Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: mSpoke

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – mSpoke…Finally, Feedreader Relief

September 30, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Didn’t you just know that somebody was going to address the information overload in your RSS feedreader? How often do you even add a new subscription anymore, for fear of not even having time to read what you already have? Mspokelogo
Not to worry — the guys from mSpoke just introduced Feedhub, a personalized, customizable RSS feed that automatically selects the most relevant posts from the set of feeds you select.  I just registered and uploaded my OPML file (easy to do in Google Reader, in my case), and — voila — I have a personalized feed!  I can’t believe how easy it was….

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"We make your feedreader smarter," crowed CEO Dave Mawhinney from stage Wednesday afternoon. "We let you stay informed without being overwhelmed."

How does it work?  The company uses its mPower Adaptive Personalization Engine, which dynamically adapts to your reading habits.

"Are you ready to declare RSS bankruptcy?" asked Sean Ammirati, mSpoke’s VP biz dev from stage. "You can take advantage of Feedhub no matter what popular RSS reader you use — Google Reader, Bloglines, NetNewsWire, etc."  And he added: "Are you ever reluctant to subscribe to a new feed because of information overload? If so, this is perfect, because it will give you only the posts from that source that are relevant to you."

Here’s a screen shot of the Feedhub home page (where I simply clicked
to register), followed by a screen shot showing how I selected the
amount of content I wanted (after I uploaded my OPML file), and, finally, a screen showing what my Google home page now looks
like with my Feedhub Personalized Feed just where I want it (upper
left).

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UPDATE 10/5: Here’s a great explanation of Feedhub that Guy Kawasaki posted yesterday…"Reality Check: FeedHub."

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DEMOfall 07: What I Like So Far

September 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The Bayview Lawn at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina was buzzing bigtime starting at 6:00 last evening to kick off DEMOfall 2007. Georgeous weather, sumptuous food, great friends, new people from all over the place, and tech talk flying in every direction. Does it get any better than this? I was so busy meeting new people and getting pitched, I didn’t even have a chance to shoot many photos. Demofall07party
Okay, one decent shot, and here it is: (from left) Marc Orchant, newly of Blognation…Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder of Mindtouch (who just who strolled over from his offices)…Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods…and Luis Villalobos, founder of Tech Coast Angels. [Man, I love the mixes I can put together at these events!] But if you want to see more photos, just check out these from Brian Solis, who does much better than I ever could. (Brian, you da man.)

But what new stuff did I hear about at the party that I like?  Well, for starters, Naomi Wall, content dev chief at MetaRADAR, told me they’ll be introducing a "media masher" that brings all your rich media content together, bridging the gap between websites, desktop apps, and mobil devices. And I also was glad to run into the guys from mSpoke in Pittsburgh (yes, some of those smart Carnegie Mellon dudes) — Sean Ammirati, VP biz dev (a colleague from Read/Write Web, who I’d only met online up till now), and Dave Mawhinney, CEO. They’re launching FeedHub, a whiz-bang new technology to help with your RSS information overload.  We’re talking a personalization engine that dynamically adapts to your reading habits. This is a space I’ve been following, and I just knew we’d be seeing some solutions to this problem soon. Bring it on, baby. A bloke from Manchester, UK, told me about YuuGuu, which lets you instantly share your screen in real-time with anyone, anywhere. Blimey, dude! The founder of LongJump told me about his firm’s online catalog of apps for small business, which can be customized via drag-and-drop. Then, lo and behold, I met a storage startup!  Fusion-io of Salt Lake City I learned will be introducing a revolutionary stroage architecture that puts SAN or NAS on silicon (high-density NAND), with access rates comparable to DRAM with the storage capacity of disk. DEMO says it "may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch" at their events. Yikes! Then, on the way back into the hotel bar [yes, the party continued inside, till God’s knows when], I ran into the the founder of iForem, which has a subscription-free service to store,protect and share intellectual property — an online safe deposit box for businesses and consumers, with a trust account. And then the folks from ideablob (site to
go live later this morning) caught me — we were the last ones on the lawn! — and told me their new venture is funded by
Advanta in Philly [how do all the PA startups find me?] This site is an open
community for small businesses, where members vote on new ideas and get
valuable advice and feedback from one another.  And get this: you can
actually win cash for your idea.

As the evening continued, I had a great chat with my longtime buddies Steve Larsen of Krugle and Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods, solving all the world’s problems. Then, it was beddy-bye time so I could get up early and write this post.  More soon!

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