TechStars

About a week and a half ago, TechStars launched. Basically, it’s a startup “bootcamp” – 10 teams will get a small amount of seed funding, work in Boulder, CO getting their new companies off the ground, and be mentored by a long list of smart folks. It’s the brainchild of David Cohen, and has some great people involved (including Brad Feld). When David offered me a chance to participate, I jumped at the chance.

Michael Arrington wrote about it yesterday on TechCrunch, and likes the idea. But what blew me away was some of the negative comments to his post. Most of the negatives seem to circle around the investment/equity part; basically, TechStars puts in $5,000 per founder (up to $15,000), and takes a 5% stake. Normally I’d write something clever now about the pre-money valuation of a napkin :-), but that really isn’t the point.

The point is, being mentored through the summer by this group of people is SO worth it. When I started NewsGator, I didn’t know anyone in the business, and really didn’t know a lot of successful entrepreneurs (other than consultants), let alone people in the legal or investment communities. When I saw my first venture term sheet, it was such a shock I’m sure I had some interesting expletives for my attorney (who, incidentally, had to be recommended to be by the same Brad Feld who was doing the investment, because again, I didn’t really know anyone in this community).

If I could go back to the beginning of NewsGator, would I have given up 5% equity for the kind of mentoring and contacts I would have made in a program like this? Yes – in a heartbeat. I can think of specific decisions I made on my own that I may have made differently if I had had a chance to talk to people like the folks on this list…and they could have made a positive impact on the company very early in its life.

Never underestimate the value of your network. And to those poo-pooing the whole concept, I’d remind you that there are a lot of people who don’t live in Silicon Valley, who have never met a VC in their life, but who have great ideas that could turn into the next big thing.

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Cool demos at the Vista/Office launch

If any of you are going to be in Phoenix, AZ Wednesday for the Vista/Office launch event, be sure to go to the “Better Together” event at 11:00am.  I will be there with Lane Mohler (our enterprise product architect), and we’ll be doing some demos in the session. Among the things we’re showing are:

– NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0 – this is a really early build (it’s not even in beta yet), but there’s so much cool stuff in here we can’t help but show it…including the cool new integration with Sharepoint 2007. This will be the first public demo of this product – prior to this, I can count the people on one hand who have seen it.

– and a brand new product, which we’ve never even TALKED about. This one is also super cool, and you’ll not only see it in the demo, but you’ll be able to play with it yourself afterwards if you’re at the show.

So come on up and say hello if you’re there, and let us know what you think!

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My new photography blog!

As many of you know, when I’m not in the office here at NewsGator I’m usually doing photography. I started out photographing just about anything, but I’ve more recently been focusing on fashion work (and a bit of glamour as well).

I’ve got a lot to say about all of that, and I agonized for a while about where to write about it, whether it should be here on my personal blog or on a new blog. I ended up creating a new blog, Greg Reinacker Photography – Blog, part of the larger Greg Reinacker Photography site, which focuses on my photography work.

So go take a look, and don’t forget to subscribe to my new blog! I have the feed links below…see you there!

Subscribe!

Subscribe in NewsGator Online

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Beta now open for NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand

As many of you know, enterprise RSS is a big part of NewsGator’s business, and our NewsGator Enterprise Server product has been best-in-class since its release a little over a year ago.

One problem we’ve seen, though, is we didn’t have a product for a) small groups of users who wanted enterprise-class content distribution features but couldn’t justify the cost of an on-premise server product, or b) large groups of users who for some reason are unable to install an on-premise product. Well, today, all that changes, and our hosted enterprise product is going into a much wider beta.

I’m proud to announce the beta 2 release of NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand is now available, and we’re accepting the next 100 customers to sign up for the beta.  This will likely be a short beta cycle, as the product is prepared for release, but it’s a chance for you to sign up for a free trial and kick the tires of our new hosted enterprise RSS application. And it’s not just the hosted web application – all of the clients we have (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Go!, Inbox, etc.) all work with On-Demand as well.

As Charlie Wood said,

With the right execution, NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand could provide the perfect complement to such services as Salesforce.com and Google Apps for Your Domain.

Sign up here to give it a try!

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Five things most people don’t know about me

Yikes…I got tagged with the meme – gosh, thanks Nick. ;-) Not one to spoil the party, here are my five things:

1. I live in Colorado, but I haven’t been on snow skis in probably 10 years. This is one of those “oh, you live in Colorado! Do you ski?” questions that’s for some reason inevitable when meeting folks that live near an ocean. :-)

2. When I graduated from college with a degree in electrical engineering, I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do…but the one thing I knew I did NOT want to do was write application software. Funny how things change.

3. My biggest pet peeve is people who throw cigarettes out the window of the car. For a long time I’ve wanted to get out, go pick it up, and throw it back in their car, but I’ve never worked up my nerve to do it.

4. The three artists most likely to be playing on my computer at home are Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan. Somehow, a while back, I convinced myself I liked their music, and now I actually do.

5. I used to race cars – specifically, a Spec Racer Ford in SCCA club racing.

Ok…now I get to spread the fun. There are a bunch of NewsGator folks with blogs now, I just _know_ they will love doing this, and I’ll get to see their faces when they realize they have to. :-) So my gift of meme goes to John Carmichael, Karyn German, Brian Reischl, Glenn Berry, and Anita Taylor.

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You never forget your first…

…your first server running your startup company, that is.

Back in March of 2003, I was just about fed up with the reliability of shared hosting for www.newsgator.com – and sometime thereafter, purchased some hardware of my own and moved it to the colocation facility at ViaWest. There were two servers back then, running the whole enchilada – one Dell PowerEdge 1650 for the web site, and a PowerEdge 2650 for the database, both purchased secondhand from a former client of mine.

The 1650 running the web site had two processors, and two physical disks mirrored by software in Windows Server.  Never mind that I had no idea how to boot off of the backup drive if it became necessary; I just felt better knowing there was a mirror.

The 2650 was also two processors, and had three drives in a RAID 5 array. Omigosh, this beast was definitely going to be able to run the SQL database for a while. Or so I thought. :-)

The online site was pretty much just a sales brochure and commerce site through the end of 2003; but in January 2004, what is now called NewsGator Online was launched, and the traffic (and load) started building quickly. Here is a snapshot, courtesy archive.org, of the original NewsGator Online services site – being run by these two machines.

The sites quickly outgrew those original machines…but I still have a soft spot in my heart for them. Especially the 1650 web server, for some reason. That server, still affectionally named with its original name, still lives in our data center. The only thing still running on it is my weblog – but that’s ok.

Imagine my surprise when it lost one of its disks, and one of our operations guys asked me if we could just move my blog to another server and retire that box. Ha…I think the words out of my mouth were something like “over my dead body!”

Ahh…you never forget your first server.

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New views in NewsGator Online

We’ve rolled out some new views in NewsGator Online.  The new options are:

Summary view – this displays a short excerpt of each article, including a “+” expando button to expand the full text of the article.

Headline view – similar to summary view, this shows just the headline from each article, along with the expando button.

Some more detail on the new views is in this NewsGator forum post.

Both of these views were inspired by user requests, many of which came from FeedDemon users who had been using these views for quite some time.  They’re highly efficient for reading lots of stuff – I encourage you to give them a try.

At the same time, we’ve rolled out advertising in the NewsGator Online web reader.  Ads are shown alongside excerpted articles only; we do not show advertising against publishers’ full-text content.

We’d love to hear your feedback about the new views – let us know what you think, and whether the new views work for you!

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NewsGator Enterprise Server wins InfoWorld comparison review

InfoWorld has published a review of Enterprise RSS systems, and NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) has not only come out on top, but was also the only product in the review with an “Excellent” rating.

The combination of our best-of-breed management capabilities, along with our wide variety of end-user choices for reading content, impressed:

NewsGator’s broad interfaces, collaboration, and integration with other systems such as Microsoft SharePoint stood out.

And there’s even more than the reviewer mentioned – in addition to direct Exchange server integration, any of our existing clients will work with NGES…including FeedDemon (as mentioned in the review), NetNewsWire, NewsGator Desktop Sync (to leverage IE7’s RSS GUI within the enterprise), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile (and soon for J2ME) devices.  Not to mention the direct integration with other applications like Sharepoint.

On top of all that is deep API support – so really, you’re not limited to the applications we ship, but rather you can build your own if you like.  And if you’ve found an application that uses NewsGator Online’s API, you’re in luck – the NGES API is a superset of the online API.

But I think one of the most important things here is NewsGator’s security system.  The reviewer notes that

Of note, NGES’s developers understand this security part well.

and

…NewsGator offering the broadest interface choices and deeper security functions.

If there’s one thing to be good at in enterprise software, it’s security.  At the end of the day, this is the stuff that really matters for enterprise IT departments, and we’ve got a very deep story here.

So anyway, I’m excited about this review.  But at the end of the day, it’s sales that matter – and we’ve got those sales, anywhere from 25 user to 100,000 user installations of NewsGator Enterprise Server.

Whew!  A fun month.  Last week we announced NGES was selected by Intel for the SuiteTwo product suite.  This week InfoWorld chooses NGES as the best of breed.  What will be next? :-)

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Evolution of NewsGator Online

It’s been posted about recently that NewsGator Online briefly had advertisements in its interface, and various speculation as to what happened.  So here’s the dealio, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

We are experimenting with different ways to present information inside NewsGator Online.  We’ve got some good experience here with the various desktop clients we have, and we’ve learned a lot.  The goal is to make the overall online interface faster to use and more efficient for the 90% case, and we have lots of ideas how to get there.  Over the next few months, you’ll see the online product change and evolve.

At the same time, we’re experimenting with advertising in the online reader experience.  In some of the new GUI models, they are pretty unintrusive, and at best they even add something to the whole experience.  But you’ll have to wait and see for more details there.  And yes, we’re aware of some of the potential issues (example) surrounding this, and we’re committed to being a good citizen with respect to these issues.

So what about the ads that were online for an hour or so last Friday, with screenshots floating around on the net?  Some ad-related code has been in the system for a while, but was not intended to be turned on on Friday afternoon.  We have a configuration switch in our system to turn ads on/off, which we use in internal testing; that switch was inadvertantly set to “on” on our online systems.  A simple mistake, which was quickly corrected.

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Office 2.0 is not about online spreadsheets!

This morning at the Office 2.0 Conference, I think I saw demos of at least four or five online web-based word processors and spreadsheets.  Eek.

I don’t think Office 2.0 is about displacing Microsoft Office on the desktop.  Let’s face it, folks – as much as we love to complain about it, Office is about to ship its 12.0 version – that’s a lot of evolution there.  It’s a very mature product, it works, and even a guy from Google this morning said if you want to build a financial model, you ought to be using Excel.

I just don’t see the incentive to have an online word processor or spreadsheet.  I mean, sure – the technology is cool.  Who doesn’t love seeing super ajaxy applications?  But at the end of the day, these standard office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) work great on my desktop.  Even when google.com is down (amusing anecdote – gmail was down for a minute this morning during a demo, much to the chuckle of the audience).  Even when I’m on a plane.  Even when I’m on an island with no cell service.  They just work.

But that’s ok – because replacing desktop applications is NOT what Office 2.0 is about.

It’s about Collaboration.  Community.  Sharing.  Give me better ways to work on something with a team.  Give me ways to take my Word document and collaborate on it.  Give me ways to distribute content widely within my organization.  Give me ways to generate content myself within my company – and give us ways to have a conversation about it.  Give me ways to tear down the walls between parts of my company, and get everyone working better together.

GIve me desktop applications that use the power of the network to deliver a better experience…but still work fine without the network.

Give me Web 2.0 – inside my firewall.

And don’t take away Excel.  It works fine.  Even on a plane.

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