Free Range: your RSS feeds in your PDA/cell phone • 11.08.05
Today I had dinner in Portland (we had great curry by the way) with Jon Maroney, an ex-Extensis marketing/biz dev guy that now is the CEO of a totally Web 2.0 company called Free Range (what a change!!). His company develops a RSS Reader for mobile devices ("Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Palm Treo, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, LG or any Java phone" according to their web site) and offers a server side service where your feeds are stored, catch and served effciently over a mobile connections (catching, compression and all that) into the free client RSS Reader. They accept OPML files as a way to upload of your feeds there and get them available in a cell phone via their service. The demo looked cool in spite of being done with a shitty Motorola phone over a slow T-Mobile connection (it was actually surprinsingly fast due to the catching and preloading info into the phone I guess). The interesting thing is that his company is also targetting corporate applications where they want to use RSS and cell phones with RSS Readers as a way to keep employees updated of particular relevant corporate information. So he is actually thinking on innovative ways where RSS and mobility can be used for corporate purposes (like keeping employees updated of changes in the HR policy) which was a refreshing thing to hear after an overwhelming usage of RSS for consumer applications.
We also discussed about Amazon Mechanical Turk and how that is a great platform for building a mobile device enable interface to access those job opportunities (Amazon has yet to release a Web Service API for that, so far the only API is for the companies posting jobs but Jeff Barr mentioned at Mind Camp that they were going to do so).
I recommend you to try so Jon can make money and eventually invite me to dinner instead of the other way around (just joking Jon 
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