robwebb2k » Netvibes

My picks: The best service providers for startups

Rob Webb — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:12:25 +0000

A friend of mine…I’ll call him Arnold Babar…is in the early stages of starting a company. Over a few beers the other night, Arnold asked me a few general questions about service providers we’ve used for various aspects of building the KnowledgeBid expert network management platform and other projects. A few came to mind immediately…then I thought of a few later that night…then a few more the next day. I’m putting them all into a post in the hopes that I might save someone else the hours of head + wall collisions it took me to find these guys. I’m only going to include services that I use heavily myself and would recommend to a close personal friend. I’ll add to this as more come to me. My top priorities: 1) cost; 2) functionality / flexibility; 3) quality; 4) reliability.

Best Corporate Telephony / PBX / Fax Service: RingCentral
My previous write-up on RingCentral is here. Super flexible PBX, digital fax delivery, digital voice mail delivery, $19.95/month. Can’t beat it. Mac friendly except for the sound recording / uploading feature.

Best Payment Processing Service: Braintree Payment Solutions
My previous write-up on Braintree is here. The payment processing industry is a total mess. The Braintree guys are straight shooters. Save yourself serious pain and go straight to them.

Best Press Release Services: PRZOOM, The Open Press
The web has antiquated the newswire industry. These two providers are free and get your PR messages on sites other than your own, which is all you really need. PRWeb and the others try to get you to pay, but it’s really not worth it.

Best Conference Call Service: Free Conference
My previous write-ups on the free conference call industry are here. The FCC says these guys can stay in business and so long as you just need them to work for your call tomorrow or next week, you’ll be fine. Call quality is good and reliability is good. I would advise against trying to bake them into your app though…you get what you pay for and who knows how long their loophole will be open.

Best Desktop Sharing Software: Glance
This a simple, functional, reliable piece of software perfect for sharing your desktop for demos. No install needed for your clients, but this means there is no way to see the screen of the person on the other end. It’s $39/month and WebEx has dropped prices in response. There may be some free stuff out there too but I would rather have my demos work and pay a little. Glance is Mac friendly, WebEx is not.

Best Domain Registrar: One and One
One and One is clean, easy to use, without constant upselling, ads and pop-ups. GoDaddy is a nightmare IMO.

Best Hosting Service: M5 Hosting
Previous mention here. These guys were referred to us by a friend and they have done a great job so far. Stay the hell away from MediaTemple.

Best Blog Platform: WordPress.com, WordPress.org
The best blogging and simple content management system out there, IMO. Open source so there are an amazing number of plug-ins, style sheets, and high quality WordPress designers out there so you can really make anything. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging platform (example here) while you need to host WordPress.org on your own server (example here, here, and here).

Best Corporate Email Solution: Google Apps for Your Domain
Face it, yourcompanyname@gmail.com is JV. Google Apps makes it free and easy to have Google tools under your own domain.

Best Bug Tracker: Mantis
We’re coming up on our 300th mantis ticket and so far, so good. Free, open source bug tracking & project management. We tried some of the more trendy solutions out there and were very disappointed.

Best Stock Photography: Stockxpert
High quality stock photography on a pay-as-you-go model. Many other players out there have high subscription fees which sucks when you only need 1 or 2 pictures. Examples here and here.

Best Professional Voice Recording: VoiceVector
These guys and gals are based in Alaska but you wouldn’t know it. $1o for your first 12 words and $8 for each additional group of 12 or fewer words in a single recording. Quick, easy, high quality, and they give you your recording in lots of formats. For example call here.

Best Screencast Solution: Camtasia
The web video world is like the credit card processing world…it’s a total mess. Camtasia makes it easy to record a screencast, polish it up, and host it so anyone can watch it. Example here. They have a free demo period. Tip: don’t try to cut and splice within a single recording – just go all the way through.

Best Competitive / Industry Monitor: Google Alerts
Previous write-up here. Cut down on your unnecessary news reading and get productive.

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I’d love to hear comments on these and other solid services out there. I’m actively looking for these:

Best Headset for Blackberry 8703e

Best Low Volume SMS Solution

Best Free CRM

Best Password / Login Manager

Efficiency through Google alerts

Rob Webb — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:04:54 +0000

One of the reasons my posting has slowed over the last month or so is because I have drastically cut down on my news consumption and a good amount of my posting was derivative of the random stuff I read on the web. I still check my Netvibes page every day or two, but in the past I spent at least an hour a day staying current on various tech, econ, VC, law and entrepreneur blogs and news sources. A major factor in my slimmed down news diet has been thanks to Google alerts. I’ve set up alerts for a variety of keywords that I’m interested in monitoring (my company name, competitive company names, friends’ company names, my name, etc.) and get emails from Google alerts when new material is on the web that includes those keywords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big driver behind my news consumption was the fear that I would “miss something” relevant to my life. Google Alerts is far more efficient in monitoring the web that I could ever be, and now I can spend my time on more important things without worry that I may be out of the loop.

My picks: The best content on the web

Rob Webb — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:24:00 +0000

My buddy Will recently asked me what feeds I subscribe too, so I thought I would post what I pulled together for him here in case anyone else is looking for the good stuff. I subscribe to tons more feeds, but these are the ones I find myself consistently reading. I’ve found myself helping people set up NetVibes accounts recently, and this is generally what I put together, with each header being a separate tab within the same account. I’ve linked to the sites when possible and included the feed addresses below them. If you want to subscribe to one, copy the feed address and paste it into your aggregator (“Add content” >> “Add feed” in NetVibes). I’ve included feeds from my sites because I read that stuff too.

Tech/VC News
Venture Beat

http://venturebeat.com/?feed=rss2

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/feed/
TechCrunch

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

ValleyWag

http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml

The Alarm Clock

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml

Digg.com: Technology

http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Venture Capital News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-VentureCapitalFirmNews

Entrepreneurs
Marc Andressen: Ning

http://blog.pmarca.com/atom.xml

Roger Ehrenberg: Monitor110

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml

Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure

http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/

Noah Kagan: Mint.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC

Steve Newcomb: Powerset

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveNewcombBlog

VC Blogs
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed Venture Partners

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lightspeedblog

Ask the VC (Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson: Mobius Venture Capital/Foundry Group)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/askthevc

Venture Hacks

http://feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks

Econ
The Big Picture: Barry Rithholtz

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/index.rdf

Freakonomics Blog: Levitt & Dubner

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/feed/

Private Equity/M&A
NYTimes: Dealbook

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2

Seeking Alpha: M&A

http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/by/type/mergers-acquisitions/feed

Analyst’s Edge: Private Equity News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-PrivateEquityFirmNews

Hedge Funds/Public Equities
Infectious Greed: Paul Kedrosky

http://paul.kedrosky.com/index.rdf

Wall Street Folly

http://wallstfolly.typepad.com/wallstfolly/atom.xml

Controlled Greed: John Bethel

http://www.controlledgreed.com/atom.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Hedge Fund News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-HedgeFundNews

Traditional News
WSJ

http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/xml/rss/3_7011.xml

Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss/printedition/economist_printedition.xml
NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

Legal
WSJ: Law Blog

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/feed/

Above The Law

http://www.abovethelaw.com/index.xml

Sports
Townie News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fitzy

Boston.com Red Sox (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/red_sox_rss/?mode=rss_10

Boston.com Patriots (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/patriots_rss?mode=rss_10

ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…

Filtering RSS feeds

Rob Webb — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:19:00 +0000

My friend Jason asked me recently if there was a way to filter RSS feeds for keywords or phrases. I hadn’t really thought about it, but with the +150 feeds I have coming into my NetVibes account (a number which has gone up since we launched Analyst’s Edge) I was interested to learn if something good was out there.

The first products I found were Feed Rinse and Feedshake. Both look nice and gooey – web 2.0 colors and round corners. The problem doesn’t seem that difficult (rss feeds + filter words/phrases = new rss feed) when I saw that Electric Pulp (the same guys that charged Guy Kawasaki +$12,000 for Truemors) runs Feed Rinse, I figured they would have an easy, clear solution.

I was wrong. Feed Rinse is not good. I spent 30 minutes trying figure out what difference is between filtering a feed and filtering a channel and whether they support boolean searching type stuff. When I finally thought I had something configured, I went to create a new “rinsed” feed and discovered that they create OPML files, not new feeds….OK shouldn’t be a problem…I can import OPML files into my NetVibes account. But not Feed Rinse files. After 10 more minutes I found the feeds were importing into random pages and weren’t filtering for the keywords I specified. Granted, this may have been NetVibes’ fault, but either way, it didn’t work.

On to Feedshake. On it’s surface, Feedshake is less snazzy than Feed Rinse, but I was optimistic when I started configuring the feeds to be filtered. The process was more straightforward than Feed Rinse and there was no confusion between channel or feed filters. Plus, Feedshake produced new feeds for me to subscribe to, which I liked…until I tried to subscribe to the feeds and found they were broken.

This sent me back to the drawing board. I figured since Netvibes makes a business of handing feeds, they might have a feed customization/filtering feature. Turns out they do, but it doesn’t create new feeds – the NetVibes search feature filters feeds you have subscribed to for specific keywords. This solves the problem – I’ll now subscribe to all of the feeds that I want to filter in one tab and then run filters on the tab daily. I’ll be running the same filters every day (“hedge fund”, “private equity”, etc.) which will get repetitive, so a feature that created a new feed would be a bit better, but at least I know this works and I don’t have to worry about anything other than NetVibes going down. Note that to use this feature, you need to go to “Settings” within your NetVibes account and select “Display search area”.

It’s surprising that there isn’t a functioning, easy to use solution for what seems to be a straightforward problem, although it’s not surprising that NetVibes has the best fix.

News feed access somewhere above Iowa

Rob Webb — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:24:00 +0000

I’ve posted a bit in the past about Netvibes, the RSS aggregator that I use to catch and organize all of the web content I consume. My Netvibes page currently catches feeds from ~125 different sites and organizes them into 11 different tabbed categories which, when I’m online, constantly refresh themselves. This allows me to monitor the content of all of these sites from one web location and vastly increases the amount of information that I can consume. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I can stay up to speed on things I’m interested in very easily. Bad because I’m interested in a lot of things. The sites that I subscribe to regularly produce new content – probably an average of 4 items per day. Across 125 sites, that’s ~500 new things to read a day. If I read all of that everyday, I would get very little accomplished. Accordingly I’ve gotten pretty good at scanning my Netvibes pages throughout the day and catching the gems, although I definitely need to get better at limiting the number of times I scan my feeds though, as it is tough to avoid getting sidetracked.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the back row of an airplane somewhere over Iowa reading through my feeds. I’m not connected to the internet (I’m going to post this later today), but I let my Netvibes pages refresh this morning before I went to the airport and kept the browser window open afterwards. My pages collected all the content from my sites and now I can read through the new stuff from my feeds. Netvibes collects the full content of an item for the first three items in a feed. For stories #4 and on, the only thing you can read without a web connection is the headline and the first few sentences. So this means right now I have access to the full content for the first three items of each feed in my account…roughly 375 articles. Pretty cool stuff considering I’m 34,000 feet above Iowa. I’ve included some screenshots below to illustrate.

Page view of my Entrepreneur Blog Netvibes tabbed page – the first three stories in each feed are readable off line.

Full story from Marc Andreessen’s blog captured by Netvibes – readable off line.

Feed inversion

Rob Webb — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 06:02:00 +0000

So I just went through my posts and tagged them all with topics (now listed in the sidebar to the right) and now when I see my post headlines in Netvibes and via Firefox toolbar, they are completely scrambled and almost in a perfectly inverted order, since I edited my most recent post first and my first post last. I think this is feedburner’s fault. Oh well. At least now my recent subscribers will now get more exposure to my older stuff?

NetVibes continues to innovate

Rob Webb — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 21:58:00 +0000

NetVibes has recently released rich text and pictures via through feeds and NetVibes2Go, which allows you to check feeds from your phone. I particularly like the Craigslist module, which allows you to monitor specific queries on the site through your NetVibes page. I definitely think this type of robust aggregation is the way things are going to head in the future and look foward to seeing how cool these modules will get. I have included a rich text screenshot below. Om Malik and Unwired have good reviews of the 2Go feature. I haven’t tried it yet myself.

The Economist on Netvibes

Rob Webb — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 16:51:00 +0000

There is an interesting article in last week’s Economist on Algerian native & French citizen Tariq Krim and his successful feed aggregator Netvibes. I am a huge fan of Netvibes and think that it works almost too well. I use it to scan the headlines of over 80 news sources and blogs throughout the day and while I am always up to speed on news, there is almost always something interesting to read that I haven’t seen yet from one of my sourced sites. It takes a bit of discipline to not scratch the itch and see what is going on all the time. I have pages devoted to tech news, tech blogs, VCs, entrepreneurs, traditional news, and one to random stuff. My favorite Netvibes feature is the way you add feeds – no messing with XML is required – just paste the site address into the add content window and the feed shows up in your page.

I am a bit surprised that I don’t see more people using aggregators, especially people like traders who have information intensive professions. The traders I know monitor sites that aggregate financial news in real time and are constantly watching CNBC, etc., but I don’t know any that use aggregators to track hot stories.

Anyways, the Economist article is worth checking out. It seems a little bizarre that Mr. Krim is a rising star in French politics because he has created a successful web application that generates very little revenue, but I guess you have to take what you can get. Also, Yahoo has always been rumored to be a potential purchaser of Netvibes, but with the recent release of Yahoo Pipes, this seems unlikely. From what I can tell, Google Reader is nearly as good as Netvibes, so they won’t be buying either. It is unclear where Netvibes will end up down the road. They probably need to start making some money soon though…

Edit: In case the folks at WebWorkerDaily are interested…my full bio is viewable via LinkedIn .