NewsGator purchases Bradbury Software

NewsGator Technologies has purchased Bradbury Software in a cash and stock deal.

Bradbury Software is develops , a feed aggregator, and , a website editor, for the Windows operating system. Nick Bradbury lives in Franklin, Tennessee and is the sole developer and runs his entire business from the top floor of his house. Nick develops in . I used FeedDemon from its first beta until I moved to Mac last May.

NewsGator develops free feed aggregators for Windows Media Center, and online as well as a paid aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator is currently developing an enterprise server (“Dino”) for corporate deployment behind a firewall. NewsGator was founded by Greg Reinacker and received three rounds of financing. Brad Feld of Mobius invested in June 2004 and again in December 2004 and Richard Levandov Masthead Venture Partners invested in April 2005. NewsGator is located in Denver, Colorado. NewsGator Outlook Edition and enterprise edition are coded in C#.

NewsGator’s desktop play was restricted to Microsoft Outlook and all the hooks and nuances of developing for the Office platform. FeedDemon stands on its own in so many ways that NewsGator is able to hedge its bets with a standalone desktop application with more of a consumer focus.

I’ve known both Nick and Greg for years and they are two people passionate about delivering feeds to their readers. Greg will develop something for a new platform such as media center or smartphone just to show that it can be done. Nick will buy a new gadget, play around with it for a bit, and then figure out how FeedDemon can best be integrated with the gadget’s features. They are both tinkerers that spend time with their users to figure out the best new features for their applications.

Congratulations to Nick, Greg, and the rest of the NewsGator team. I hope Nick gets to stay in Tennessee and drink his Miller Light while Greg and his team are in Coors country.

Update: Nick makes it official and lets us know he will not be moving, just traveling more. Denver is about a two hour flight from Nashville.

Greg Reinacker and Brad Feld tell their side of the story on their individual weblogs. NewsGator posted a press release.

Blo.gs sold

Jim Winstead just announced blo.gs has been sold to an undisclosed buyer and the site will change hands on or after June 13. The new owner will “continue providing the same features that exist now, and will be working on making blo.gs even better.”

Blo.gs is a pretty large ping beacon, second only to weblogs.com in its level of integration into all the different weblog tools available. My guess is a company wanting to move into the space purchased blo.gs for its ping beacon and its database of posts. There is a small chance the acquirer cares about the site’s 12,000 users and PHP code but I doubt it. I expect a lot of users will be canceling their accounts and taking their blogrolls elsewhere in the next month.

TV mixed with blogs

Dana Stevens, television critic for Slate, recently wrote about how television media chooses to cite blogs in their news coverage. I have yet to see the blog coverage on CNN or MSNBC, but it seems like they have the wrong approach to including this new medium.

We witness cross-media citations all the time. News organizations care about who broke the news and who had the best commentary and the best sources are usually cited multiple times on big stories. Newspapers or radio stations often break stories and CNN reports on these breaking stories just as they would their own original observations.

There’s interesting content out there, and blogs may break the story and provide interesting commentary. Television shows need to treat weblogs just as they would treat a newspaper or radio station: quote or excerpt the source in your own way.

Mainstream media is struggling to adjust and integrate with the world of grassroots media. It’s a bit sensationalized at the moment but I think once things settle down they will realize the more things change the more they stay the same.

Technorati partners with Salon.com

Technorati has partnered with Salon.com to integrate weblog content and commentary in Salon.com’s home page, the end of every article, and a roundup. Richard Ault took some good screenshots of the new features if you would like a small walk-through.

I am really excited to see the writing of the masses combined with the edited writing of the few. Salon.com has been publishing original content online since 1995 and I have been reading the site intermittently since it started. Salon owns The WELL, the most famous online community.

Salon chose to measure its hottest stories by the number of bloggers writing about them. Salon authors now have real and measurable feedback on their writing and choice of topic and I am sure every writer wants to be at the top of the list, even for a day. Your feedback, what you write about every day, inevitably will control the content published on Salon in some way. It’s powerful to think about.

Salon is the first of what we at Technorati hope will be many integration deals with media partners. I want to continue to get the quality content produced by bloggers marketed to as big of as big of an audience as possible. Journalists are often asked how their job security has changed with the popularity of weblogs. I think both serve a purpose and complement each other, and the Salon partnership takes a big step in that direction with a pioneering Internet content company.

One year since Movable Type 3.0

A year ago today Six Apart launched Movable Type 3.0 and introduced their new pricing structure and rebranded as a publishing platform. The announcement resulted in over 800 TrackBack links. Each Movable Type download had yielded $0.38 and the company decided it was time for a new pricing structure. Six Apart underestimated the community’s reaction to the change.

The commercial license pricing remains unchanged a year later while the personal licenses are a lot cheaper than originally announced. Six Apart has since introduced educational, non-profit, developer, and single author personal use licenses for their software.

Tim Draper music video

Tim Draper broke into song during yesterday’s speech at Stanford. I have never before seen a high-profile venture capitalist prance around on stage, play air guitar, and slap his ass, but luckily I had my camera ready to capture this unique moment.

Tim Draper recently attended an event with a very unique auction prize: Scott Cargo of The Eagles would produce a song using your original lyrics. Tim won the auction and wrote “The Riskmaster.” Draper Fisher Jurveston sent a CD of the recording to 5,000 business associations last December, and I happened to get a CD from Tim. The song was written by Tim Draper with vocals from David Issacs, music and engineering from Hank Linderman, and produced by Scott Largo.

Listen to “The Riskmaster,” the official song of Draper Fisher Jurveston. When you call DFJ and you are put on hold, this is the song you hear.

That’s not all! As promised by the title of this post, here is the world premiere music video of “The Riskmaster” by Tim Draper. The full-sized 80 megabyte video is 4 minutes and 30 seconds in length. You can also download the smaller 11 megabyte version.

Tim Draper on changing the world

Tim Draper

On Wednesday I attended a lecture by Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston at Stanford. Tim talked about new ideas that will change the world and solve common problems of humanity in the process

Draper Fisher Jurveston logo

The Draper Fisher Jurveston logo was designed to symbolize change. A globe is at the forefront, representing the referenced but uncharted world. The delta in the background symbolizes changing that world through new investments, ideas, and support.

Tim likes to think in terms of “cyberspatial” competition. Given an environment of perfect information a new idea or breakthrough will spread throughout the world based on a certain amount of information shared with the world. Today’s companies must build on this established base and continue to build a new base to reestablish authority. Venture capital firms like funding companies with competition because competition keeps a small company on its toes always fighting to create that new base reference.

Tim Draper is credited with inventing the term “viral marketing” in 1997 with Hotmail and continues to invest in viral companies like Skype.

There were some interesting statements about the boom of the late 1990s. When money is cheap, Tim said it makes sense for a startup to burn through that money to gain market share, knowing that money will not always be so cheap and market share is of course a zero-sum game. Tim originally thought the economy following the .com crash of the late 1990s would throw us into a depression similar to the late 1920s. The big difference in the recent depression was the existence of women in the workforce. If one out of two workers in a couple lost their job they could conserve their consumption and persevere.

Disclosure: Draper Fisher Jurveston is an investor in Technorati, my current employer, and Andreas Stavropoulos sits on Technorati’s board of directors. This relationship did not affect the content of this post.

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