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.

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

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!

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.

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 .

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.

Venus Show

Venus made a rare show passing across the sun today. My colleague in office brought special sunglasses today morning. The view was just superb!

Below is a picture and comments from Rediff.com


Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images.
Venus made a pass across the sun on Tuesday -- the first time since 1882.

In a rare alignment that has not occurred in 122 years, the planet appeared to move across the face of the Sun -- an astronomical event known as the transit of Venus.

Before Tuesday, no human alive had seen the event. The next transit of Venus is on June 6, 2012. But miss that one and you are out of luck. The next one will be in 2117.

Venus is visible as a black dot as it transits across the face of the Sun as seen from the Greenwich Observatory in London.

Mobility & SMS

1999-2000 were the boom-burst times for the IT industry. It was the time when the mobiles started hitting the campuses, though quite costly for we college goers then.

I still remember with my friends discussing the new buzzword SMS, with some disagreeing that mobile phones are crappy with small screens and too few keys to type. Some one in the crowd said, "SMS will fail". And many in the technology market thought the same and have been taken aback by the success of SMS.

I regard mobility and simplicity to be the two key factors for the success of SMS. Everything from just ringtones, wallpapers, dating, news, airplane updates - any other application of internet has moved to this primitive medium called SMS. The days when we are moving into 3-D visualizations, high tech areas such as nano technology, a simple technology (primitive to current standards) has turned into a multi billion dollar industry. This is what is mobility and simplicity really are.

The current world of mobility is just a beginning. Its still novice - it is at its pre internet stage. There is much more for us to see.

Mobility is getting used to people and People are getting used to mobility.

For mobility to succeed in future, it shouldn't forget the basic principles :

- Provide hit and click services (People need services anywhere anytime, one just needs to provide them in a straight forward fashion). I want to buy a TV, give me the price of TV from the local store. Let the server handle all the complexities and give a user, a hit and click service.

- Simple interfaces which everyone can use (let computing come to people rather than people need to take a course to learn).

- Make Mobility rich but not complex.

Semantic Web Activity in India

For past few days, I was trying to look for people, institutes or companies in India involved in Semantic Web. In Europe it seems to be quite huge effort from some time. I couldn't find much information on these topics earlier.

But today, I found something interesting. NCST (National Centre for Software Technology) Bangalore (now known as C-DAC)has a particular research group called "Data & Knowledge Engineering" which works on Semantic Web. Its quite good to see indian institutes moving in that direction. They have a number of projects running in the knowledge domain.

- KMap - A Web-based Knowledge Management Application

- Viksha - Knowledge Enabling Devices
Viksha aims at building a channel through which extraction and addition of knowledge through different data sources existing inside an organisation and combining it with Internet. The whole system is broadly categorized into three parts: -Existing databases, Ontology and then an Intelligent Browser.

- VXML - Visual Document XMLiser
Aim is to convert unstructured text data to structured XML format using a Visual Editor.

- Semantic Web Annotation Tool
The Annotation System makes it possible to make/search annotations using a plugin for Internet Explorer. The annotations can be stored both at the client and at the server end.

The screenshots of the available tools look quite good. Currently not available in public domain, but perhaps might be there soon.

RSS Advertising - will we get spammed?

A look at few of the blogs (Russel, Pheedo) seems to show the beginning of RSS Advertising. Pheedo recently did a case study on RSS Advertising.

Pheedo reports that by integrating online advertising into an RSS feed, a new online advertising technique, it has achieved measurably better results than e-mail for its client.

The online campaign for a free IT evaluation was conducted through specialist publication InfoWorld, which could offer direct access to IT professionals.

Pheedo said the six-week effort outperformed the best click through rate in email by over 26% as compared to the industry average of 8.7% CTR reported in DoubleClick’s Q4 2003 Email Trend Report. Furthermore, they were able to lower the effective CPM by three times of that over email, saving its client thousands of dollars.

Writing this, I thought about Google AdSense - did someone one integrate Google Adsense in RSS feeds? The answer is YES. Enough smart people around. But its against google license policy and therefore has been put off. [Mehack]

And now yet, another activity - BlogAds. Some items from BlogAds FAQ

What are Blogads?
Glad you asked that. Blogads are classified ads that appear in blogs and other independent web sites. Each "strip" of Blogads is managed by an independent publisher who sets prices and decides which ads appear.

Thank you. Who gets the cash from Blogads?
In traditional media, writers and editors earn less than 20% of total revenues, and 80% of revenues go to newsprint, ink, new computers for the ad reps, parking spots, printing presses, lemonade for the publisher's kids... you get the picture. The coin gets flipped with Blogads: 80% goes to the writer, with 20% paying for technology

Will we see publishers now publishing 10 items in every feed which contain nothing but ads? RSS atleast has a big plus that one can remove it quite easily from his reader. So publishers have to be extra careful that they don't publish feeds which cause a nuisance. What will it be for users? Only time will tell, how mainstream this activity becomes. Right now it looks to be going strong!

Business Models for Semantic Web

Today's world-wide web consists mainly of html pages which people view using browsers. In the late 90's IE - Netscape war was one of the hottest wars for maintaining authority on the internet. Browsers are till today the main entry point for viewing content on the Web. Content Providers publish content via HTML and big content providers like Yahoo earn their revenue by advertising.

Today's content industry & web based services are to some extent supported by advertising. The google ADSense program took this advertising to the next level by building a store house which can provide advertisements to any small or big content publisher. Advertising has also in some sense become a lifeline even for consumers to have free services on the web.

The world wide web has grown so big, its not possible for people to sneak each and every corner of the web. People are increasingly feeling the need for content to come back to them depending on their interests rather they going and search for it. They would like to divulge certain tedious or repetitive tasks to software agents which can handle them well on their behalf.

I will like all my resources (content I read or services I use) to be adapted according to my own needs. I want an agent to look and inform me of the best deal for a camera. In this world, where software agents work, what role do current business models for advertising play? They appear to me will slowly fade away in the dark. Things are beginning to already appear with RSS, where users are increasingly viewing information via rss readers or directly in their email boxes rather then going on the web. As we go forward with more and more metadata on the web, demand for user adaptable content and services will increase.

In such a situation, where users don't access content the way the content provider provides, but in a way they want; how can content providers sustain themselves? How can users still get subsidised or free services on internet in a future semantic web scenario where agents are brokering on my behalf?

One solution I can think is the advertising itself can mature from just being static (content or images) to be itself a service. My software agents when looking for content on bbc site for me, also check the metadata based advertisements on bbc's site to get recommendations or in other cases might negotiate some deal.

The next question will be to what extent can these "smart advertisements" lure software agents ?