Last night we quietly let ZapTXT Version 2 out into the wild. The service has been re-architected and built from the ground up so we can scale easily and build new services on the platform. This version takes a more holistic view of what monitoring, discovery and messaging needs to look like so that you can be confident that if its important, ZapTXT will find you.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

	1. We can find you. Really. Set notifications to IM and tell ZapTXT to forward notifications to Email or your Mobile Device when you are not available. Our presence detection features can tell when your Instant Messenger status is “Idle” or “Offline”. So if it’s really important, use SMS (normal carrier charges apply). If it can wait, choose email so you can get to it when it’s convenient.
	2. Daily Digest You told us that some notifications can wait. So we now enable you to select Daily Digest as a delivery option for a task. We’ll collate all your notifications for that task and send you one email every morning.
	3. Quiet times for SMS Don’t want your phone beeping at night or during a meeting? Use Quiet times to tell us when SMS notifications should stop. Anything you miss will be forwarded to your email.
	4. No alerts, just a river Dig our filtering capabilities but don’t want a notification pushed via IM, Email or Mobile? No worries. Alerts are now optional. You can use the “Latest Tab” to view a river of news for all matches. Or grab the custom RSS feed for each task and port it to your fancied RSS reader (e.g. NewsGator, Google Reader) or start page (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes)
	5. Multiple Emails Say you want to send critical news about a customer, competitor or LinkedIn network updates to your work email and eBay, Craigslist or FriendFeed notifications to your personal email. Within your settings, add an additional email address. We’ll present your secondary email as an option when you create and edit tasks.
	6. Sharing tasks You could always share a ZapTask. Now you can share a ZapTask as a reading list. Here’s how it works: You create a task, share it as a reading list with friends or colleagues. They subscribe to your ZapTask. Now, every time you add or remove feeds, your subscribers ZapTask will update automatically. Ever try and keep a customer or team member abreast of latest sources that they should monitor? This helps you do it very effectively.
	7. Advanced Search Too much noise? Use our advanced filtering to receive topics mentioned just in the title, exact phrases, written by authors you fancy and more.

Introducing ZapTXT in the Workplace. To add to our publisher solution, we’re also really excited about our new service offering: ZapTXT in the Workplace - An enterprise version of the application that extracts and delivers user defined intelligence from across websites, social media platforms and enterprise systems. The enterprise version is currently available as a SaaS model or as an appliance that you can safely stick behind your firewall and has been successfully implemented for customers. More on this and how specific user groups at our customers are leveraging the platform to improve performance, in a subsequent post. Contact us if you would like to know more.

Finally, ZapTXT now has an API that is ready and is currently available as part of our enterprise offering. We’ll be making it publicly very soon so web applications can offer discovery and notification capabilities via IM, Email or Mobile device to their users. If you’d like to be notified when the API is available, leave a comment below or drop us a line.

With this release we aimed to put in place the required plumbing to allow for reliable tracking, discovery and unified messaging. The social web can be a noisy place and we plan to continue to make it easier for you to focus on topics from sources you trust, discover new sources and rest assured that when the good stuff shows up, we’ll come find you.

Huge props to Eduard, Jane, Paul & Xavier for knocking out the platform over the last few months. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince them to blog often about how good discovery and messaging platforms can be designed, built and kept humming by small, bootstrapped but stellar teams.

Cheers, Sameer

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