smartfeed

NewsGator jumped deeper into the mobile app world with its recent purchase of mobile podcatcher smartfeed along with its companion mobile reader, smartread. They also hired the smartfeed/read creator, Kevin Crawley, to head NewsGator’s mobile product development. It’s a great move by NewsGator to extend their vision of ‘any time, any place, any device’. Greg Reinacker covered the key points about why we did this on his blog, and Kevin added some more background color in his, so I won’t repeat it here.

The thing I like most about this story is how Kevin came to be hooked up with NewsGator - particularly relevant to a series of side-bar conversations I’ve been having recently on the value of VC blogs (thoughts on that topic from last year are here).  Kevin apparently read something interesting in one of my blog posts and, since we were both Boulder locals, reached out to me. We met about 9 months ago for coffee and to talk about technology in general and RSS and podcasting specifically. It turned out that we knew a bunch of people in common, had common interests, etc (this being Boulder, it was pretty much a certainty that we’d have at least a dozen ‘one degree’ connections). Nothing specific came of the meeting, but we agreed to stay in touch, which we did over the months. Long story short, voila!, Kevin is working with NewsGator who now owns the IP from the project that we originally got together to talk about. Not where I thought that cup of coffee was headed, but a great blogging success story.

Comments

[Kevin Cawley]

Seth, I had been a silent observer of your blog and what encouraged me to reach to you about a year ago, was a post you did on bike commuting to the Mobius office . I read that and thought, “here is a guy who is clearly very sharp, in tune with the tech scene, and is a normal guy with similar interests.” And like you said, it was pretty cool to find out we had several mutual friends while chatting at Vic’s coffee shop.

I really want to thank you for your introduction to JB and Greg at NewsGator, Seth. I was pretty much set to move to Seattle back in January, got a voice mail from a buddy of mine asking if I was online shopping for galoshes (it had rained for like 30 days in Seattle), and a few days later I got a note from you about talking to NewsGator.

And here I am… the NewsGator team is fantastic, they have a killer product suite, and the excitement about mobility has been extremely encouraging... I am psyched about the possibilities.

BTW, Walker and I want you to bring your bike down to Denver one of these days for a lunch time urban assault ;)

-kevin