NewsGator Investment

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.