If you are interested in Sling Media’s $46m financing by the likes of Liberty Media, EchoStar, and Goldman Sachs, my partner Ryan McIntyre (who sits on their board) has his view of it.
The guys at FeedBurner have had a busy week. Earlier this week – they announced that their FeedFlare service – which they announced in December – could now be incorporated directly into a blog with one line of javascript.
As an example, let’s look how FeedFlare impacts the post “The Coming Irrelevance of My.Yahoo For Me.” If you get my feed, you’ve noticed the following in the footer:
Now, you’ll notice the following on my blog:
The first line of my blog footer is my standard (and historical) footer. The second line is the FeedFlare. Today there are a relatively limited number of Flare’s available, including “Email This”, “Email The Author”, “Technorati Links”, “Add to Del.icio.us”, and “Subscribe To This Feed” (only on the blog, not in the feed, since you are already subscribed to the feed!)
However, there are a lot more FeedFlare’s coming. In addition, the FeedFlare API is coming, so anyone can create a FeedFlare that automatically plugs in. If you’ve got suggestions for FeedFlare’s that you’d like to see, comment away.
It’s always really exciting when a portfolio company hits its inflection point and has a year of extreme growth. All venture backed companies always predict their growth will follow a “hockey stick curve”, e.g.
This of course is the exception, not the norm, for the vast majority of startups. Stratify had its hockey stick in 2005 – by the end of the year we’d had over 400% growth off of a multi-million dollar base revenue from 2004. While it’s easy to sit back and be delighted (or even a little stunned), there is no end in sight, which is a tribute to Ramana Venkata and his awesome team.
Stratify released v6.0 of their Legal Discovery Service this week. If you are a corporate litigator or a company involved in litigation of any sort, you should explore working with Stratify. Their hockey stick is not an accident – the software (and the company) they’ve created is extraordinary.
FeedBurner launched its Japanese site today with its Japanese partner GMO Affiliate. While I can’t read any of the Japanese on the site, I’m am assured that it says the same interesting things as the English FeedBurner site and does the same things, with some fun, exciting, and hot new Japanese features (that presumably I can’t read either.) There were around 350 feeds “FeedBurnered” in the first 12 hours. Yet another step in FeedBurner’s attempt to provide publishers like you and me help in taming all the world’s feeds that are out in the wild.
Today, FeedBurner announced that USA Today is now using FeedBurner for managing over 100 feeds. I sure do love clicking on that orange XML button and seeing “syndicate content powered by FeedBurner.”
At the same time, FeedBurner announced its new FeedFoundry product for publishers with multiple feeds. FeedFoundry lets you use all the FeedBurner features that you have come to know and love, including FeedFlare, while enabling you to use an new interface that understands the concept of “multiple feeds for a publisher.” If you are a multi-feed publisher, you can get more information (and sign up for a test drive) here.
A few days ago a Technorati watchlist for Quova turned up an article by The Register about their November 2005 circulation numbers. While The Register announced that they crossed the 4m unique threshold for the month (as audited by ABCe), I was more excited to see them quote their distribution of readers by country according to Quova.
While this is a very simplistic use Quova’s technology, it made me think back to the mid-1990’s when I was on the netGenesis and I/Pro boards and I first pondered the analog analog of magazine circulation as applied to the web. At the time, this was really hard data to pull together with any accuracy, especially at the geography level, and I remember talking about different approaches beyond simply parsing HTTP_REFERED to get the country code in the URL.
At the time, we weren’t even thinking about content localization or fraud detection. I was just excited by the pretty pie charts that showed distribution of visitors by country. We’ve come a long way in a decade.
The FeedDemon 2.0 Beta is officially up and ready for action. As a special bonus, I got the alpha of NewsGator Outlook Edition 2.6 today (2.6.1.129) loaded with new features and appearing to be very stable. I’ve got FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 syncing with NewsGator Online syncing with NewsGator Outlook 2.6 Alpha – all my read / unread states are being synced perfectly, I can modify a feed on one and have it ripple through, and all the platforms are running very quickly right now.
Plus – I can now post a Technorati chart of posts per day of a keyword (in this case, “jack bauer”) on my blog.
I know I’m a nerd, but it’s really fun to see all this stuff come together – now if Brent can only get the NetNewsWire beta out my Mac can join in the fun.
I love it when I stumble upon new uses for features from companies that I’m an investor in. This just happened with Technorati Mini. While it’s a relatively new feature, I’ve known about it since inception and have played with it some. However, I never really dug it until last week when my friends at FeedBurner say that they have it up on their screens all day when they make an announcement to see how it spreads throughout the blogosphere.
Now – I have RSS feeds for all my companies set up as Technorati Watchlists so I see this info when I’m check FeedDemon. However, there are times when you want to see this in real time. Say – for example – when you want to see what people are saying about Jack Bauer prior to hours 3 and 4 today. It’s really cool, especially if you have a three monitor setup.
NewsGator has been gradually releasing new inline features for NewsGator Online. If you haven’t played with it in a while and are tired of your existing web-based RSS reader, give it another try. Several new improved features include:
Some more FeedDemon 2.0 features and screen shots are also sneaking out. And – keep your eyes open for the upcoming launch of FeldReader.