Brad Feld writes in his blog for their rationale behind NewsGator investment:
The misperception is that NewsGator is only an Outlook plug-in. While the most popular product from NewsGator is currently their Outlook-based aggregator, what really turned us on when we dug into NewsGator as a potential investment is NewsGator Online Services (NGOS). Greg Reinacker's vision is much broader than simply an RSS aggregator - his goal is to provide RSS content on any device. NewsGator currently provides clients for Outlook, the Web, POP email, mobile devices (web-based and wap), and Microsoft Media Center (how cool is it to get an RSS feed on your TV?).
Following are several examples of how NGOS can be used today:
- I use a Tmoblie Sidekick - made by Danger - as my cell phone and wireless data device (web browser, email, AOL IM, wap browser, calendar). Using NGOS Mobile Edition, I can read my feeds via my web or wap browser on my Sidekick. These subscriptions are synchronized with my desktop, so I don't have to do any set up on my Sidekick - I simply access my services.newsgator.com mobile edition account.
- NGOS has a custom search feed capability. I put in all of my companies as keywords (one per feed) and then get feeds for each company. This is similar to Yahoo! Alerts and Google Alerts, but also searches all of blogworld so I get any postings in these feeds also.
- A NewsGator / Gmail interface exists. Using this, you can route all of your feeds into your Gmail account and take advantage of Google's search technology on your personal feed database.
Now - while Greg's vision is broad and his technical skills amazing - he'd be the first to admit that NewsGator hasn't packaged and promoted their various products in the most effective way. We're already hard at work on this - expect a steady stream of product announcements in the next few months as we roll out new products to more clearly package and expose all of the technologies NewsGator has built. Existing NewsGator customers should expect to benefit broadly from this - we intend to be fanatically loyal to all of our customers - especially our early ones. We're also extremely interested in finding out how people are using NewsGator and NGOS, as well as what they are looking for in the future products.
A services model is one of the strongest model for RSS. Pure clients can get lost in the space. Netscape story reminds us of that very well.
Tuesday 29 June 2004
Sunday 27 June 2004
RSS Tools
SocialText has a bunch of good links on RSS tools on their webblog.
- A list of RSS Tools
- Secure RSS - the way RSS is being used for private blogs or feeds using basic HTTP authentication.Silver Orange did an experiment on analysing tools that support secure rss feeds. It can be found here http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/july/privaterss
- A list of RSS Tools
- Secure RSS - the way RSS is being used for private blogs or feeds using basic HTTP authentication.Silver Orange did an experiment on analysing tools that support secure rss feeds. It can be found here http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/july/privaterss
Saturday 26 June 2004
Just Execute It
Since my university life, I have always been tempted by the Venture world. Having seen the bubble game of the dot com era; rising aspirations, falling hopes - entrepreneurship is not an easy world. Its not for everyone, only for the ones who want to make things happen.
During the dot-com era, everyone used to talk about a "Killer Idea". Few months back I was with some people, they said their intention was mainly towards good ideas. Even though ideas matter but more then the idea, its the "Execution". Ask yourself a question - do you have the capability to execute, do you understand how a business is run? Ideas just come and pass unless someone strong doesn't executes them.
Recently a company called "Auction Drop" got his first funding. The idea is simple, a chain of drop off centers for eBay. People drop off their items for what they want to sell at eBay at some store and rest everything the store handles. You Drop It Off. We Sell It On eBay.
Interestingly this idea has been tried earlier and it failed. A company called "EZSale" founded some years back on the same principle had its fall. Link
So will AuctionDrop win or fail or why did EZSale failed - answer lies in execution!I remember few words from a talk by Vinod Khosla, where he said one has to pursue things religously against all odds.
The moral is even if you have a great idea, you might not be successful. Strength lies in building yourself strong, knowing the ins and outs, understand things well and then Just Execute It!
During the dot-com era, everyone used to talk about a "Killer Idea". Few months back I was with some people, they said their intention was mainly towards good ideas. Even though ideas matter but more then the idea, its the "Execution". Ask yourself a question - do you have the capability to execute, do you understand how a business is run? Ideas just come and pass unless someone strong doesn't executes them.
Recently a company called "Auction Drop" got his first funding. The idea is simple, a chain of drop off centers for eBay. People drop off their items for what they want to sell at eBay at some store and rest everything the store handles. You Drop It Off. We Sell It On eBay.
Interestingly this idea has been tried earlier and it failed. A company called "EZSale" founded some years back on the same principle had its fall. Link
So will AuctionDrop win or fail or why did EZSale failed - answer lies in execution!I remember few words from a talk by Vinod Khosla, where he said one has to pursue things religously against all odds.
The moral is even if you have a great idea, you might not be successful. Strength lies in building yourself strong, knowing the ins and outs, understand things well and then Just Execute It!
Saturday 12 June 2004
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart - the father of modern day computing systems showed us the way of human computing.
I came to know about this great personality through the hypertext community. I still remember in my university time,I was fascinated by the web when I came to experience it, but I failed to realize the importance of hyperlinking in a wider context. To me it looked to me just like "a href" tag within HTML which I took for granted. But can we imagine the web without links today? They are as synonymous as the web itself.
And from there I made my entry into reading Open HyperDocument System and to Douglas Engelbart.
Can we ever imagine "personal" computing without a mouse, display editing, Outline processing, Video-conferencing, hypermedia, multiple windows, linking, in file object addressing? He is the one who is credited with all and that also way back in 1968!!
In 1968 (an era in which computers were just number crunching machines) he and his team did a landmark demonstration causing shock to everyone. The videos and pictures of this are available and I was myself shocked to see all this in one go. I thought of all these techonologies to have had evolved slowly over a period of time.
Stanford in 1998 organised a symposium on Douglas Engelbart - an Unfinished Revolution. The videos of the symposium are available. Though these are a bit long, but I think they are a must see. Videos
There were a number of interesting talks at the symposium.
I thought everyone would have been blown apart by that demo in 1968. But it's wrong. That era was led by people from Artifical Intelligence and some even thought its just crap, and one should make machines intelligent rather than making machines to be used for knowledge workers. Can we imagine that today?
One of the presenters highligted the effect between fast and slow movements. Fast movements like technology changes fade away fast, Slow changes involving paradigm shifts provide the real continuity on a longer term. We can predict things at 5 year (technology) scale, but can we say how things will be 30 years or 100 years down the line? We can make wild gusesses but it takes a lot to seriously think on that scale!
And the most interesting one was: Can we have a Moore's Law on Organizational capability ?
Douglas Engelbart's aim was not to make technology to show document editing or the like but to make computers in a way which increases the collaborative capability of humans to be more productive. This is what we still miss to a large extent even today.
We live in a world where computing is still data crunching but on a different scale. We live in set paradigms and are bound by set paths. We stil need to work out what do we require for providing intutive interfaces for humans which anyone can use and at the same time increase our productivity.
With more digital mobile devices penetrating our world, we need to work more effectively rather than replicating the PC model on these devices.
I came to know about this great personality through the hypertext community. I still remember in my university time,I was fascinated by the web when I came to experience it, but I failed to realize the importance of hyperlinking in a wider context. To me it looked to me just like "a href" tag within HTML which I took for granted. But can we imagine the web without links today? They are as synonymous as the web itself.
And from there I made my entry into reading Open HyperDocument System and to Douglas Engelbart.
Can we ever imagine "personal" computing without a mouse, display editing, Outline processing, Video-conferencing, hypermedia, multiple windows, linking, in file object addressing? He is the one who is credited with all and that also way back in 1968!!
In 1968 (an era in which computers were just number crunching machines) he and his team did a landmark demonstration causing shock to everyone. The videos and pictures of this are available and I was myself shocked to see all this in one go. I thought of all these techonologies to have had evolved slowly over a period of time.
Stanford in 1998 organised a symposium on Douglas Engelbart - an Unfinished Revolution. The videos of the symposium are available. Though these are a bit long, but I think they are a must see. Videos
There were a number of interesting talks at the symposium.
I thought everyone would have been blown apart by that demo in 1968. But it's wrong. That era was led by people from Artifical Intelligence and some even thought its just crap, and one should make machines intelligent rather than making machines to be used for knowledge workers. Can we imagine that today?
One of the presenters highligted the effect between fast and slow movements. Fast movements like technology changes fade away fast, Slow changes involving paradigm shifts provide the real continuity on a longer term. We can predict things at 5 year (technology) scale, but can we say how things will be 30 years or 100 years down the line? We can make wild gusesses but it takes a lot to seriously think on that scale!
And the most interesting one was: Can we have a Moore's Law on Organizational capability ?
Douglas Engelbart's aim was not to make technology to show document editing or the like but to make computers in a way which increases the collaborative capability of humans to be more productive. This is what we still miss to a large extent even today.
We live in a world where computing is still data crunching but on a different scale. We live in set paradigms and are bound by set paths. We stil need to work out what do we require for providing intutive interfaces for humans which anyone can use and at the same time increase our productivity.
With more digital mobile devices penetrating our world, we need to work more effectively rather than replicating the PC model on these devices.
Robot with a Human Face
Last year, I was just sitting lazily on my bed watching news, when a particular news item shook me a bit up. It was one of the most interesting thing that I had seen in robotics. A Robotic Human Head mimicing human expressions of a person who is sitting in front of the head. Today I just tried to find and got it in one go.
The article The Man Who Mistook His GirlFriend for a Robot in Popular Science describes the process in detail. You can also find videos at this link .
The article The Man Who Mistook His GirlFriend for a Robot in Popular Science describes the process in detail. You can also find videos at this link .
Digital Pens - Can they comeback?
A recent article in bbc news shows sony laboratories in Tokyo enable one to pick and pass information enabling swapping/sharing of information amongst digital devices.
Pick and drop'
Dr Rekimoto's lab has extended the drag and drop technique used in most PC software to create a 'pick and drop' technique.
So the owner of a handheld computer can pick up a file from their device, using a special pen, and drop it onto the screen of another computer, by placing the pen on its screen.
These technologies are very interesting for truly intuitive interaction Ian McClelland, Philips. He refers to this approach as 'direct manipulation'. It allows people to visually select and move information in physical space, rather than having to understand abstract concepts of networks and servers.
The pick and drop technique would make it easy for two colleagues in a meeting to exchange files between their laptop computers, new acquaintances to pass each other electronic business cards, or friends to swap references to websites or music tracks they like.
Another technique that the labs has developed is referred to as 'pick and beam'.
This uses displays projected onto tables and walls, using data projectors, that act as extended working spaces.
Documents can be dragged using a special pen from a computer desktop into these spaces. There they can be spread out or exchanged, allowing people to work with them almost as if they were paper documents.
Pick and drop'
Dr Rekimoto's lab has extended the drag and drop technique used in most PC software to create a 'pick and drop' technique.
So the owner of a handheld computer can pick up a file from their device, using a special pen, and drop it onto the screen of another computer, by placing the pen on its screen.
These technologies are very interesting for truly intuitive interaction Ian McClelland, Philips. He refers to this approach as 'direct manipulation'. It allows people to visually select and move information in physical space, rather than having to understand abstract concepts of networks and servers.
The pick and drop technique would make it easy for two colleagues in a meeting to exchange files between their laptop computers, new acquaintances to pass each other electronic business cards, or friends to swap references to websites or music tracks they like.
Another technique that the labs has developed is referred to as 'pick and beam'.
This uses displays projected onto tables and walls, using data projectors, that act as extended working spaces.
Documents can be dragged using a special pen from a computer desktop into these spaces. There they can be spread out or exchanged, allowing people to work with them almost as if they were paper documents.
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