Improving Parent-Teacher Communication Through RSS

A lot of the buzz around RSS has to do with its usage by publishers, media companies and enterprises, but it's a technology that also is improving the way communication takes place within other industries. One of those is the education sector, specifically K-12 schools. A great example is the work we are doing with a company called DirectoryXpress, a partnership we announced this morning.

Their application, called MyInfoPage, is in use at several high schools, including two in Jacksonville, FL and one in Philadelphia. It's really revolutionizing the way that school staff and teachers are communicating with parents and students. It allows educators to create personalized information pages that re continually updated with school information such as classroom news, homework assignments, syllabi, closures, sports schedules and monthly lunch menus. The NewsGator Private Label Platform does the work on the back-end delivering the content to pages and providing a way for students and parents to add feeds, but the nice thing is that they don't need to understand RSS or know how to use an aggregator to take advantage of this.

"It is an invaluable, easy-to-use system that doesn't require a steep learning curve," said Dawn Huskey, media instructor at Holy Family Catholic School. "MyInfoPage has enhanced communications between our families and our faculty making us a united force in the educational process for our students."

The schools also can use the sites to make money through search and affiliate programs and uptake has been tremendous. More than 50% of parents from Holy Family  have signed up and created personalized pages since the site rolled out a few weeks ago. Look for additional schools to be added on every month.

It's applications like these that demonstrate the true power of RSS as a game-changing technology.

Tracking Election Year 2006 With RSS Feeds

The Internet is becoming ever more important in politics, with national and local lawmakers, bloggers and pundits reaching out to their constituencies via websites and blogs before the coming election.

To help NewsGator users separate the wheat from the chaff, our editors have combed the Net for news sources, bloggers, podcasters and pundits from every political persuasion. They are gathered into a new category titled ELECTION 2006. From your Web Reader, click on Add Feeds and look for the category in the list.

There are election news feeds, reporter weblogs, blogs from all major parties and bloggers and podcasters writing about politics and the mid-term elections. Among them are the Caucus, a political blog from The New York Times, political columnists from The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek and popular political blogs from the left, the right and the middle.

We want your help, too. If you notice a favorite voice, pundit or politician missing from the discussion, please send your suggestions (with the site url AND feed url) to keithf@newsgator.com.  Any side of the political spectrum is fair game. Voting is among our most esteemed rights in the United States, and having the best information is critical to making the best choice.

It's Go! Time for Windows Mobile Devices

As TechCrunch reported yesterday and we announced this morning, NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile is now generally available. The product, which you can purchase for $29.95 on our Web site, is the latest addition to our family of RSS aggregators that includes Web, Outlook, Windows, Mac, and Media Center Edition versions.

NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile allows users to read content and manage subscriptions directly from any device running the Windows Mobile 2003 or Windows Mobile 5.0 or later operating systems, including the Palm Treo 700w, Motorola Q, Cingular 2125 and HP iPaqs. Content including feeds and links is automatically formatted for the devices and gets cached and stored locally so you can read it when you are not connected to the Internet. As is the case with all of our RSS aggregators, there is full synchronization between NewsGator Go!, NewsGator Online and the client-based products, meaning that users won't see articles reappearing as new every time they switch interfaces. Subscriptions for NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile can also be managed within the locations section of NewsGator Online, allowing users to specify which feeds they want to appear on the device.

While a certain subset of our users switch between several different platforms on a daily basis, the bulk of our users, particularly those who have purchased a client-based product, tend to do the bulk of their reading in NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon or NetNewsWire. Virtually all of them are away from their computers at some point in time and business users in particular can really benefit from a rich client product to access critical feeds while they are commuting to work, on the road or even waiting in line to get their daily caffeine fix. On that front, we're currently working on integrating NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile with NewsGator Enterprise Server. Also keep an eye out for an announcement of the counterpart for J2ME-capable devices going into beta in the near future

A couple of other things to report about. Nick Harris, one of our rock-star client product architects, announced a pre-release of a nifty utility called NewsGator Desktop Sync. Originally demonstrated back in March at the Mix '06 conference, NewsGator Desktop Sync is a system tray application that keeps your feeds, folders and read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform (Windows Vista, IE7).  This means that any application that uses the Windows RSS Platform will be automatically synchronized with a NewsGator Online account. March Orchant of ZDNet has a nice blog post that describes the benefit. Finally, for those of you interested in learning more how RSS technology is being used inside of organizations from a centrally-managed perspective, we have a new sign-up form for our Webinars.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Windows Mobile,

NBC and NewsGator

We're very pleased to announce that we're partnering with NBC around its just announced nbbc video venture.

NBC Universal and its affiliates announced the launch of NBBC, an independent business-to-business marketplace designed to aggregate, monetize and distribute both NBCUniversal and third party video to tens of millions of unique users worldwide. NewsGator is one of the launch partners for the marketplace and will be taking content and distributing it through video feeds across our product platform, from NewsGator Online (subscribe to the Editor's Choice feeds!) to FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our private label partnerships, and the NewsGator Plug-In for Yahoo Messenger.

We choose from a wide menu of videos from leading content providers included in nbbc such as Forbes and HowStuffWorks,  and select the best ones to redistribute through our network. Here's an edgy example!  Battlestar Galactica fan?

Video is becoming an increasingly important part of the feed-reading experience, and we're excited to join forces with nbbc as they accelerate this trend. You can find out more about NBCC here.

Enterprise RSS -- Flying...

We were recently talking about sales of our enterprise products to corporations over the last few months, and happily noted the following about a sub-set of our recent wins:

1. 11 of the Fortune 100
2. Five of America's largest financial services firms
3. Four of America's largest law firms
4. Two of the top three pharmaceutical companies in the world
5. Two of the top four aerospace and defense firms in the world
6. One of top two (to be a bit discreet) corporations in each of the following categories;

Consumer packaged goods
Semiconductors
Networking products
Entertainment
HR Consulting
Software

We LOVE our customers!

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator,