We have a bunch of cool companies. One of my new favorites is Sling Media who makes the ultraspiffy Slingbox. My collegue Ryan McIntyre sits on their board and has a comprehensive post with links up about this nifty new device that helps you watch your television (cable, satellite, or DVR) wherever you are. You can watch Ryan and the CEO of Sling – Blake Krikorian – talking about this type of stuff on The ISV Show.
If you are so inclined, you can treat yourself to a new toy this holiday weekend and – instead of buying a car at the endless “4th of July sales” – wander over to your local CompUSA (or the CompUSA web site) and pick yourself up a Slingbox.
Matt Blumberg – CEO of Return Path – posted a job description for a new VP of Marketing on his blog. Jennifer Wilson – Return Path’s long standing VP Marketing is having a baby and going on maternity leave (congrats Jennifer!) – when she returns it’ll be on a part time basis. So – if you are (or know) and A+ VP of Marketing in the Denver or New York area, please drop Matt a note.
I hate Spam. Fortunately, one of our companies – Postini – does a remarkable job of eliminating it (turn on Postini, magic happens, Spam disappears.) Recently, I’ve been under attack from other Spam variants, including trackback/comment Spam and IM Spam (SPIM). Today, Postini announced a partnership with IMlogic to collaborate on a Spim blocking service. Dudes – IM there.
Gnomedex starts tomorrow (ok – I guess it officially started tonight, but I chose to spending the evening gorging on sushi with Amy and then watching the Spurs crunch the Pistons.) I’m not a conference guy (I get restless) but I happened to be in Seattle and it has turned into the center of the RSS universe for a few days. So – off I go to Gnomedex tomorrow.
In preparation, NewsGator released two new things this week.
Sync is up next. I’ll be on the look out for short nerds tomorrow.
Very sweet – nice job Dave and team. Great new UI, tags – tags – tags, advanced search, better watchlists, RSS feeds from lots of stuff, new indexing, deduping of results, link sidebar, tighter search, and lots more. Go play and give the Technorati crew feedback so they can keep improving it.
Fred Wilson calls it EZ Pass for Email. It’s the best metaphor for what Return Path’s Bonded Sender Program does and Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – explains it very clearly on his blog.
We had high hopes for Bonded Sender when we acquired it from IronPort Systems in April of 2005. Now that we’ve had several months of experience with Bonded Sender, our expectations – based on what we are seeing – have been exceeded.
Return Path analyzed 100,000 email campaigns across clients who were accepted into the Bonded Sender Program while already using Return Path’s delivery monitoring services. The results over a 90 day period were very significant. Email deliverability rates increased on average by 20.6%. 250 million mailboxes are represented by the 35,000 domains (corporations, ISPs, colleges, and filtering packages) that use Bonded Sender as an email accreditation service (think of Fred’s EZ Pass metaphor – if you are a member of the Bonded Sender Program, 35,000 domains let your email pass through their spam filter).
While I’m spending a lot of time with RSS these days, we’ve also historically made a lot of email-related investments, including Email Publishing / MessageMedia (email service provider), Critical Path (email hosting), and Postini (email security / anti-spam / anti-virus service). Return Path continues in this investment thesis and – given both Fred and Matt’s awareness and understanding of both email and RSS – you can expect some nice email / RSS cross-over action as we continue on our quest to make email as effective and safe as possible.
My RSS world continues to be busy as both Technorati and Feedburner had lots of action this week.
Technorati released the beta of their new site. Dave Sifry has a post up about the features as does Niall Kennedy, who includes some fun old Technorati designs from 11/02, 6/04, and 7/04. Awesome progress guys (as of today: 11.2m weblogs watched and 1.2 billion links tracked.)
On Monday, the Feedburner guys put out an analysis of their existing aggregated podcast metrics. Feedburner now manages feeds for 6,000 podcasts and are seeing solid growth in the number of per-podcast subscribers (average of 33 – up from 15 in February; average of 65 if you eliminate the podcasts with less than 4 subs).
On Thursday, Feedburner announced their SmartFeed Mobile Server. This allows commercial publishers to publish once to all their feed subscribers across a wide variety of mobile devices. It augments Feedburner’s SmartFeed service that deploys the right format of your feed to various user-agents (so – it’s “subscriber aware, rather than “publisher driven”). I’ve heard lots of folks complain lately that feeds are starting to look goofy in different devices (e.g. I love stuff on the web, but my Trio sucks). If you are a feed publisher, Feedburner’s services address this issue automagically for you.
On Friday, Feedburner responded to feedback from several notable RSS folks that Feedburner was inappropriately creating “lock in” when someone had Feedburner start managing their feed. Specifically, if you changed your mind for some reason and didn’t want Feedburner to manage your feed, there was no simple way to get your subscribers redirected to another feed. While the Feedburner guys had not heard this request from very many of the customers, it became clear about a week ago that this was something we should address as part of “being a good citizen.” Eric Lunt cranked on it and rolled it out in less then a week of determining the importance of it. The Feedburner gang is clear that “it’s your feed” as evidenced both by this functionality as well as Eric declaring “[While] we think we have the best feed management service, we think that providing publishers with the ability to do whatever they want is always the right answer, and most importantly, we think your subscribers are your subscribers, not ours or anybody else’s.”
And – for those of you that like tagging, podcasting, and the ability to quickly roll new functionality by combining different services, Fred Wilson figured out how to use del.icio.us and Feedburner to create his own podcast/playlist from the music he’s been listening to. Eric took it one step further and inserted an elevator pitch (Fred is a VC after all) into the stream, so Fred created a feed for “fred’selevatorpitch”.
Who said VCs aren’t nerds.
I wrote a post earlier today about Matt Blumberg. This afternoon, I was thinking about Jim Lejeal, another great entrepreneurs (and blogger) that I get to work with.
Jim is the founder and CEO of Oxlo Systems (we are investors.) Jim was previously the co-founder and COO of Raindance Communication (again, we were investors – see a pattern?) We’ve worked together on various things since 1997 – Jim’s continued persistence was one of the reasons I invested in Dante Group (which was then acquired by webMethods for a nice 3.5x return in six months in 2003 – not a home run – but a nice venture deal – especially after the dry spell that was 2001 – 2002.)
Jim had a busy spring. On May 31, he announced that Oxlo had closed a $5 million financing consisting of us, Appian Ventures, and Waypoint Ventures. This loads up their gas tank nicely through the end of 2006. Jim wrote a couple of posts on the financing process – including Fundraising…, Expectations and the First Chicago Method, Not everyone calculates an IRR, Well I did it again (a priceless story), and Everything-Assured Capital. If you are raising VC money – or thinking about it – run, don’t walk your mouse – to read these posts. Now that the financing process is over, I hope Jim will write more about it.
While it’s easy to fall into the trap of “stopping everything else” when you are fundraising, Jim knows that’s an ineffective way to run a young company. Oxlo continues to make steady progress with two major announcements in May – an exclusive partnership with BIGFNI and an integration relationship with RouteOne’s Credit Application Management System. If you know anything about the auto industry, you know these are two big dominos that Oxlo needed to get to fall – and they have. Well done Jim and team.
The CEO’s of my companies have probably gotten tired of me saying “c’mon guys – put a blog up as part of the front page of your site.” While folks are still issuing press releases, the “home page corporate blog” is a great way of quickly getting messages out about your company and your products. Plus – if you do it right – you can use the voice of people in your company, rather than just boring-as-shit PR/marketing speak.
While many of the CEO’s of my companies are blogging (JB, Dick, Terry, Ed, Jim, and Matt), it’s been slow going to get the corporate blogs up. Not surprisingly (since they live and breath this stuff), NewsGator and Feedburner are the first two up. NewsGator Daily covers all things NewsGator and – as CEO JB Holston says – will “have multiple authors contribute, embedded directly on our site.” Feedburner’s weblog – Burning Questions – has been up for a few months, but they’ve just added Publisher Buzz (“recent posts from people who kind of dig Feedburner”).
If you want to subscribe, the links are below:
Rob, Dan, Terry, Mike, Ed, Jim, Marie, Tim, Matt, Raj, Ramana, Dave – what gives?