Congrats to my friends at Return Path for being ranked #167 in this year’s Inc. Magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing private companies America.  Matt Blumberg and his team should be proud of what they’ve accomplished.  When we invested in 2000, Return Path had a business vision, an initial product, and no discernible revenue.  Six years later, they have a substantial business, are growing at a rapid rate, have a superb customer base, should be profitable this year, and are great people to work with.

I’ve been bugging Fred for a while about trying to use a feed reader on a regular basis.  He’s been a random reader – surfing around his blogroll – following links that are interesting to him.  When he recently switched from a PC to a Mac, I encouraged him to give NetNewsWire a try.  I also pointed him at my Product Focused Venture Capital post where I explained how to publish your blogroll from NewsGator Online (which NetNewsWire synchronizes with) on your blog.

Fred sent me an email this morning that was said “BTW – you’ve been waiting for about two years for this” and gave me a link to his “Call Me Converted” post.  If you don’t use a feed reader, but are an avid reader of feeds, it’s a good explanation of his conversion.

But it gets better.  Last week, NewsGator released a new version (1.4.1) of the NewsGator Enterprise Server.  One of the new features is synchronization with NewsGator Client Software – NewsGator Inbox (Outlook), FeedDemon (Windows), and NetNewsWire (Mac).  NewsGator has a number of enterprise customers that like having the separate rich client software as their primary reader – they can now get both a centralized RSS / feed server and the separate rich client software – and be able to mix and match across platforms by user. 

Other features of NGES 1.4.1 include:

• Enhanced Directory Server Integration: LDAP now works as well as Active Directory.
• Podcast Support: Podcast enclosures are detected, highlighted, and managed with FeedStation, just like in NewsGator Online.
• Category Filtering: Do you only want to read my posts on marathons and avoid my posts promoting my companies?  Now you can filter by feed by category.
• Security: Security is starting to make the rounds in the RSS/feed world.  NewsGator has been aggressive about making sure all of their products are locked down and super safe.

Now – assume Fred wants this functionality today, but doesn’t want to deploy a separate enterprise server (since he has a small company – like mine.)  Soon, he’ll be able to use the hosted version of NewsGator Enterprise Server.  He’s essentially doing this today by using NewsGator Online with NetNewsWire – he’s just not able to benefit from the community oriented and administration features that are emerging in NGES (since NewsGator Online doesn’t know how to associate Fred’s user name with the other users at Union Square Ventures.)  Fortunately all of the groundwork he is putting in place now will be easily portable to the next level of functionality across NewsGator’s products that emerge later this year.

Welcome Fred to the land of NetNewsWire users.  I’ll make sure Brent has you on the beta list.

I had a Rally Software board meeting – this has been a fun company to be involved in from raw startup through its current aggressive growth.  When we initially funded Rally – which is the market leader in Agile lifecycle management products, many people said “what’s Agile?”  That question isn’t being asked much anymore – in many cases it’s no longer “what’ and now “when?”  Rally’s expert coaching services has helped accelerate the general adoption of this, but it’s also very clear that Agile is shifting from a new / niche software development methodology to a mainstream one.

The Agile Journal has an excellent case study on Shopzilla’s implementation of Agile using Rally’s products.  If you are interested in exploring using an Agile methodology to develop software, this article can give you a high level feel for how to think about Agile tooling.

Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems and a long time friend – has a great story about his experience yesterday being up on stage with Microsoft at the SpeechTEK 2006 conference demoing Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging and Speech Recognition.  Terry gives a good demo – and tells a great story – especially about a demo that was done with no safety net.

Brian Kellner, my victim VP Product Management at NewsGator, writes a great timeline of “his view” of Product Focused Venture Capital.  Look for the TypePad widget soon.

NewsGator released the beta of their Toolbar for IE and Firefox.  While it’s beta, I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it’s pretty solid.  A toolbar is long overdue, not just for auto-discovery (there are lots of plug-in options for NewsGator’s products – going back to 2004 – but you’ve got to work harder than necessary to find them or get them installed.)  You can get the Toolbar here and – once it’s out of beta – it’ll be on the home page and in the product builds. 

Remember – it’s beta.  If you try it and have problems, tell us.  Did I mention that it’s beta?

Now – this isn’t your ordinary toolbar.  It’s tied tightly to NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox, and FeedDemon.  As you’d expect, it has a Subscribe button and feed autodiscovery.  However, it does smart things like find multiple feeds when they exist (say – on all those Typepad sites) and puts the FeedBurner one at the top of the list.  Or – when you highlight a feed in Subscribe popup, it shows you the Title, URL, Description, and Number of NewsGator subscribers to the feed.  Or – you can actually Preview the feed to make sure it’s got the stuff in it that you want. 

Ok – you’d expect that.  However, when you land on a page that has a bunch of inbound links, there’s a Discussion icon that lights up with the number of Recent Links.  My FeedBurner Networks post got a lot of play over the weekend – Discussion finds 52 links (yeah – there are duplicates – those will get fixed – I already reported it) but via the drop down you can navigate around the inbound links.  Yes – these are all in the NewsGator Online database.

How about the cute little Search box.  Say you are interested in Marathons and want to find some Marathon feeds.  The Search popup returns the top “marathon” feeds in NewsGator’s database, ordered by Number of Subscribers (remember – this is beta – there’s plenty of work to do on this one, including cleaning up duplicates and managing the search taxonomy.)

While the Toolbar in a vacuum might not be that exciting, I think the integration of the various products around the core NewsGator Online feed database in the middle – and the surfacing of a number of clever features (lots more coming) – is really cool.

FeedBurner is beta testing a new set of functionality – called “Networks” that is planned for a September launch.  I’m coordinating one of the beta Networks – the Venture Capital Network.

A FeedBurner Network is a collection of blogs that fit within a particular topic.  The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers.  For example, if you are interested in reading Venture Capital bloggers, you currently have to manually poke around to find them.  Some bloggers have taken it upon themselves to compile a list of Venture Capital bloggers (65 – where did all those come from?) and you can use Technorati to find Blogs about Venture Capital.  But – none of these approaches is particularly organized, scales, or is really manageable.

A FeedBurner Network is managed by a coordinator.  At this stage the coordinator is the gatekeeper for the network, although it will evolve so that all members of a network can promote other potential members.  As a result, the content is “filtered and selected” by the network coordinator (and ultimately members) so that there aren’t “fake” Venture Capital blogs as part of the network.  The result should be a higher quality network and a quick and easy way to find “Venture Capital bloggers.”

Obviously, Venture Capital bloggers is a niche network.  However, it has a surprisingly large readership.  I’ve invited 13 VC bloggers into the network at this point and the network already has 46,000 subscribers.  I’m continuing to gradually invite VC bloggers into the network (if you are a VC blogger, haven’t been invited, but want to be in the network, email me) as I make sure all the FeedBurner stuff (remember – this is an early beta) is rock solid.

There are benefits to subscribers:

• It’s easy to find high quality relevant bloggers / feeds for a specific topic through the aggregation into a Network.
• There will be a “micro-portal” for each Network – you’ll be able to go to a landing page that lists all the members of the network, selectively subscribe to their feeds, or explore their blogs.
• You’ll be able to subscribe to the spliced Network feed (for example, here is the spliced feed for the Venture Capital Network).

There are also benefits to publishers:

• The “micro-portal” will be another place for subscribers to find your blog / feed.
• You will get new readers as a result of people that subscribe to the spliced feed (this will show up in your subscriber metrics.)
• Advertisers will be able buy ads in the Network with higher quality advertising that is relevant to the readers of feeds in the Network.
• You’ll have Network oriented publicity tools (think stuff like “Widget with the latest X headlines in the Network”, or the Banner that I have on the top left of my blog stating that I’m part of the network) which will help cross-promote feeds in the network.
• You might make some new friends via your fellow Network members.

The guys at FeedBurner have a lot of other ideas about this which they’ll roll out in phase 2 of the Network product at the end of the year.  For now, we’re testing a few networks – Venture Capital being one of them – and would love any and all feedback subscribers and publishers have.

If you haven’t tried Technorati in a while, go take another look.  At their birthday party, they rolled out a new major upgrade to the service.  Dave Sifry – the CEO / founder describes it in detail.  My quick scan around the blogosphere pundits showed consistently strong positive feedback.  I often get asked how I manage to keep up with as much information as I do – especially about the companies I’m involved with.  Part of my secret weapon is Technorati, NewsGator Online search feeds, and FeedDemon.  Plus – they all work really nicely together.

Happy birthday guys.

Today, FeedBurner announced that Matt Blumberg has joined their board of directors.  Matt – the CEO of Return Path – has a good post about his perspective on joining the board.  Matt has always been an advocate on the value of CEO’s sitting on other boards and has benefited greatly by the CEO’s that have been on his board (thanks Scott, Bob, and Ben.)  As a long time investor (and past board member) for Return Path, it’s been fun to work with Matt as he’s grown the company.  It’ll be fun to work with him side by side to help the FeedBurner guys.  Welcome Matt!

NewsGator announced that Goodman and Carr – one of the leading law firms in Canada – has deployed NewsGator Enterprise Server.  The nifty thing about this implementation – which is detailed in the case study that just went up on the NewsGator web site – is the tight integration between NewsGator Enterprise Server and Microsoft Sharepoint.  Yum: NGES + Sharepoint = Chocolate + Peanut Butter.