Automattic, the business end of blogging software WordPress, and enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow have announced a partnership that’s all the talk of the blogosphere. The two companies will offer a joint product that blogs and reads feeds both public facing and behind the fire wall. This is a good move that could make a big difference in the rate of adoption of social software in the business world as few things go together like blogging and RSS. KnowNow is a Sunnyvale, California company that’s been around since before RSS was on the stage but has recently relaunched with a new emphasis on syndication technology. In its initial iteration it utilized adapters similar to what it and other companies now use to transform and deliver information via RSS from various sources that don’t publish native feeds. Those types of adapters, pulling information from various databases inside the enterprise and from around the web and making it available for feed readers, are now a common practice in enterprise RSS. The company is headed by Todd Rulon-Miller, a former Senior VP at Netscape in the 1990′s. KnowNow has a long and impressive customer list, though when I last spoke to them only about 12 of those companies had yet deployed their new enterprise RSS server. Wells Fargo Bank is the company’s flagship RSS customer. They have raised a number of rounds of funding, the most recent was announced at the end of last month and was for $13 million. That round included money from RSS Investors, Presidio Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Levensohn Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures. The new KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition will be sold and supported by KnowNow, who previously offered only a blog-like notes feature for publishing. Customers should be able to use KnowNow’s technology for intake of information from external news feeds to internal database queries and corporate communication. The blogging platform will then be used for either public facing blogs, internal communication behind the firewall or probably in most cases both. Blogging software was a revolution in and of itself, but it’s always needed RSS to serve as its foundation. RSS feeds are what allow an ecosystem of blogs to flourish by allowing readers to easily consume a large number of blogs. Feeds also nourish publishers by making a steady flow of information easy to consume and then share by posting. The new joint product will → Read More
Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here. Zvents My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff. KnowNow Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week. Orb Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though. Wink Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”. Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow. Allpeers Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently. Flock Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again. But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week. PubSub Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here. → Read More
