Project Tango takes Viigo from its roots as a popular RSS reader, to an open, flexible platform for the consumption of a wide range of content and interactive services. The BlackBerry beta, which kicked off a month ago, acquired about 10,000 active beta testers in its first week. We’re hoping to see an equally active Windows Mobile community.

For the beta, we’ve provided a fixed set of useful services (News & RSS, Audio & Podcasts, Weather, Sports Scores, Entertainment & Stocks) for users to play with.

These services provide a hint at what’s possible on the Viigo platform. When the full app is released in the fall, users will be able to pick and choose the services they want to subscribe to and entirely customize their Viigo experience. Today, these services have been written by the team here at Viigo, but it is our intention to open up the platform and allow anyone to build their own services.

In addition to Viigo’s Award Winning News & RSS Service, here’s what’s new in the Public Beta:

Audio & Podcasts

Wirelessly browse, subscribe, download and listen to audio podcasts.

Weather

One click access to 5 day forecast for your favorite cities … lots more coming here too including radar, etc.

Sports

Live scores for the following current leagues (MLB, PGA, LPGA, Formula 1, CFL, etc) … you’ll see other sports such as the NFL, NCAA, etc as the respective seasons start.

Entertainment

Buy, download and play fun Magmic games. Lots more coming here …

Stocks

A very early sample of a portfolio service, showing updated market data for a sample portfolio of commonly held stocks … lots more coming here, including the ability to manage your own portfolios, and get much richer data than is currently shown.

As we move through the summer, new features and new services (such as Flight Scheduling and Flight Status, Hotel and Restaurant reviews, Local Attractions, etc.) will show up.

To view of movie of the Tango Beta in action or to download a FREE BETA copy, click on http://www.viigo.com/wmbeta

Mark Ruddock
CEO
Viigo

So, imagine you’re using Newsclip and browsing your feeds:

When you open your favourite feed (in this example, Digg.com’s RSS feed) and find an article you want to post, you open the menu and select the "Post To Del.icio.us" menu item:

A dialog box appears allowing you to add tags, change the description and enter your Digg username and password (which are stored securely on the device so you don’t have to re-enter them every time):

And voila… you have now posted an article to del.icio.us, so you can go to your desktop computer later and check it out.

Let us know what you think of the feature! This is a bit of a preview for some bigger changes we have in the pipe for Newsclip and the whole thinking around the product and what it means for mobile content consumption. Stay tuned… there’s lots more coming!!!

A side note – right now the del.icio.us feature is only available for our BlackBerry client, but we’re working hard to get it on the other platforms as well.

You can get the latest version of Newsclip by pointing your mobile browser at http://mobile.virtualreach.com

Perhaps more importantly, though, is that you can also add and remove OPML subscription lists. And we directly support My Yahoo! and Bloglines. So if you use My Yahoo! or Bloglines to manage your RSS feeds, you can very easily synchronize those accounts with your mobile device: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm Treo, and any J2ME phone.

We’re looking for web aggregator partners who are looking for mobile synchronization capabilities. If you’re looking to give your customers mobile access to content, please contact us.

For me this is golden, because I tend to test Newsclip a lot. I’m installing and uninstalling all the time – often test versions on internal test accounts that get blown away when we do our launches. So now I have a Bloglines account where I keep the feeds I want to subscribe to, and I can quickly sync to Bloglines when I shift my accounts around.

My Newsclip also introduced the concept of Newsclip accounts, which include a username and password. There was a lot of internal debate about doing this, mainly because we liked the idea of people just being able to install the app and use it without worrying about identity and account issues.

What we found though, is that many of our customers change devices a lot, so it was actually a hassle for them to deal with Newsclip in that environment. So now you can establish a username and password for your account, and reinstall this account whenever you change devices.

Yeah, we know there are a lot of buttons out there. Two things about this:

1. We resisted doing the button. From a brand perspective, the button business is noisy, and there are a lot of aggregators out there. We don’t even want to be an RSS aggregator – our preferred model of business is to have people do their web-based RSS thing with Bloglines or My Yahoo!, and we’ll simply integrate the mobile part via OPML.
2. Coming soon, our button is actually going to support quick subscription of an entire OPML list to your Newsclip list. We’re looking to partner with online aggregators. For example, a RSS aggregator could put the Newsclip button on their site, so users could automatically link their subscriptions to their Newsclip account via OPML.