Microsoft BizTalk is one of the sleeper products in the Microsoft Windows Server family. BizTalk is at the core of Microsoft’s Business Process Automation (BPA) solutions and – with the release of BizTalk Server 2006 – is maturing nicely.
One of my investments – Oxlo Systems – has built its products for the auto industry on top of BizTalk and has had great success with the BizTalk Server platform. Microsoft recently wrote up a nice case study on Oxlo and what they’ve done using BizTalk. Oxlo has received a lot of help and support from Microsoft – both the BizTalk product team, the vertical sales organization, and Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team (lead by Dan’l Lewin.)
Scott Maxwell – a partner at Insight Venture Partners – has an extensive post up about Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Scott and I sit on the Microsoft EBT VC Advisory Board, along with several other VCs – and have watched Microsoft continue to increase and improve their focus on working with and helping VC-backed companies. Oxlo is one good example of where it is working.
I’ve been using FeedDemon 1.6 RC2 (the version that synchronizes with NewsGator Online) for the past two months as my feed reader. I monitor over 400 blogs a day and have found that FeedDemon is the only way I can handle this volume effectively. As an investor in NewsGator, I regularly use all the NewsGator products (very convenient since they almost all sync – NetNewsWire sync should be out soon for you Mac users – so I can easily switch between them.) I also play with many of the other aggregators to make sure I know what folks are up to. Nothing comes close to FeedDemon for high volume RSS feed reading / management.
Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon – has put up some teaser screens for FeedDemon 2.0. A number of the new features are aimed at helping with RAT (relevance / attention / trust) which is important for anyone dealing with a large number of feeds. NewsGator / Nick decided not to release 1.6 and go directly to 2.0 to take advantage of a number of new things coming in NewsGator Online.
If you are curious about FeedDemon 2.0, take a look at a few of the screens:
Unread feed view – yum. Awesome stuff Nick.
Or – do you know one? Gold Systems is looking for one. Terry Gold writes eloquently about what he’s looking for. He’s also looking for experienced support engineers and a director of product management.
If you are interested, you can learn more about what Gold Systems is up to from this Microsoft Case Study on Gold Systems IVR Solution for ServiceMagic based on Microsoft Speech Server.
Since FeedBurner and Technorati started off their announcements this week with cooking metaphors, I thought I’d continue the trend. Three of my four RSS-related investments made announcements this week about products and/or customers.
FeedBurner announced a new service called FeedFlare. Jennifer Aniston didn’t wear enough Flair in Office Space, but she would have been fine if she had used FeedFlare. At the bottom of my feed, you’ll now see options to email this post to a friend, email me, see the Technorati links to the post, tag the post with del.icio.us, and see any del.icio.us tags that have already associated with the post. This was trivial to set up – a couple of clicks within my FeedBurner setup page and I automagically had Flare. FeedFlare is based on an open-API so expect lots of new Flare to quickly appear. Fred Wilson nails it with his description.
FeedBurner also announced that Reuters has chosen it to manage its RSS feeds. Major publisher, major market validation.
Technorati announced the Technorati Kitchen. Niall Kennedy explains why this is “The Kitchen” instead of “Beta” (Beta feels so “day old bread”, doesn’t it?). First up – Explore. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject – find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting.
NewsGator announced that the NewsGator Hosted Solution has been chosen by Newsweek and MacWorld. Brent Simmons – the creator of NetNewsWire – talks about why he’s excited about the MacWorld deal.
All in all, a tasty day.
I wrote yesterday about Quova “becoming a company.” Return Path – which celebrates its six birthday today – also became “a company” this year. I’m incredibly proud of the team at Return Path – we invested in 2000 in a company (actually, “a product”) called Veripost which merged after a year with Return Path when both companies were pursuing their Series B financing. Each company was chasing the same market (ECOA – Email Change of Address), were ahead of their time, were really only “a product”, and had the potential to vanish when the Internet bubble burst.
Instead of vanishing, Matt Blumberg and the Return Path team have done an awesome job of building a real company and having the prescience to acquire Assurance Systems – a company started by George Bilbrey (one of the Veripost founders) – early in it’s life. George’s company formed the core of the Email Delivery Assurance business that Return Path currently dominates and George and his team at Assurance have been key members of the Return Path team.
I’ve shared office space with the Return Path team since the inception of Veripost – hopefully they’ll have a cake today (and will bring me a piece).
There are three words I’m starting to see regularly in the recursive world of blogs (blogs about blogs) and user-generate content (yes – there is an awful lot of user-generated content about user-generated content, including this blog post.)
Unfortunately for my title to be cute, pithy, and remind us of a president who actually had a clue even though he couldn’t manage to keep his zipper up (oops, did I say that), I could only use one of the words. So – how about a haiku since when I get older I want to be like Yoda.
It’s the trust, stupid
Pay attention people
Relevance it is
While you might end up feeling like you are playing buzzword bingo, these three words (ok – concepts) are going to start weaving themselves into a lot of the user-generated content dialogue. Why – just this morning – Judy’s Book (my newest investment) announced “TrustScore(SM)”, a mechanism for delivering at-a-glance scoring of local consumer reviews on the Judy’s Book site.
This stuff isn’t trivial to figure out. Seth Goldstein, who is working on Root Markets and AttentionTrust, is deep into the Attention concept. My friends at NewsGator are deep into the Relevance and Attention concepts. The key – of course – is to get this right and completely hide it from the end user (ah – the brilliance of Google Page Rank). Mr. End User wants to automagically get the most relevant, trusted stuff and ignore the other n-thousand pieces of email / blog / web / RSS clutter that vies for his attention every day.
We need a TLA for Trust / Attention / Relevance – how about TAR? Or ART? Or RAT?
One of the challenges with early stage companies is determining whether the thing you are creating is a “feature”, a “product”, or a “company”. Of course everyone aspires to create “a company” and most business plans eloquently describe the $50 million company that is going to be created in five years. Since that rarely occurs, early stage VCs are constantly asking “is that a feature, product, or a company?”
When Raj Bhargava and his co-founders came up with the original idea for Quova, it was unclear whether IP geolocation was the basis for a feature, product, or company. In the first few years of Quova’s life, we spent most of our time inventing the IP geolocation technology, getting some early customers, and evangelizing why IP geolocation mattered. After a couple of years, it was clear that IP geolocation (and Quova) was “a product”, but it wasn’t clear whether or not we had created something that had big enough reach to be classified as “a company.”
Last week, Quova announced their “next-generation suite of geolocation solutions.” In my book, Quova has graduated into “company” territory – based on the breadth of their product line, the rapid increase in relevance of their products / technologies, their revenue ramp, their dominance of their market segment, and the growth of their customer base. The Quova product suite consists of four primary products – Quova Secure, Quova Compliance, Quova Marketing, and Quova Media. These products are all based on the core Quova IP geolocation technology, but are packaged in different ways to address specific customer needs and include additional data, software, and professional services to address the specific customer need.
The evolution from feature to product to company is hard (and often not achieved) – it’s especially rewarding to see it happen with a company like Quova that was funded in 1999 by a patient set of investors that held steady through the Internet crash with the belief that Quova was onto something meaningful. 2005 has been a strong growth year for Quova and with this product suite release the company is extremely well positioned and focused for additional rapid growth and an exciting time in 2006.
Nope – I’m not referring to an HTTP 404 error. I’m talking about Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404. If you are a software developer and don’t know what SOX is, it’s the law enacted after all the corporate accounting scandals in the early 2000’s that was intended to increase the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosure. There are many opinions on SOX, including the widely held opinion among the VC community that SOX has been instrumental in discouraging companies from going public. Love or hate it, we’ve all got to live with it.
Niel Robertson – the CTO of Newmerix – has written a good overview article on SOX 404 and what it means to the IT organization and the software developer. Distilling the government regulations and accounting stuff into a short article that is relevant and useful is non-trivial – Niel did a nice job of it. If you are involved in creating, managing, or deploying software that impacts financial systems, it’s worth a read.
If you haven’t used Technorati for a while because of either performance or accuracy issues, try it again. Dave Sifry – Technorati’s CEO – has a post up describing their performance improvements. As a Technorati investor, I’ve given Dave and team lots of steady feedback and have watched with happiness as the performance, relevance, and accuracy has steadily improved as they’ve continued to scale up and tune their infrastructure to handle the massive number of blogs that they are indexing. Oh – and they’ve added a bunch of cool new features along the way. Dave and his team listen – if you have issues after trying it again, email me and I’ll pass it on or give them feedback directly.