Newsgator - Innovation Leader

Newsgator is a blog user’s best friend. It is my principal RSS reader and I use it every day. The Outlook plug in is flawless, elegant, and intuitive in design. Anyone can use Newsgator in Outlook with absolutely no training required. If you can read email you can use Newsgator. It is that simple, yet incredibly powerful under the covers.

Microsoft is promoting Office and Outlook as development platforms and Newsgator is one of the best examples of how to seamlessly integrate into the Outlook UI. Newsgator creates a subfolder in your Outlook Inbox. New RSS feeds are delivered automatically to the Newsgator RSS subfolder and appear as Unread Mail. The feeds can be read in Outlook just like email. The subfolders can be arranged or renamed just like any other email folder.

Innovative start-ups like Newsgator and Portaga are realizing that users want additional features and services but they don’t want another separate application or to learn another UI. We will see more examples of innovation inside Outlook and Office in the coming months.

However, Newsgator more than just an Outlook plug-in. They have a web edition, media center edition, and a mobile edition for wireless devices. Newsgator will also synchronize across multiple devices so that when you read a feed on one device it will show up as already read on your other devices. Of course they provide a subscription syndication widget as well. You can subscribe to my blog by clicking the NEWSGATOR chicklet in the right panel. If you are not currently using Newsgator you can download it here.

Newsgator provides search and browse capabilities to find new feeds, and a recommended list of feeds based on your expressed interests. In fact this may be the hidden jewel for Newsgator. They have one of the largest user bases in the field which allows them to collect lots of data about which feeds are most popular, which feeds have the most subscriptions, and which feeds are most often deleted. This data will prove extremely valuable in the future when ranking, relevance, and content ratings will be needed to find the feeds important to you among the millions available. This is analogous to the early days of the web. Would you rather be the browser company or the search company? In this case would you rather provide RSS readers or an RSS search engine? Newsgator is in a position to do both.

Newsgator was Greg Reinacker's  idea, and he has built a great product, and a great company. J.B. Holston joined the company as CEO in September of 2004. He was formerly president of Ziff Davis International. Brad Feld, Managing Director at Mobius Venture Capital was a first round investor and serves on the BOD. I have had the opportunity to work directly with Greg and JB as part of my job in the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft.

We are always looking for innovative companies like Newsgator who have built compelling applications on Microsoft platforms. If you know of such a company respond here with a comment and I will get back to you.

Comments

[Sumanth Raghavendra]

Don,
Your blog comments make for interesting reading!
I represent a company called InstaColl - short for "Instant Collaboration". Our offering seamlessly converts the Microsoft Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) into real-time, interactive platforms where multiple users can simultaneously edit, review and share documents from right within the productivity application interface - with InstaColl embedded into Microsoft Office, people no longer need to move out of their mainstream desktop applications to fire up and participate in real-time collaboration session.
I hope you will take a look at our offering and share your impressions.
Thank you for your time.
Warm Regards,
Sumanth Raghavendra,
Chief Executive Officer,
InstaColl

[christopher Franck]

www.migg.com is a company that has developed deep technology (for its focused niche of document management) on a microsoft platform.

[Tim Howell]

Don,

Disclosure: I work at AfterMail.

AfterMail is an innovative, next generation email management solution that is developed using Microsoft technology. Not only does AfterMail address the critical storage and compliance issues facing most organizations today, we also deliver a platform using which our customers can easily integrate email data with their line of business applications.

Please contact me for more information.

Regards,
Tim

[DonDodge]

Christopher, I took a look at Migg Solutions. Very impressive! CFR part 11 is very difficult. I know from personal experience at Groove Networks. I was VP or product management at Groove and many of our customers were large pharma's (GSK, Novartis, Pfizer, Lilly, etc)and they all required CFR part 11.

I will send you information on how to sign up for the Microsoft Partner Program. It is free and easy to get started. Visit https://partner.microsoft.com/global/30000104 for complete information.

[DonDodge]

Tim, I took a look at AfterMail. Compliance is a hot topic in the marketplace and you have an excellent solution.

I see that you are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Congratulations! Let me know if you need any help connecting to the right people in Microsoft.