Newsgator

One of our themes is Protocol . We’ve been investing in companies built around technology protocols since 1994. One of my first investments, when I moved to Boulder in 1995, was in a company called Email Publishing, which was the very first email service provider. SMTP has been very good to me. We made some of the early investments in companies built around RSS, including FeedBurner and NewsGator. RSS is a brilliant, and very durable, protocol. The original creators of the protocol had great vision, but the history and evolution of RSS were filled with challenges and controversy. Like religious conflict, the emotion ran higher than it needed to and the ad-hominem attacks drove some great people away from engaging with the community around the protocol. ...

I am on the board of Sitrion , who just released their latest version of Sitrion ONE , which allows enterprises to deliver mobile solutions in one single day. Many companies travel a long and interesting journey. When we invested in NewsGator in 2004 , RSS was just starting to emerge as a protocol and wire up much of the content on the web. At the time, it was impossible to anticipate how the web would evolve, as 2004 was a particularly low point in the evolution of venture capital and tech companies. Of course, it was also the year that Facebook was founded, which is an important thing to remember about the relationship between perception in the moment and long term reality. ...

My friends at NewsGator have started a fundraising campaign to help victims of the Colorado wildfires. In addition to getting the campaign up and running, NewsGator has committed to a matching gift of $10,000. Amy and I decided to match that gift from our foundation, so the matching gift is now $20,000. I’d like to encourage everyone involved in a startup in Colorado (or anyone in the world) to help your neighbors in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Boulder who are victims of the current fires that are raging. There are two ways to do this: ...

While you might be interested in a ego vanity iPhone app like the Brad Feld iPhone app, you are probably a lot more interested in an iPhone app for your business. NewsGator has become an expert at building these and has developed a superb framework for branded iPhone apps. On March 31st they are having a Webinar titled Gain Revenue & Readership with Branded iPhone Apps – Reed Business Case Study Webinar*.* Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Brien Tate (Reed Business’ CTO) will walk through what they’ve done around the Variety iPhone app including: ...

In case you don’t get enough of me, you can now download the Brad Feld iPhone app. Or – from your iPhone – just do an App Store search on Brad Feld. As a result of the Brad Feld iPhone app you can easily get the blogs from Feld Thoughts , Ask the VC , Foundry Group , Amy Batchelor, and Stan Feld all in one nifty app on your iPhone. ...

Greg Reinacker, the founder/CTO of NewsGator, has a post up titled Enterprise RSS – the State of the Industry that is a continuation of the discussion that’s recently ensued around Enterprise RSS (reference my post from the other day – Enterprise RSS at NewsGator is Alive and Well ). Following is the setup. First, let me get this out of the way – RSS use in the enterprise is definitely alive and well. But it’s not in the obvious places. No one is writing articles talking about how their desktop feed readers are revolutionizing the way they do business. No one is talking about how they’re retiring their Exchange servers because so much content is delivered via RSS instead of email (and in fact, email is alive and well). No one is saying “if I only had Google Reader behind my firewall, I could save millions of dollars.” Few companies even say their users are clamoring for some sort of enterprise RSS application. ...

I love ReadWriteWeb. I respect Marshall Kirkpatrick. But I’m completely baffled by his article R.I.P. Enterprise RSS. Marshall says “It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead.” Huh? Marshall, are we living in parallel universes? NewsGator has built its business on Enterprise RSS. It has two primary revenue generating products around Enterprise RSS: Social Sites Professional and Social Sites Enterprise. There are now over 120 companies using these products representing over 800,000 users. Per the press release NewsGator issued today, customers that bought these products in 2008 include: ...

Yesterday, NewsGator announced the release of their AdBurner Online Advertising Program. AdBurner is a partnership between NewsGator, Technorati, AdMeld , Gigya , Medialets, and Tremor Media. If you’ve been following NewsGator’s progress, you know that they have two major parts to their business – their (1) enterprise products and (2) media products. They had an excellent year in 2008 with significant growth on both sides of their business along with an especially strong Q4. ...

Kevin Kelleher’s article on GigaOm this morning titled 2009: Year of the Hacker made me think back to the rise of open source after the Internet crash of 2001. In the aftermath of the crash, many experienced software developers were out of work for a period of time ranging from weeks to years. Some of them threw themselves into open source projects and, in some cases, created their next job with the expertise they developed around a particular open source project. ...