Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Microsoft launches MSN Newsbot in the US, powered by Moreover Technologies

As posted by John Battelle in MSFT Newsbot: Take That, Google News, Microsoft has launched its own version of Google News in the US. The press release mentions that Newsbot leverages the crawling and clusterization back-end of Moreover Technologies. The first phase of the beta program was launched in Europe last february.

This is a great achievement for Jim Pitkow and the team. Congratulations!

Disclosure: I am an investor in the company as a former General Partner of RVC.

To blog or not to blog

Very thoughtful post from Christopher Allen re Too High A Standard on how much thinking and research has to go into a blog post. I have really enjoyed Christopher's (long) contributions in the past, and am looking forward to his more frequent write-ups.

My comments on the U-Blog/SixApart debate

I have reposted the comment I left on Loic Le Meur's blog last night "en francais dans le texte". In a nutshell, I am volunteering that:

Loic is taking an excruciating pain to try and respond to the rant of his users and should be commended for it. It is a difficult thing for two startups to impeccably manage the communication surrounding an acquisition and the necessary consolidation of existing product offering.

that those kinds of issues happen all the time when a company acquires one of its local competitors and that the U-Blog community should work together at defining the functionality that they would like to see implemented in TypePad, and move on.

Loic and his team should be praised for the fact that SixApart chose a French team to lead the european platform, a rare enough achievement, as opposed to getting complaints that U-Blog "sold its soul" to SixApart.

At BlogOn 2004

Like many fellow bloggers (I just started but I already pretend being one), I am attending BlogOn 2004 today. Very interesting social media conference, with the who's who of that "phenoma" being in the room or speaking on panels. It is very impressive to see that this event, for its first edition, was sold out.

I will be one of the three "judges" in the Company Presentation break-out session this afternoon. I already met a couple of interesting companies during the BlogOn Speakers dinner last night: Marc and Anthony from BuzzNet and Michael from UserPlane. I am looking forward to that session.

My friend David Hornik (who's just sitting behind me as I type this) was mentioned for his now famous blah blah blah piece during the first panel, masterfully led by Ross Mayfield.
Ross, did I apologize enough for not inviting you on the Social Enterprise Software panel of SoftEdge 2003 ?

If you are interested in getting a glimpse of the conference, I suggest Fast Company Now. Heath Row is creating transcripts in quasi real-time and posting right after the end of each session.

Welcome to Software Only

What am I getting myself into, starting a blog whilst there are so many things that I don't have time to do any given day (like reading all interesting blogs, articles and books that are piling up on my desk)? Well, because that is something I have been musing about for a while, and that I needed a catalyst to move from thought to action. That trigger point came as a I realized that I could not speak at BlogOn, and not get my long overdue blog going. So here we go...

Making the decision was the easy part. The (major) question then became: what I am going to talk about on this thing ? Well, what I do for a living and as a passion: helping software companies start and develop.
My firm, SoftTech VC, provides consulting services to the software ecosystem, essentially helping companies in one part of the ecosystem to work with other parts. That practice allows me to get a perspective from all those constituents, with a strong bias towards startups. So, without disclosing anything related to the business of my clients, "Software Only" will focus on ideas, issues and trends related to the Software business.

Happy reading!

PS: No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster