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Search - Monday, September 20, 2004

NewsGator Technologies - Profile

HQ: Denver, CO

Founded: 2003

Management: CEO is Greg Reinacker, a computer consultant turned entrepreneur. He likes race car driving.

Investors: Series A from Mobius Venture Capital in June 2004.

Business Model: Core product is RSS news aggregator integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Pulls newsfeeds directly into Outlook folders. Program costs $29 to download - Newsgator is also cutting deals with publishers to provide/share in revenues from premium content. Also on offer is NewsGator Online Services, which synchronizes your RSS feeds across multiple locations - for instance in Outlook and a mobile device. Subscriptions for this service range from $5.95 to $19.95/mth.

Competitors: Pluck, FeedDemon, Bloglines, Feedster, Feedburner.

Dirt: Why pay when you can get it for free? This is going to be the major challenge for RSS reader developers who expect people to pay for their wares. MyYahoo now has a decent RSS reader built-in to its news page - 100% free. Other challenges: Premium content sounds good, but you need lots of publishers involved to make the economics work - and we mean LOTS. Also, a:c likes the NewsGator/Outlook interface well enough, but finds the periodic downloads of content to be something of a bandwidth hog.