FeedBurner (where analytics is a byproduct and a core part of the value.)
Lijit just rolled out their search stats. If you want to see something cool, take a look at my Lijit search stats. This is the information being searched for in my Lijit Search Wijit (titled “Personal Network Search”) on Feld Thoughts.
The number of searches by day fascinates me since I’m solidly in the 80 – 100 range, which is much more than I expected. The source of clicked results is equally fascinating since it’s a starting point for understand who I’m driving traffic to as a result of searches on my network (not just my blog – but people I trust as authorities on subjects I care about.)
Stan James (Lijit founder / CTO) has an blog up that goes more thorougly through the stats. In addition, he recently posted his preliminary results from the blogroll ranking experiment that he’s run. All the expected disclaimers apply, but the blogroll spider is out on the web doing it’s thing and Stan is applying his giant brain to the data to try to figure out how to mathematically determine the “implicit trust network” that is contained in blogroll information.
I owe David Cohen a cross-post on widgets in our Big or Bullshit series. This isn’t it – I’ll get to it. But – my hint is that while they are big, it’s more bullshit than big (think application packaging – we’ll talk more later.)
In the meantime, a number of my companies continue to crank out stuff in and around the world of widgets. FeedBurner just integrated their Headline Animator widget into their publisher engagement metrics (stats for us nerds.) Lijit just started crawling blogrolls while Bijan simultaneously noticed that the Lijit Wijit (er “widget”) just started reporting some interesting stats on what people were searching on his blog. Todd Vernon reminds us how important measuring everything is and put up a screenshot of a huge Raindance milestone from Monday when Raindance crossed the 5 million / day of audioconferencing minutes (I remember how excited we were when this metric crossed 100,000 / day. Finally, Eric Lunt of FeedBurner spent some time having fun with User-Agents, once again showing how hard it actually can be to accurately measure stuff.
Widgets are big, but they are also bullshit. Coincidentally I just saw a GigaOm article titled Widgets Don’t Age Well. More coming soon.
Ah – growth is good. A number of my portfolio companies have recently increased the pace at which they are hiring, especially on the technical side. StillSecure is working on an exciting new “convergence product” and also expanding its Safe Access team. Mitchell Ashley – who is running the convergence product – has a brief note up on his blog about the type of folks StillSecure is looking for. If you fit the bill and are interested, send an email to careers@stillsecure.com.
Five of my Boulder / Denver based portfolio companies (Rally Software, StillSecure, Me.dium, NewsGator, and Gold Systems) are holding a joint recruiting even on March 7th. They are each looking for a variety of people across Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Services and Support. If you are interested in a new job at a young, rapidly growing software / Internet company, this is a great way to check out some of the hottest companies in the area.
Event Logistics
Wednesday, March 7
5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Westin Westminster
Process and Questions
Arrive anytime between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. on March 7. Tables will be set up to meet with representatives from Rally, StillSecure, Me.dium, NewsGator and Gold Systems. Please bring plenty of copies of your resume and any other relevant work samples; registration in not required. Business attire is recommended, and tea, coffee and light snacks will be provided.
Participating Companies:
Rally Software – Voted the best tech company to work for in Colorado, Rally leads its industry by providing tools and coaching services for Agile software development – one of the fastest-growing trends in the technology space. Search open positions at Rally.
StillSecure – Ranked #12 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 Rising Star list, StillSecure creates network security software products covering network access control, vulnerability management and intrusion detection/prevention. Search open positions at StillSecure.
Me.dium– One of the most blogged about Colorado tech start-ups, Me.dium has developed a window that reveals the hidden world of activity behind a browser, allowing people to see their online world for the first time. Search open positions at Me.dium
NewsGator – Headquartered in Denver, NewsGator is the world’s leading RSS company and develops and markets its RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Search open positions at NewsGator.
Gold Systems – Since its founding in 1991, Gold Systems has been hailed as one of Colorado’s biggest high-tech successes, and its software has helped automate more than 1 billion telephone calls around the world. Search open positions at Gold Systems.
For additional questions, email jobs@rallydev.com.