VentureBeat

updated

KnowNow, a startup that sought to deliver RSS services to large companies, is looking to sell after failing to build a viable business.

The San Francisco company started winding down about two weeks ago, VentureBeat has learned, after three different CEOs took turns a the helm but failed to build a business out of the new technology.

A source close to the company says the underlying technology is valuable, and he expects a sale.

RSS grabbed a lot of attention among businesses two years ago, when techies began proselytizing the wonders of the protocol. RSS could let you subscribe to almost any kind of data. While consumers can use it to track their favorite news sources, there’s so many other uses for businesses: If your sales person kept a log of their sales, you could subscribe to their logs via RSS. If your biz development person tracked their deal progress, you pull their logs by RSS too. If your IT department logged traffic spike data, you could get that, and so on. To top it off, you could pull it all into a spreadsheet on the fly and mix it all up, giving you — at least in theory — a more efficient, quicker way to get an overview of your business and make better decisions.

Two years ago, when KnowNow raised $13 million in fresh capital to sell RSS services for the enterprise, we expressed surprise at the large amount of capital. RSS platforms should be relatively cheap to build. At the time, chief executive Todd Rulon-Miller explained KnowNow needed the cash because it was building products for companies requiring robust, secure software, such as banks. Wells Fargo, for example, bought one of KnowNow’s $75,000 sever licenses, he said. He also said at the time that KnowNow had ten other large customers and that deals would be announced, but apparently the customers never coughed up real dough. The RSS strategy, however, was just the last in a series of turns by the seven year old KnowNow, which raised more than $50 million. It was backed by big-name valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, among others.

I’ve tried reaching KnowNow and Rulon-Miller, but have yet to hear back.

[Update: I'm told KnowNow made $7.5 million in revenue last year, though I haven't confirmed that with the company.]

NewsGator is another company seeking to serve businesses with RSS services, and appears to be doing somewhat better, having integrated with Microsoft’s Sharepoint to create an add-on product. We’re told large software company SAP recently replaced KnowNow’s product with NewsGator’s. Attensa is yet another company working in this area.

KnowNow, a Sunnyvale company that has made early inroads selling RSS technology to companies, has agreed to help sell and support WordPress blogging software.

The deal is significant because KnowNow has quietly been selling nicely priced software systems — both hosted and server systems — to companies that help those companies track transactions, news and other events via the RSS protocol. KnowNow has lacked its own blogging software, and this gives San Francisco’s Automattic, the company which owns WordPress, one more way to infiltrate companies — at a time when cross-town rival Six Apart’s TypePad is among those with an early lead, and which recently got a boost from an alliance with Intel (more below).

RSS is the protocol, which can be used for sending electronic updates of just about anything, including things like sensitive banking transactions. It is also used to deliver blog posts to readers’ blog readers, whether it be BlogLines, Yahoo or some other company. KnowNow is in serious sales and marketing mode now that it has raised $13M in fresh capital from Kleiner Perkins and others. VentureBeat was surprised at that amount of capital, as RSS platforms should be relatively cheap to build. We talked with chief executive Todd Rulon-Miller, who comes across as confident but focused — he has been in the enterprise software game for years. He said that the systems being built for companies are managing many sensitive needs. Wells Fargo, for example, is among the companies that have bought at least one of KnowNow’s $75,000 sever licenses. He has ten large customers, and will be announcing more, he said.

We don’t know how well they are really doing, but with WordPress this becomes a serious combination — serious enough to match the Intel alliance (scroll down, and see here too), which pulls together Six Apart, Newsgator (for RSS reading), SimpleFeed (for RSS technology) and Socialtext (wikis).

Updated

Topix.net, the Palo Alto company that aggregates news on a single site, letting users see local and other relevant news to them, said it has raised $15 million more in financing.

Topix said in a statement that it raised its money from existing backers Gannett, McClatchy Company and Tribune Company.

Topix.net serves 32,500 local news communities, and has been busy introducing new features, such as online forums tied to local news. They also introduced an interactive feature that lets you select news from over the past year related to a term. For example, Saddam Hussein was just sentenced to hang, and if you search for Saddam you will get a fever chart of how much Saddam was in the news over the past year. You’ll see it spike this weekend. You can interact by clicking on the time bar.

With this investment, Gannett and Tribune each own a 33.7 percent stake in Topix.net, while McClatchy owns 11.9 percent, the company said. (See here for the history of the earlier investment in Topix).

Here is our previous coverage of Topix.

Update: VentureWire reports that the pre-money valuation of company was a respectable $72 million. The Web site saw 3.9 million unique visitors in September 2006, according to Comscore, up from 3.6 million during the same period last year.