Wehay! Newsgator have announced that their excellent RSS mail reader will now be completely free. Newsgator.com is already one of my favourite online readers and the Windows Mobile software links into this to show all your feeds, news and gossip when you’re on the move.
It’s great to hear that useful, well-written and beneficial software is being switched from “paid for” to “free” and not the other way around. Well done NewsGator!
Read on for the full press release, or head over to newsgator.com to set up your feeds and then download the free app to your phone to sync your news.
Links – Newsgator.com – NewsGator Go!
NewsGator Releases New Versions of Client Products; Best-of-Breed RSS Readers Now Free
Free NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go! Benefit Consumers and Businesses
DENVER, Colo. — Jan. 9, 2008 — NewsGator announced today the general availability of NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also began today. The award-winning products for PC (FeedDemon), Mac (NetNewsWire), Microsoft Outlook (Inbox), and mobile (NewsGator Go!) deliver a best-of-breed RSS reading experience that synchronizes through NewsGator’s online platform. All of the new product versions deliver a better user experience with the inclusion of significant performance, usability, and relevance enhancements.
NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all of NewsGator’s Web, desktop and mobile readers for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange), all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter when or where they read it. Enterprise customers will continue to enjoy the extended value of having all these clients synchronize with NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES). The combination of innovative client reader features and the ability to leverage core platform data and capabilities have made NewsGator products dominant in the enterprise.
“It’s all about ubiquity,” said Greg Reinacker, NewsGator CTO and founder. “We have more than 100 Fortune 2000 companies using NewsGator Enterprise Server and our client products. In selling to these enterprises, we discovered that thousands of knowledge workers were already using one or more of our client products and we learned that we could drive the relevance of everyone’s experience by using the community’s anonymous content consumption patterns throughout the system. In general, we found that the more people that used our system, the more relevant we could make the product for each user. By making it easier for knowledge workers to use our clients we dramatically increase the size of our user community. Enterprises that then deploy our server can take advantage of the synchronization and increased relevance for every user supported by the system. Likewise, we can extend these capabilities to our online platform, which currently serves well over 1 million consumers and indexes 7 million new articles per day. The result is tremendous value and continued innovation for both consumer and enterprise users.”
J.B. Holston, NewsGator CEO and president, said, “We are uniquely positioned to drastically expand the community of people working with RSS content. The larger that community is, the more valuable the experience for every user and for all of our services customers. That insight has led us to undertake the significant investment to make all of our client products free. Our 50 media and online publishing customers can now take advantage of this valuable intersection of community and content. With services such as our Widget Framework, these customers can syndicate the most relevant content, on a branded basis, to a much wider audience. In addition, we are rapidly growing our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business by partnering with brands, agencies, and information service companies that can use attention and relevance metadata, provided by the NewsGator platform, to offer much richer and more relevant content solutions to their audiences. Look for more announcements about these efforts in the coming weeks.”
Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst with Burton Group, said, “Burton Group has long been focusing on the evolution and business impact of RSS platforms in the enterprise. Making readers more available for all workers inside an organization makes it easier for people to participate in an RSS platform and makes it more possible to deliver a consistent feed reading experience across multiple application contexts. Not only is this a usability and productivity benefit for workers but the enterprise wins as well since the underlying RSS platform is able to capture and analyze relevant data on a much broader basis. Wider adoption of its free clients will likely generate a tremendous amount of relevance information, which can be used to augment systems installed at customer sites.”
The improved relevance information in NewsGator’s online platform will also drive further innovation within each of the RSS clients.
“When I joined NewsGator,” said Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon, “I had a vision of FeedDemon leveraging the power of NewsGator’s platform to give PC users a better reading experience. Making all the clients free helps make that platform even richer and more powerful – I’m very excited about the possibilities and have some great features planned for the next release of FeedDemon.”
“The NewsGator platform enhancements will also enable great new features for Mac users,” said Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire. “Syncing with the NewsGator platform already makes NetNewsWire faster and lets users read their feeds on an iPhone. With these enhancements it will be even easier to recommend the best feeds and the coolest stories in NetNewsWire, creating a better user experience for both consumer and enterprise users.”
All client products are available for free download from the NewsGator website (www.newsgator.com).