Here’s the latest action:
Newsgator looking for cash — Dan Primack points to a list of 23 companies looking for cash, and one of them is Newsgator. The companies presented at the VC in the Rockies conference in Colorado. We point out Newsgator because it is a so-called RSS feed reader, which allows people to collect and organize the blog/news/other feeds they subscribe to, and it is facing lots of competition. The latest evidence suggests Yahoo, and especially Google are growing dominant in this area, along with Bloglines, now owned by Ask. Techcrunch has an informative piece on the latest feature at Feedburner, a company that manages many feeds for publishers, and which has gathered information about the feeds and how they’re being read. Its “user engagement report” shows how often the various feed readers are being used by their subscribers. Of note: Newsgator appears to be losing market share. And then there’s the question, how do you make money?
Insiderpages, a site for local businesses, is rumored to have been acquired by a public company — More details to come.
Fox Interactive buys ad company, Strategic Data Corporation — The company is supposed to help Fox Interactive, the division of News Corp. that operates MySpace, to boost advertising. Already, Fox Interactive is bringing in $500 million, and this company should help increase. (See NYT)
Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion for MP3 patent infringement — A federal jury awards Alcatel-Lucent the damages, after finding that Microsoft paid a German consortium for use of the format years ago, but that Alcatel-Lucent had patents on the format beforehand.
Stem-cell royalty struggle continues — The California stem-cell institute has been beset by political problems that just won’t go away. A bill expected to be introduced as early as today would require companies doing business with California’s $3 billion stem-cell institute to give the state a larger portion — up to five percent — of their revenue than the one percent he institute had proposed. Story here.
4 Comments
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Niall Kennedy said:
The FeedBurner blog post (and a Techcrunch author interpretation) should not be the only measure of a company’s health. NewsGator owns some of the most popular desktop aggregators, and their private label offerings and enterprise aggregation are growing businesses.
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Greg Reinacker said:
I don’t believe NewsGator is losing market share - quite the contrary. The Feedburner stats are somewhat flawed in representing true market share - I wrote about why on my blog at http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=828.
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Brad Feld said:
Matt - to your question “And then there’s the question, how do you make money?” - it’s really simple in NewsGator’s case. They sell software. The graph of quarterly revenue is a very nice, steep, upward slopping curve.
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David Scott Lewis said:
So now that three NewsGator supporters chimed in, I guess it’s my turn.
If someone really needs syncing between different computers because a person is using, e.g., one at home mostly offline and another at the office online), then NewsGator is indeed a pretty good option. However, this is the only situation where NewsGator has a true competitive advantage. Other readers can sync between two different computers (like Awasu).
For my money, the best bet is Omea Pro. There’s really no comparision. It’s not perfect; alas, no readers are. A perfect solution would likely be an Omea-NewzCrawler-Awasu-Google Reader-Bloglines hybrid. But animal doesn’t exit. Hence, I’ve found that Google Reader and Omea are the two best combinations, especially since the Pro edition is now free.
BTW, Omea works quite nicely with Firefox. Even has a Clipmarks-like clipping function (although without a social component). And you can subscribe to pages (yes, web pages) with their Firefox Add-on. VERY nice feature … and easier than always using FeedYes.com to create a feed from a page without one (although FeedYes.com does have some distinct advantages in many cases; I use combined with RssFwd to, in essence, send updated clippings of a web page to both my news readers AND e-mail accounts).
Bottom line: Forget NewsGator. Go with Omea (by JetBrains). And their price is right, too. FREE + great functionality = a winning combination.
BTW, JetBrains uses Omea to entice people to buy their other products which are not reader related. Building good will; demonstrating their capabilities.
