So the response to my What’s in a name post was great…all of the comments, both public and private, were very helpful. Thanks! The general consensus was that we should probably change the name, and we should probably do it sooner rather than later.

We haven’t decided absolutely to change the name, but we’re enthusiastic about it and are exploring options. If the perfect name comes along, we’ll do it.

So…I’d like to solicit some ideas from you. And what’s in it for you? If we choose a name that you submitted to us first, we’ll send you a brand-new Windows Media Center computer, and a free 12-month “Plus” subscription to NewsGator Online Services including NewsGator Media Center edition. All told, somewhere around a $1500 prize. I’d post a specific link to a machine, but if we can, we’ll wait for the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 launch, so you get the latest and greatest.

Discussion in comments to this post is encouraged, but please submit your ideas via email from this link, rather than comments. We don’t want cool ideas to be posted, and someone be trolling through them buying domain names and shaking us down. Minimum criteria for a name:

• domain name must be either clear (no one owns it) or up for sale
• name must be free of obvious trademark problems (search)

In the beginning, there was the Outlook News Aggregator. Not a very imaginative name, but the start to something that would become much more than an Outlook add-in.

About a week later, the name NewsGator was born. I still remember that day…having lunch with a friend, brainstorming about names, and seeing which domains were immediately available. And then ponying up $10 to register the domain, the first expense I can recall that’s attributable to NewsGator. :-)

Later in the year, the questions started about “Gator”. Folks associate this with the evil spyware company now known as Claria, and we started getting questions about whether we were related to them. Of course we are NOT related to them in any way whatsoever, but nevertheless the question comes up constantly.

Last week we had a board meeting, and kicked around the idea (again) of changing our name. There are obviously both advantages and disadvantages to doing so. We’re well known in the space as NewsGator, but on the other hand there are probably sales we’re losing because people assume we’re evil. It’s a tougher decision than one might think, especially at this point in our company life cycle.

So I pose the question to you, my consistently insightful readers. Do you think we should change the company name? Why or why not?

In all the excitement of the last couple of weeks, I almost forgot to post about something pretty cool.

SnapStream recently shipped their $49 Firefly remote control…basically you can hook this baby up to your PC, and control it from across the room.  I’ve got a couple of them in my office – it’s quite nice, and it’s a RF remote so you don’t have to worry about pointing it the right direction. Combine it with Beyond TV (another of their products), and you’re got a pretty inexpensive but very powerful PVR.

What’s even more interesting, though, is the recent launch of SnapStream Spotlight. This is similar to the “Online Spotlight” feature in Windows XP Media Center Edition, but it ships with the Firefly. And NewsGator Media Center Edition is supported within SnapStream Spotlight.

So why is this cool? Well, Windows XP Media Center Edition used to be the only way to use NewsGator MCE. And it only ships on new PC’s…which means there are millions of folks out there who can’t watch streaming on-demand video (and view any other content) with NewsGator MCE, until they buy a new computer. But with a Firefly, anyone with Windows 2000 or later can use it now. That’s a pretty serious jump in potential market.

We’ve recruited people for some of our open positions, but we still have a few development-related positions available. We’re in the Denver area – local applicants only for now, please!

You’ve almost certainly heard by now that NewsGator Technologies has taken on venture funding from Mobius Venture Capital. I haven’t had a chance to comment about this until now, but there’s quite a bit I want to talk about.

First, to the folks that sent their congratulations, thanks!

Brad Feld, from Mobius, has written a great post describing why they made the investment. Brad and I have been working together on this for a couple of months now, and he’s right on the money in what he says. Go there, and read it now. I’ll wait.

NewsGator for Outlook was our first product, and many of you have been with us from day one. It’s been a great product – tight integration into Outlook, a great story for businesses wanting to leverage RSS, and an amazingly supportive and enthusiastic user base.

Almost exactly one year later, NewsGator Online Services was launched with a number of exciting capabilities. Synchronization between multiple machines running NewsGator for Outlook. NewsGator editions for web browsers, mobile phones, and email clients besides Outlook. Custom search feeds and premium licensed content rounded out the initial services. Media Center support followed a couple of months later. The motto “The content you want. Any time. Any place. Any device.” was a primary driving factor for NGOS, and we’ve been delivering on that ever since.

If there’s a downfall with NGOS, however, it’s been getting the word out about it. We’ve done a good job marketing NewsGator for Outlook, to the point that the brand is widely recognized as a great Outlook product. However, we haven’t yet done a great job of getting the word out about NGOS, and what its capabilities are – especially for the non-Outlook market. We have lots of satisfied customers with the online products, but it’s not yet a “household name”. We’ve been working on this, and we’re getting a bit better…and more changes are underway to further move this along.

The reason I bring all this up is for all the folks who wrote about this, asking “why would Mobius fund an Outlook add-in?” or “Won’t Microsoft build one of these?” or something similar. As Brad said, what we’re doing goes far beyond the Outlook client – to the NGOS capabilities, and some other cool things we’re working on. That said, the Outlook client remains a key part of our strategy, and it will only get better and better.

So this all begs the question that has been subtly and not-so-subtly asked: why outside funding, and why now? NewsGator has been profitable, and doing fine up to now, with several employees and many contractors. So what were we thinking?

As the plan and vision for the products has taken shape, a number of very cool ideas have arisen. Many of these are based on feedback we get from customers, and others are based on feedback from folks who don’t use our products. We’re excited about this stuff – you can see it in our emails, hear it in our voices, and wonder about it when we’re all still online at 11pm. :-)

There are a number of things driving the development schedule. For maximum impact of what we’re working on, we need to do many things simultaneously; and to do that, we need more resources. We could have done all of this without any outside funding, but it would have taken longer. Much longer. And by the time we finished, the market might have been a different place. So we made the decision to accept an investment, and I feel fortunate to have Brad as a partner moving forward.

So there it is. I have lots more to say, but I’m a little afraid I’ll never have time to finish this post if I keep going. :-)

To our existing customers, I’d like to say thank you – you’re the ones that got us to where we are today, and we won’t forget that.

And finally, to anyone who is afraid we’ll take a turn for the worse as we ramp up in size…I don’t think it will be that way at all. But if you see something we’re doing that you don’t like, or you feel like we’re not being fair to our customers, then call us on it. Send me a note. I might not always agree with you, but I promise I will read it.

Gary has cleverly figured out a way to get RSS content from NewsGator Online Services into his new Gmail account:

Now though I’ve started to play with GMAIL, and the first thing I wanted was to use google’s search capability against the many rss feeds I get. It works! I went out and found a pop3 redirector, Mail Redirect and am testing it against the Newsgator online feed. So far, it’s working great, every two hours it goes out, pulls my feeds and redirects them to google.

Great idea – even though Gmail doesn’t support POP3, he’s found a way to send content from the NGOS POP edition to it!

From today’s announcement:

NewsGator Technologies announced that the recently launched NewsGator Media Edition is featured in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004’s “Online Spotlight”

This is pretty cool. Now anyone with a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC can get to NewsGator Media Center Edition without having to download a thing. And when new users are browsing around in the Media Center interface, they will see NewsGator – right next to MSN and ESPN.

So your homework for tonight…go to your local Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, or whatever your preference. Find a Media Center PC, pull up Online Spotlight, and go into News/Sports. Behold that which is NewsGator…and tell the passers-by that THIS is the reason they need a Media Center PC! :-)

(ok, maybe that was a little over the top…but hey, it’s Friday!)

In case you’ve missed it, there has been some great press recently, mentioning NewsGator and NewsGator Online Services:

New York Times: Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information (June 3, 2004)

“There is also a subscription service that can coordinate your news feeds across several devices – say, a cellphone, a home PC and an office computer – so that you never inadvertently read the same headline twice. It can even be directed to send traffic information only to your cellphone and movie news to your home computer.”

Detroit Free Press: Keep Track of Web Favorites (June 2, 2004)

“Among a new generation of software and services that shield the underlying complexity of RSS are two new products from NewsGator Technologies…both products are well designed and show a degree of professional polish missing from many first-generation efforts.”

And an excellent in-depth review of both products in EContent Magazine’s May issue:

EContent Magazine: NewsGator 2.0 & NewsGator Online Services: EContent Decision Maker Review (May 1, 2004)

“NewsGator takes this product – and news aggregators in general – to a new level.”

Yikes…I hate to see NewsGator getting slammed in an article. I’d like to respond to the “problems” the author, Ryan Singel, found with NewsGator:

It has troubles with sites that use a third party to take care of their feeds (latimes.com, for example, uses NewsIsFree.com for Web syndication). With that kind of feed, you need to click on a link essentially twice.

It doesn’t have any trouble with these sites; NewsGator shows exactly the content that the publisher puts in the feed. If it’s only a headline and/or excerpt, as with the feeds he mentions, that’s all that will be shown.

There is also a NewsGator extension from Graeme Foster called FetchLinks, which will selectively retrieve the linked page into Outlook in situations like this. This can address the underlying inconvenience he’s talking about with these particular feeds.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to rearrange the feeds, which are displayed alphabetically. Moreover, while grouping feeds into folders is possible, NewsGator cannot show you all the items in a folder or even tell you how many items are in there.

This is how Outlook works. One of the real value-adds of NewsGator is the fact that it works within Outlook, and you don’t need to learn new tools and new ways of working. Folder arrangement and unread counts work exactly as they do with email folders.

And we do of course show unread message counts for folders, as shown here.

Further, using Outlook organizational capabilities such as search folders can make a big difference in the way you use the product. Again, since NewsGator is built into Outlook, it has a huge amount of flexibility. More info on search folders with NewsGator here and here.

NewsGator is useful for those who don’t want another application running. But it’s best only for those who read a handful of news sources and don’t mind clicking multiple times to see a story.

Only useful for those who read a handful of news sources? Hmm…Robert Scoble has said publicly many times that he reads over 1400 weblogs and news sources with NewsGator. I’m not sure what else I can say – 1400 is a lot of feeds, and NewsGator is the tool that makes it possible for him.

By now just about everyone has heard about Channel 9. One of their video feeds is a featured feed inside of NewsGator Media Center Edition.

When development started for our Media Center edition, we picked up some MCE machines for development and testing. But things have been so busy that I never had a chance to watch a “real” video all the way through; we had some short test videos to test our system when a video completed, and I’m sure some folks around here had watched “real” videos, but not me.

So about a week ago, during a rare hour away from my desk, I plopped on the couch and watched a few of the complete Channel 9 videos in NewsGator MCE…and made a couple of observations: