As many of you know, I left Feedster at the end of April to start Mashery. I really enjoyed my time at Feedster - there was so much going on in the wind tunnel world of RSS, content syndication, and search. I have a great deal of respect and affection for the company, its investors (several of whom are now Mashery's investors), its partners, and the colleagues I worked with. So I was pleased to hear about some recent progress being made there.
I heard recently that Tyler Goldman will be joining Feedster'as president, replacing Chris Redlitz, who has left the company. I don't know Tyler personally, but based on what I've heard about his background, it appears that board chairman and Selby Ventures partner Marco DeMiroz has managed to attract a top-tier talent to provide the leadership Feedster needs.
On the funding front, Feedster did bring in an additional round of financing led by existing investors, but with a few new names I don't remember participating before. One in particular stood out to me - former Google executive Aydin Senkut. Aydin was a big part of Google's Asia-Pacific strategy, and I've maintained for some time that Feedster's biggest opportunity lies in Asia. Feedster was designed from day one to handle double byte content, so deploying in Japan and China required straightforward changes to the UI, allowing the company to attract strong partners in both countries.
I have also heard about some behind-the-scenes progress being made on Feedster's technology by Brent Whitney's engineering team. Co-founder and search genius François Schiettecatte is still actively involved, and Brent's been building a solid development team in Australia that has added some important capabilities to the San Francisco based team. The company has progressed well beyond basic blog search and content syndication, and is taking an incredibly sophisticated approach to crawling and indexing RSS from around the world, making that content useful and valuable, and purging Feedster of spam.
So good luck to Tyler and the team - seems like things are heading in the right direction.
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