Blogs @ ZapTXT

Some nice mentions over the last week.

The last 10 days have been absolutely nuts here at ZapTXT, thanks to holiday shopping and in particular the Wii shopping frenzy. Folks from all walks of life adding RSS feeds from Wii tracking sites to ZapTXT to receive notifications as soon as the Wii or specific game showed up at one of the major retailers. Then more users came to monitor game review updates via IM, Skype, Email, SMS using RSS feed from sites like, 1UP, IGN and GameSpot. More on this here.

First, Joystiq, the popular gaming blog wrote up ZapTXT as one way to locate a Wii if you couldn’t get to “The one American store with daily Wii shipments“. Thanks a lot guys. You sent a lot of new users our way and we really appreciate it.

KillerStartUps thoroughly explains what ZapTXT does in this article but also asks whether we can be a mainstream utility. Well, given the scores of school teachers, librarians, and moms and dads monitoring the Wii using ZapTXT shows that we do have mainstream utility. We’ll always make sure we fine tune usability but this experience has shown that we are off to a good start.

And last but certainly not least, this morning, Mike Gunderloy at Web Worker Daily gave us some ink in his post titled “WWD Coffee Break: Portfolio, RSS and Notes“.

A big thank you for taking the time to write us up.

technorati tags:
ZapTXT, RSS+Wii, Gaming

A month ago we started to see a surge in Nintendo’s Wii tracking using ZapTXT. So we thought we’d share, in case there were some Wii-heads out there desperately seeking one for the holidays.

An awesome utility to track Wii availability is Wii Tracker. WiiTracker tracks Wii availability at major retailers such as Amazon, Buy.com, CircuitCity, Costco.com, eToys.com, Sears, Target.com, Frys.com, and Walmart.com and provides updates on availability for each of these retailers. What’s cool is that you can click straight through from WiiTracker’s site or from the ZapTXT alert to the shopping cart for each of these retailers.
WiiTracker has an RSS feed that you can use to subscribe to all updates via an RSS reader. Or you can use ZapTXT to receive notifications via IM, Skype, Email or SMS, only when WiiTracker finds new inventory at any of the retailers its tracks.

Use this link to use ZapTXT to monitor the Wii and you’ll be on your way. Important: Remember to use our keyword monitoring feature with the phrase “in-stock” to only receive notifications when the site detects available units.

Happy shopping, Sameer

Allan Hoffman wrote an article on NJ.com called “IF U R KEWL U CAN TXT (Translation: If you are cool, you can text)” that talks about how texting is breaking into mainstream usage, well beyond the youth and early adopter crowd.

ZapTXT was included in the article as an example of how to monitor topics of interests on sites you read via IM, Email and SMS.

“ZAPtxt (www.zaptxt.com) will monitor Web sites based on keywords of your choice. You could choose to monitor a sports Web site for your team or a business site for a company; when new information appears about your keyword, you’re notified with a text message. As with a number of other services, you can also opt to receive alerts via e-mail or instant message.”

NJ.com provides news, business and sports updates from Newark Star-Ledger, The Times, Trenton, The Jersey Journal, Easton Express-Times, Bridgeton News and Today’s Sunbeam.

A big welcome to all the folks from NJ local communities that came by to check out ZapTXT. Our NJ debut was on Hoboken411, a blog focused on Hoboken, NJ where we are proud to power notifications for new posts and comments via IM, Email or Mobile Device.

Thanks for the mention Allan!

Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:Nj.com, zaptxt, Hoboken411, Allan+Hoffman

Women2.0 is a San Francisco based organization focused on encouraging and supporting women in the field of entrepreneurship. We’re thrilled to share that the site is now using ZapTXT to power notifications via IM, Skype, Email or Mobile device. The Women2.0 community, the press and other interested folks can now receive filtered notifications on topics of interest across the site.

“We are a group of ambitious women and always have to balance our full time jobs, with full time passions. We are confident ZapTXT is the perfect tool for our community. Our members can now be in sync about upcoming Women 2.0 events through the channel of their choice. ZapTXT is a perfect fit for my lifestyle.” said Shaherose Charania of Women 2.0.

Women 2.0 hosts events and mixers that provide a forum for women entrepreneurs, to help launch new companies, network with experienced entrepreneurs and executives and to meet investors. The group also hosts a Ning-powered social network for Women Entrepreneurs so if you are a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned one that has wisdom to share, take a look here.

The group hosts an annual Pitch event where finalists will pitch to a judging panel of investors, executives and seasoned entrepreneurs for the chance to earn top prizes of cash and exclusive meetings with iconic investors. The deadline for submitting a business plan is April 1, 2008.

Women2.0 was founded by Shaherose Charania, Angie Chang, Shivani Sopory and Wen-Wen Lam and has a impressive Steering Committee that includes Rachel Cook, Chris Shipley, Rebecca Weeks, Katherine Barr, Ellen Levy, Alka Gupta, Carol Sands and Shannon McClenaghan.

We also join TeXtra, mogulus and realgirlsmedia (RGM) as media partners with Women2.0 and we plan to do a lot more to help get the word out in the coming months.

Special thanks to Shaherose Charania and Angie Chang for making this happen.

To follow the latest at Women2.0, subscribe to this ZapTask.

Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:ZapTXT, Women2.0, Notifications, Ning, Shaherose+Charania, Angie+Chang

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs fame announced the release of a nifty application she built for PodHandle that presents content (using RSS feeds) from over 50 podcasting professional consultants and relevant Google Blog Search queries. The application is designed to benefit those in the podcasting consulting business by making available a searchable list of podcasting related resources.

Instead of just publishing a list of feeds (or OPML for the more technically minded), Marjolein chose to build an application using Grazr which enables effective feed management, browsing and searching. Marjolein has graciously shared the process of creating this application for the benefit of others looking to do something similar to what she has done for Podcasters.

Paul and I had the opportunity to work with Marjolein on this to get ZapTXT integrated into application and as always, it’s great working with her.

Congratulations to Marjolein on a successful release. I’m sure we will be seeing more of these very soon.
Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:Marjolein+Hoekstra, CleverClogs, ZapTXT, RSS, Grazr, Podcasts, Podcasting, Podhandle

technorati tags:TechCrunch, TechCrunch40, TC40, ZapTXT, Events+RSS, Events

Sean Heber of SpiffyTech has a cool service called Totally Scored that lets you search for sports scores and subscribe to results via RSS. It’s a straight forward service: pick your team(s) or sports and view score results. Optionally, subscribe to RSS feeds for future results if you like.

For those of you that need to receive sports scores asap, ZapTXT is available on the site on every search result page so you can subscribe for notifications via IM, Skype, Email or SMS. Search the site for your favorite sport or team and on the results page, click on the green button at the bottom. You’ll be taken to ZapTXT to pick your alert preferences and thats it.

Here’s a screen shot of a ZapTXT alert via Skype for the Milwaukee Pittsburgh game below. I used Skype but you can use Email, SMS or your favorite IM client.

Go to Totally Scored to get started!

technorati tags:ZapTXT, RSS, Sports+Scores, Totally+Scored, Sports

Update: Fixed. All is well in Jabber land.

If you are using Jabber IM (which includes GTalk and Gizmo) as your notification method for ZapTasks, you might experience a delay. We’re working on this problem and we will resolve this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, to ensure timely delivery, you can change your delivery method to email or to another IM client (Yahoo IM, MSN, AIM or Skype). We apologize for any inconvenience.

Consumer Reports, one of the most trusted sources when it comes to news and product ratings and buying guides now provides RSS feeds. Partnering with SimpleFeed, the site lets you combine feeds for specific topics (cars, home, babies, latest news etc.) to create a master feed that covers topics that you are interested in. Its a nice approach to building a sub domain of topics from a larger bucket of information so you have just one tailored feed from a given source.

Consumer reports provides a host of information within the feed, including relevant articles (nice touch!) and a link back to the site to get the ‘war and peace’ version.

One suggestion that I would make to them is to allow users to name this customized feed. All combinations of feeds are labeled as “Consumer Reports”. It might be hard to remember what feeds I have in my combo menu, a few months down the line.

To see how this feed serving capability performs in combination with our filtering and notification abilities, I’ve set up a ZapTask with the Consumer Reports feed for Babies and asked to be notified via IM when there’s a mention of “Britax” - the car seat that my 16 month old lounges in. The feed validated just fine so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be getting an alert one of these days.

All in all, RSS just makes a boat load of sense for the type of content that Consumer Reports serves up and the implementation is dead simple requiring little or no RSS know-how. Congrats to the Consumer Reports team on joining the RSS bandwagon.

[via RSS Blog]

[tags]Consumer+Reports, RSS, ZapTXT, Britax, SimpleFeed[/tags]

Cheers
Sameer

A lot has been written about how to discover new blogs and websites using RSS. The most common approach to this is subscribing to search results RSS feeds from blog search engines or RSS feeds provided by memes, and participatory media sites. And services such as Sphere are just great to discover related content and writers in the context of an article that you are reading.

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of interesting uses of ZapTXT to monitor topics of interest from sources other than written web content. This post tries to shed some light on 4 places, to find hidden influencers, and thought leaders, that might be too deep or out of scope for a blog search engine to catch. Give it a try - I found a couple of ZapTXT mentions that I wasn’t aware of.

Presentations/Slides/Documents
The value of RSS in this space is not getting nearly enough attention. Sites such as SlideShare (review), and Scribd (review) provide RSS feeds so you can track topics of interest mentioned within presentations or documents hosted by these sites. There’s a sea of content from credible authors in this maze that may or may not be referenced in blogs or other written sources. Some of these folks are well respected conference speakers and thought leaders that have good things to say. What’s particularly unique about this is that the search results show reflect content inside a presentation (as opposed to just metadata). More and more conference speaker slides and company presentations are hosted on these sites as a way to achieve more shelf life beyond the speaking event, product launch or training session.

PodCasts or Video Casts
Monitor topics and content within the audio or video file. Say an industry expert was interviewed in a podcast or videocast. Believe it or not, many such experts don’t have blogs or write for a living. They do however have insightful stuff to say and they may even mention your company, industry, whatever. Using RSS feeds provided by services such as EveryZing, Blinkx (reviews), and Adap.tv (review) will allow you to monitor not just tags (as you would with YouTube) but the actual transcript of the interview. So the next time you want to know when Jim Cramer talked about Apple or the Housing Market in an interview, use the RSS feed from one of these services to be notified.

Images and Photos
Did someone post an image of your new product that makes it shine? Photo sharing sites such as Flickr offer RSS feeds for a tag or search result, making it easy to monitor any new images on a given category. Unlike the previous examples above, unfortunately we can’t tell what’s inside the image and have to rely on labels and tags for feeds. Hopefully one day Riya will offer RSS results for searches for a similar watch, pair of shoes, shades, etc. as they do with Like.com. That’s when this is going to get very exciting!

Sites that don’t support RSS.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few of those. Fear not, social bookmarking sites such as De.licio.us, Diigo and StumbleUpon are good resources to find such sites. Just monitor an RSS feed for a tag or a search result and if someone found such a site worthy enough to be shared, you will find it.

More work needs to be done but there’s a lot of goodness hidden in these critters that just don’t get the ink they deserve. A couple of months ago, one of our users was kind enough to let us know that we were profiled up in a newsletter aimed at technologists in the legal industry. None of the above mentioned tricks helped us get wind of that.

Dig deep - there’s a lot of good stuff tucked away.

Cheers, Sameer

[tags]RSS, Conference+Speakers, Training, PodZinger, Sphere, SlideShare, Scribd, De.licio.us, StumbleUpon, Diigo, Riya, Jim+Cramer, Blinkx, Adap.tv, ZapTXT, Podcasts, VideoCasts, Flickr, Alerts[/tags]

Update: We’re up and running.

ZapTXT is moving to a new data center this weekend. We’re making the switch from a hosting solution to our own infrastructure. New facility and shiny new hardware, packed with power. A big move for us but one that will let us scale to support our service capabilities and your notification needs.

We’ve tried to minimize the interruption but we do expect to be down for a few hours this afternoon (Saturday 7/9/07) to make it all happen. Apologies for the inconvenience. We’ll be up and running as soon as possible.

Thanks.

Ask.com, the 4th largest search engine just released a new look and a boat load of features to its results page. ResourceShelf has a nice run down of the new release here and the news has lit up Techmeme as well and here’s a detailed review on Search Engine Land.

First, congratulations to the Ask team for a very very nice product. The user interface is clean yet allows for additional contextual results across media types. This seems to be very useful, especially for well known search terms. Say you are looking for new info on Maroon 5 - you can now get all of the results - Bio, Images, Event Search, Encyclopedia, Lyrics, Popular Tracks and related names, in a very non-intrusive way. In other words, if you want to explore, its all there and if you want to ignore it, it’s not competing for your attention. In particular, the contextual integration with iLike for this use case is very well done. Another broad search test for “Pizza” also showed good results with additional categories such as Business Listings, Shopping, Videos. You get the picture.

My first impression was that the new Ask.com is now as much of a discovery service as it is a search engine. For the example I used above, bringing in data such as events, lyrics and images into the fold means that there even more of a dynamic nature to this than ever before. The interaction design and final destination points across each result type made me realize that instead of fighting other search engines on relevancy of data already indexed on the web, there’s an opportunity to service those users that are searching for information that may not have shown up as yet. A concert, a new song, a new pizza restaurant, what ever. To me, this new design is well suited to this notion.

2 suggestions:

First: Expand the recommendation engine. For example if I did a search for events for Maroon 5 in Boston and there’s no events, show me where they are playing anyway say in a 100 mile radius, along with the no results found.

Second: Michael Fergueson, Ask.com’s user experience guru, does cover some important points about how this design allows for better user retention and repeat visits in this interview with Andy Beal. However, I think Ask might still be closing the interaction loop prematurely. RSS can be an effective tool to continue the engagement with the user beyond the search results page. Since you know I’m interested in a Maroon 5 show in Boston, give me a feed to subscribe to so I can get a heads up about an event in Boston when it gets announced.

Looking forward to using this more when outbound RSS is enabled. That’s when it gets very relevant to our user community.

Nice job!
Sameer

technorati tags:RSS, Search, Discovery, Ask.com, Ask3D, ZapTXT