Brad Feld

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NewsGator Go! – What’s Next

Oct 06, 2006
Category Investments

Two weeks ago, NewsGator released NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  This is the product that resulted from NewsGator’s acquisition of Kevin Cawley’s company that created SmartRead and SmartFeed.  NewsGator Go! is now a full featured Windows Mobile reader that tightly integrates with NewsGator Online Service, including full synchronization.  If you are a Windows Mobile user, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever seen for reading feeds on a Windows Mobile device – hats off to Kevin (and – oh – check it out.)  If you want Greg Reinacker’s (CTO of NewsGator) view of how this evolved, he’s got a great post up about The story of NewsGator Go!

Greg and Kevin have been spending a lot of time working on mobile related stuff the last couple of years, starting with Greg’s original html mobile reader for NewsGator that came out in 2004.  Three of the key attributes of mobile readers that we’ve learned about are (a) only reading a subset of your feeds (e.g. I only have 20 feeds that I want on my phone – I have 700 feeds that I subscribe to in FeedDemon / NGOS), (b) intelligent formatting for the device while preserving all of the publishers content, and (c) full online / offline synchronization of read / unread states.  (a) and (c) are built into NewsGator’s platform and Kevin has done a great job of taking advantage of them, while working through many of the thorny issues surrounding (b).

Kevin has a post up on his blog with some of the features he’s already working on for the next release.  They include enclosure support, scheduled sync, viewing clipped articles, subscribe / remove feeds, compression, emailing articles, some navigation / readability improvements, and integration with NewsGator Enterprise Server (which was recently released for FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Inbox.)