Even a techno-niche can get funding these days. Back in June a new venture capital fund was announced for RSS-related technologies. These truly are the grand days of the internet… a huge bucket of money, waiting to pay people who can generate some XML.

Tangent: Why wasn’t there a big fat HTML Fund back in the day when web pages were indistinguishable from magic? Oh wait, there was. We called it “the dot bomb.”

Kidding aside, the buzz about the RSS Fund is that it has very strict criteria. So, maybe that idea I had about an RSS feed to monitor the foosball table in my office won’t make the cut.

Somebody else, however, did make the cut: RSS Fund Makes 1st Investment in Attensa.

The business model of Attensa doesn’t sound very edgy, but it’s reasonable to wait and see what some smart people can do with RSS and $9M. The real eyebrow-raiser is the notion that these folks intend to compete with NewsGator Outlook with a payware RSS reader.

Market share of NewsGator aside, how long is it going to be until Microsoft simply puts an RSS reader right in Outlook? With all of the Vista infrastructure dedicated to RSS feeds, it seems inevitable that a Microsoft RSS/Atom reader is forthcoming.

If that happens, Attensa, I have this great idea about a foosball table…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 16:06 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.