Feed manipulation and content syndication service FeedDigest has announced it has received a significant amount of angel funding to enable it to extend its service and feature set.
“On average, we’ve been adding about 50 new customers to the service each day in spite of a limited operating budget supported by donations from our customers,” said FeedDigest’s founder, Peter Cooper. “In less than 12 months since our initial launch, we have over 13,000 clients who rely on our service to have fresh, relevant content delivered to their Web site automatically 24/7. With this investment, we intend to provide a world-class, supported RSS content publishing service to a mainstream audience….We’re bringing the concept of feeds and content syndication up to date and turning it into a user-friendly experience so that webmasters and media patrons outside of the tiny world of RSS can get the most out of this amazing technology. We’re attempting to break RSS out of a tech-only audience, something few other technology providers are trying to do,” said Mr. Cooper.
The angel funding comes from a small fund called Curious Office, led by two Seattle-based technology investors, Kelly Smith and Adrian Hanauer. Smith has a long technology track record starting with SPRY Inc. (the first commercial implementation of the Mosaic Web browser) and was one of RealNetwork’s earliest employees. He was most recently Vice President Product Marketing for Myrio, an IPTV vendor acquired by Siemens earlier this year. The Hanauer family were seed stage investors in several major web properties including aQuantive Inc. (NASDAQ: AQNT), the largest interactive advertising company and Amazon Inc. He is also co-owner of the Seattle Sounders, a professional soccer team. “We made this investment because we believe we’re entering a new phase on the Web — even the smallest websites should have a better automated framework for publishing relevant headlines, news, photos … pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items,” Smith explained.
As a result of the investment, FeedDigest is expected to make further major announcements in the next couple of months, particularly as it brings its statistics and automatic news discovery and delivery features online.
