Profile: Rojo

Company: Rojo

Location: San Francisco, CA

Launched: Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005

Funding: “Rojo received seed financing from TPG Ventures and individuals such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo’s most recent round of funding was lead by BV Capital and TPG Ventures.”

What is it?

Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all here) that combines great “standard” RSS feader features with tagging and social networking. It is an interesting experiment that is getting a lot of buzz.

The service is completely free for users. It includes adds in the user interface.

In their own words, “Rojo means “RSS with mojo” and in this spirit our company is dedicated to providing the best RSS feed reader around so that busy people can manage and read content as efficiently as possible. Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends. We believe that analytics and community based features are what make feed reading accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike so we provide RojoBuzz, which tracks which webpages are most linked-to by the feeds you read. With Rojo’s community features you can share stories, feeds, tags, contacts, and profile information with your friends and colleagues, making it easy to find, discover, and share interesting content. This is what we are dedicated to providing. This is what we are passionate about. “

Signup was easy (with standard email confirmation), and I was able to import all of my feeds from bloglines (although this process could easily be simplified – I would much rather just tell them “bloglines” and my username, which some other web-based RSS readers do. Export of feeds via OPML is also offered.

Rojo’s magic – what makes it stand out from the crowd – is the ability to tag posts, feeds and contacts. You can use those tags to sort and find your content, but you can also use them to find other potentially useful content from others, including your contacts. Adding contacts and sharing tags and feeds is very simple. Taggin of posts and feeds also partially solves the ranking problem with blogs – it helps the cream rise to the top.

There are some other excellent reviews of Rojo out there and we’ve linked to many at the bottom of this post. See, for example, Jeff Clavier’s analysis here.

Key Features:

– Free
– Web-Based
– (relatively) easy import of feeds
– export of feeds
– Feed Reading and Discovery
– Search
– Tagging
– Sharing
– expand/collapse feeds
COOL COOL COOLRojolicious (combining Rojo Tags with Delicious Tags)

Screen Shots:








Management:

Christopher J. Alden, Co-founder, CEO
Timothy J.O. Catlin, VP of Engineering
Kevin Burton, Co-founder, Lead engineer
Link

Board of Directors:

Christopher J. Alden, CEO
Dave Whorton, General Partner, TPG Ventures
Thomas Gieselmann, General Partner, BV Capital
Ron Conway, Managing Partner, Angel Investors LP funds
Link

Advisors:

Marc Andreessen
Karen Edwards
Mark Graham, Co-founder
Brewster Kahle
Susan Mernit
Artie Wu
Link

Relevant Links:

Software Only review of new rojo

Susan mernit
Steve Gillmor
Om Malik
Add chicklet
Rojolicious
Rojo wiki
FAQ
Rojo blog
About
Press
Rojo merchandise
Rojo Tag cloud
Slashdot
Team
Under the Radar on Rojo (great profile)
BlogThis on Rojo

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