Sunday, January 30, 2011

Money for nothing

A few years back I participated in a study on early stage investing in Russia - motivated by the fact that there is a lot of money staged by both the Russian government and Russian investors. What's become even more intriguing since then is the flow of Russian money to Silicon Valley investments - DST-Facebook investments getting the most attention recently. These high value deals are definitely bold and working - for now.

The latest news is the super cheap angel funding that Yuri Milner is engineering. Whether this is sustainable long term is hard to say, but this will surely shake things up around here for the foreseeable future. One thing is certain: the already hot startup environment just got a lot hotter.

Feedly: the iPhone just got a lot better

For several years, I've been using Feedly on my personal computer to quickly browse across lots of content from news feeds, blogs, and other sites of interest. It's been a very handy way to keep up on information from lots of sources without getting bogged down - scan lots of feed titles and previews and dive in on items that seem interesting.

But my usage patterns with Feedly have been uneven - primarily because I don't have much time to sit and scan on my pc - I'm either doing meetings, working on documents or trying to stay on top of email during the day. My "dead time" tends to be "in between" times like running between office buildings. That's when I'll check news feeds to see what's going on in industry or the world. Typically, it means manually browsing to reliable sites - which is not all that convenient.

Well, now Feedly is available on the iPhone and things just got a lot better for me. I can manage all my feeds through the desktop, but take advantage of very quickly scanning information over hundreds of sources. It's now virtually the only iPhone app that I use regularly and I don't lose any time. In fact, since I've been playing with it, I really haven't needed to open Safari at all. My only "wish" for Feedly is that the digest would show the latest feed entry for each source by title, which would save me some wasted navigation. For me, this is all about getting the right information to me quickly.

A seriously great app that bridges all my normal working environments seamlessly. Highly recommended - thanks Edwin and company for pulling this off!