Nov 25

Reads of the day

By Stefano Buliani reads of the day No Comments »

I spend a considerable amount of time every day reading blogs and news on the internet. In fact, I go through so many interesting articles every day that is difficult even for me to keep track of every single one. I have therefore decided to create a new category on this blog and post the most interesting/insightful/funny things I find surfing the net on a semi-daily basis.

At the same time I’m very interested in discovering what you, who read this blog, have found interesting or insightful so I’d appreciate if you could leave comments with links on these posts.

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Nov 18

FaveBot – RSS aggregation unleashed

By Stefano Buliani Technology, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

I recently came across FaveBot. The site aims at aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from the most renowned news sites and blogs all over the internet and has recently received a major update functionality-wise.

The site doesn’t exactly look beautiful but its minimalistic simple interface makes it incredibly easy to use.
Once the really brief signup process is completed you are all set to go. Through the “My Trackings” tab you’ll be able to specify search keywords and the categories of feeds you want the site to search in. Results are immediately accessible from the “MyDiscoveries” section.
The categories currently available on the site are blogs, books, DVDs, events, music, news, photos, podcasts and videos.

Another spiffy functionality is the possibility to upload your iTunes library file and let the site aggregate for you all relevant news about your favorite bands.

The only thing I find quite confusing is the fact that while you’re allowed to create multiple tracking filters the results are then all mashed together. the only way to access the outcome of a single search is to click on the number of results in the Trackings summary page.
The site would, perhaps, grow at a considerably faster pace by letting its users add new fees to its database. At the moment the list of feeds to be spidered seems to be “hard-coded”.

The idea looks solid and fairly useful. With just a few fixes and usability improvements it could probably turn into a profitable business in its niche between Feedburner and Digg.

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Nov 17

The Funded revealed

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, WWW No Comments »

The FundedThe Funded, a controversial website which lets entrepreneurs rate VCs performances and behavior, has pulled off a major PR stunt 2 days ago when the mind behind the project revealed himself to the press.
Unfortunately the entire thing didn’t exactly work out as planned as information leaked to the press/blogs well before the scheduled announcement time. TechCrunch and GigaOm among others were already reporting the name of The Man behind it hours ahead of the official announcement.

Adeo Ressi

The man, “Ted”, behind “The Funded” is Adeo Ressi. Ressi founded and sold casual gaming site Game Trust to RealNetworks this September for around $20 million. He also serves on the board of the X Prize Foundation, best known by their cash prize for civilian space exploration.

Not only entrepreneurs but also VCs can create a profile on the site and set the story straight – or rather, tell their side of it.
Oddly enough The Funded is not venture backed.

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