NewsGator Online, one of the first online RSS readers I used back in the day, is being tossed in the deadpool by its parent company in a move that signals its newfound focus on desktop applications and social computing tools for businesses.
Users of the online feed reader are kindly requested to migrate their subscriptions over to Google Reader before August 31, and NewsGator will provide step-by-step instructions and in-product reminders to make sure all goes smoothly.
Speaking of NewsGator’s desktop RSS readers, which include FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs, they have both been updated to a new version. Users of the software programs are asked to download the updated versions in the next 30 days, and in another testament to the company’s friendly relationship with Mountain View it is mostly touting the new synchronization feature with Google Reader as a selling point. → Read More
Enterprise RSS promised to be far more than just Google Reader on steroids. It allows groups to keep abreast of private updates using push technology without cluttering up e-mail. Similarly, I use SM2 everyday to monitor news about CrunchBase. Currently I get a daily e-mail, but it’d be nice if I could subscribe to a password-protected RSS feed. On Monday, Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed enterprise RSS is dead–citing Newsgator’s continued infusion of cash as evidence the market is dead. Brad Feld responded with his thoughts on why enterprise RSS is alive. Yesterday, I spoke with JB Holston, Newsgator’s CEO, and asked him for his thoughts: You’re known for RSS readers–what problem do you want to be known for solving? First, though our brand is associated with consumer RSS readers–FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, iPhone RSS reader–we never intended to build a consumer-focused product and flip it to Google. From the beginning, we were targeting the enterprise. We want to be known for solving collaboration problems. We have social widgets, for example Reuters widgets use our technology. We also have a Social Sites application that basically turns Microsoft SharePoint into Facebook for the enterprise. [Screenshot below.] Our enterprise RSS service has two sides: a Saas deployment used by approximately 150 vendors, and an on-premis server that sits behind the firewall–currently about 125 clients. Why do you keep raising cash? Newsgator was first funded four and half years ago–really, we’ve had three rounds of funding from separate groups. Technically it’s been six rounds, but only three events with different lead investors. So far we’ve raised $39 million. This seems like a lot if we were just an iPhone developer (our iPhone application made TIME magazine’s top 10 list), but as I said before, we’re very focused on the enterprise. Raising $39 million is common in this space. What’s your response on the death of enterprise RSS? Who cares? It doesn’t have to be called enterprise RSS because that’s just the backend protocol. From our perspective, enterprise RSS–whether deployed for CMS, or portal enhancement, or social computing, or replaicing external information sources–is just the enabling technology. Our customer’s don’t come to us and say “we want enterprise RSS”. They come with specific problems like “fix our portal”, “help us drive collaboration”, etc, and then we go use RSS. They don’t care how it happens. From our point of view, the conversation has moved beyond RSS in the → Read More
This morning, NewsGator released a small batch of usage statistics for the free iPhone RSS aggregator NetNewsWire, a port of the OS X application of the same name. According to the blog post by Josh Larson, NewsGator’s Community Manager, NetNewsWire has already seen over 200,000 downloads, 115,000 of which have signed up over the last 30 days. On average, NetNewsWire for iPhone users subscribe to 26 RSS feeds. One crazy blacksheep out there somehow handles over 2,800 feeds, which is absurd – I only pull down a few hundred, yet things can already seem a bit torrential at peak times. 2,800 feeds would be mind boggling. [Via TUAW] CrunchBase Information NewsGator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
NewsGator has decided to offer all of its RSS readers for free, including the newest versions of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. NewsGator Inbox, which has just been launched in public beta, will also be available for free. When Nick wrote about NewsGators’ latest round of funding, he noted that NewsGator’s desktop feed readers can be preferable to web-based feed readers like Google Reader. Whereas web-based readers often suffer from a lag during which they fail to show a site’s most recent stories, NewsGator’s desktop readers tend to load up-to-the-minute stories from your favorite sites. NewsGator will rely on revenues from its enterprise offerings going forward. The company will also increasingly record anonymous usage data in an effort “to help make decisions about what content [it believes] will be most relevant for you and for other users.” CrunchBase Information NewsGator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Makers of the desktop RSS reader, NewsGator, have raised a $12 million led by a new investor, Vista Ventures, and supported by existing investors Mobius, Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. This brings the total raised by NewsGator to $30 million over three rounds. Their RSS reader has been a personal favorite of the TechCrunch team. I use it over Google reader, which can lag behind in keeping my feeds up to date. They also have a mobile version. Although we know the company best for the reader, NewsGator has also developed several other RSS related products. They have enterprise servers for syndicating information from the web to your employees, their own widget framework, and a host of personal products. Readers considering enterprise syndication services should check out our coverage of Attensa too. Update: NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston adds: Over 1 million folks rely on NewsGator daily – whether through FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our mobile applications, our enterprise server at 12 of the Fortune 100 (and many more companies), or readers of over 50 sites who work with our content and widgets (USA Today, CBS News, etc etc). He confirms that NewsGator’s main sources of revenues come from licensing its software to enterprises and monthly service fees from media and consumer-products companies. The new investment will go towards strengthening its position “in the enterprise RSS space,” and he expects this will get the company to a breakeven point on profits. CrunchBase Information NewsGator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Buying an iPhone has started becoming the ticket to an exclusive club for a private web of specially crafted applications. iPhones are getting their own chat, chess, and dating applications. Now iPhone owners can sit back, sip their latte, and enjoy yet another delicious iPhone app from NewsGator. RSS reader NewsGator has released an iPhone version of their product today. Now when iPhone users log into m.newsgator.com, they will receive a free iPhone optimized version of the site custom tailored for the touch screen. NewsGator Mobile for iPhone syncs with feeds across on all the existing NewsGator products, including NetNewsWire, NewsGator Online and FeedDemon. They have existing paid clients for Java and Windows Mobile phones we covered previously. These clients include additional features such as clippings and offline reading. Readers should also be familiar with the Google Reader skin developed by David Cann, soon after the release of the iPhone. → Read More
NewsGator Go!, previously only available for Windows Mobile, is now available for Blackberries and Java-capable phones including models from Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung. This version synchronizes with your online NewsGator account and caches articles for later, offline consumption. You can also send stories via email through the program’s interface. Read the rest at MobileCrunch… → Read More
A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I’m updating the list this year. Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: → Read More
RSS vendor Newsgator will announce tomorrow a new service for reading RSS feeds on Windows Mobile phones. Called Newsgator Go! the program will cost about $30 and will sync its data with other members of the Newsgator family: NetNewsWire for Mac, FeedDemon for PCs, Newsgator Online and Newsgator Inbox for Outlook. Newsgator products are my favorite for reading feeds and I’m excited to hear that the company will come out with a Java reader in coming months. One of the best things about the product is that it will allow specific groups of feeds to be designated for sharing across devices via an interface in Newsgator Online. I moved to using NetNewsWire on my desktop when I grew frustrated with Newsgator Online’s inability to display more than a thousand feeds without choking, though the company tells me they’ve vastly improved the speed of the online version in recent months. One way or the other, I only want and need so many feeds on my phone. Newsgator Go! will also cache feed items locally on your phone so you can read them without going online. Other options for reading your feeds on the go include Bloglines Mobile, the FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader, the multi-featured mobile hydra Winksite, Dave Winer’s mobile River of News for select feeds and the forthcoming mobile tool suite SynapseLife. There’s a screenshot of the Newsgator Go! interface posted at MobileCrunch. → Read More
Newsgator just announced the release of a new beta browser toolbar for Windows users of Newsgator Online, Newsgator Inbox and FeedDemon. Some key functionality has been added that will help the company compete with competitor Bloglines. Users will now be able to subscribe with one click to any page’s RSS feed in IE and Firefox, a feature that had made Bloglines the easiest online feed reader to use. The toolbar also displays the number of Newsgator subscribers to the feed, inbound links to the URL you are viewing, a feed preview and a search box to discover new feeds by keyword. This is a very smart addition to the company’s offerings that I’m surprised took so long and I wish it was available for the Mac. One click subscribe is available in NetNewsWire, but the other features would be nice. If this were just a FireFox plug-in that would be ideal. While Bloglines has long been the favorite feed reader for people looking for a simple but powerful tool, the new Newsgator toolbar means that users seeking many of these features now have options. Newsgator provides a river of news feature that Bloglines does not and handles OPML files much more gracefully. The search feature will probably not be as good, though, as the one at Bloglines – which is backed up by Ask.com and requires that Bloglines users are subscribed to a feed before it is displayed in search results in order to exclude splogs. Newsgator is one of the leading RSS companies on the market. The company has provided white label solutions for NewsWeek, USAToday and many other companies. 15% of TechCrunch subscribers use Newsgator services, second only to FireFox Live Bookmarks at 27%. We last wrote about the company when it released a road map for the future of RSS. → Read More
Newsgator and Feedburner are the two most active companies in the RSS space right now. When either of these companies say anything, I pay close attention. Yesterday Newsgator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker (listen to an interview with Greg Reinacker and executives from other feed readers on TalkCrunch) posted something that everyone interested in the future of RSS should pay attention to – a big roadmap for the company’s near term future. Newsgator properties (including the Mac NetNewsWire) are the second most frequently used feed readers by TechCrunch subscribers according to Mike’s post on CrunchNotes – behind FireFox. I think the company’s roadmap speaks to the future of RSS syndication in general. What are the most recent innovations at Bloglines? Folding blog search into Ask.com and supporting flash inside the reader. The Newsgator next steps discussed in Reinacker’s post blow those away. I think that these are the features and issues that we’ll see from every other vendor in this space. Highlights discussed below include: recommending feeds niche default subscription options social networking/comments about feeds RSS everywhere – where else can it go? feeds and podcasts by phone advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities. → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a profile of NewsGator’s online product only, not its outlook, feeddemon and other products. There is a natural tendency to view NewsGator Online in comparison to Bloglines, as the products are both very popular and similar in many ways. Company: NewsGator Founded: 2003. Acquired Feeddemon in May 2005. What is it? This profile reviews only NewsGator’s online product. NewsGator has a number of other popular products, including an Outlook product and the products offered by Feeddemon (recently acquired by NewsGator). We will probably profile NewsGator’s other products soon. They’ve recently changed their pricing structure, and based on its complexity (and user feedback), we suspect things may be further simplified over time. Today, Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon founder) further changed pricing for his product. The reason we like the Online edition is that it is not tied to a single computer. You can log in from anywhere. Also, Bloglines is the gold standard of web-based RSS readers, and it is natural to compare and contrast the two services (see our Blogines profile here) Key Features of NewsGator Online: – easy import of feeds opml file – two pane interface – clippings, folders and feeds on the left, content on the right (similar to bloglines) – alphabetizes feeds – can view all feeds, or just feeds with new content – fast updating – great “clipping” tool to save content with one click – sorting options includ by date, view older/newer first – nascent search abilities NewsGator v. Bloglines: Bloglines has recently had significant delays in updating feeds – often updating only once a week. That means content comes infrequently and is stale – just the opposite of the core reason for using an RSS reader. Their site is also down quite often (who’s seen the infamous Bloglines Plumber recently?) They are the largest RSS reader (other than Yahoo) (Bloglines accounts for about 30% of Techcrunch subscriptions, NewsGator is a close second), but these problems are leading many users to try out other services. However, even with its shortcoming, we find that NewsGator Online is not as good as Bloglines (but it’s close). To test NewsGator, we imported our Bloglines feeds and used it exclusively for a few days. Importing was easy, thanks to the Bloglines export feature and the NewsGator import feature. Snafus are noted below. Things NewsGator does better than Bloglines: 1. Feeds are updated much more frequently → Read More
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