Viigo Blog

Summary

The latest release of Viigo for BlackBerry (2.2.80) is focused primarily on delivering important usability improvements that have been requested by our users in the past few months.

• Improving the frequency with which feeds are updated and delivered
• Allowing more screen real estate for feeds
• Preserving user-defined fonts
• Adding shortcuts
• Supporting One click eMail article to me
• Making it easier to blog from Viigo
• Adding the ability to limit the maximum articles per channel
• Supporting foreign character sets in “full article”
• Adding the ability to synchronize to your Google Reader account

Just this morning, BerryReview.com reviewed this release, awarding it a 9/10 Star ranking and an Editor’s Choice Award.

Performance

Viigo’s user base has grown considerably over the past year … we currently see well over 25,000 new activations each month, and serve millions and millions of articles per day to users worldwide, in over 7 languages. Our Viigo users also have very diverse tastes. Today Viigo tracks, collects and dispatches over 130,000 distinct RSS feeds, some with tens of thousands of readers, others with only a handful.

As some of you will have noticed, all of this has put our servers under strain. The good news is that we’re tackling this issue in a number of ways. First of all, we’re working continuously to optimize our server architecture. This release adds some key improvements that will start to have an impact as more people upgrade. Secondly, we are significantly growing our server capacity, doubling it over the next few weeks as we move to a new data centre. Performance aside, we also have a ton of exciting new features currently under development for future releases, as our recent round of Venture Capital has allowed us to double the size of our development team. Stay tuned for what they’re working on … it’s pretty exciting.

But, you say, developers need to eat, and server farms cost money! How do you do this if you give Viigo away for free?

In order to continue to offer Viigo for free while supporting both the exciting new features we have under development, and our growing server capacity, we have opened Viigo up to advertising. You will notice the debut ad from our partner “American Express”, that has appeared in both the “::Viigo Bulletins” and “FP Trading Desk” feeds. We have been extremely careful to make this the best advertising experience possible, both for our users and for our advertisers. The ads are clean and unobtrusive and are cached so as to require almost no additional bandwidth. For advertisers, we support “Click to Call”, “Click to SMS”, “Click to Email” and “Click to Web”.

“Berry Review” calls this “one of the best executions of mobile advertising [they] have seen to date” and that “Viigo has done a good job of keeping the ads as unobtrusive as possible”. Please head over to http://www.berryreview.com/2008/01/23/viigo-rss-reader-now-has-advertising for more of Ronen’s analysis. We think you may even like the ads … especially some of the Viigo Specific offers that may soon come your way so stay tuned!

More Screen Real-Estate

In the previous version of Viigo, the introduction of support for MMA compliant banner advertisements required that we expand the top bar by a few pixels. This, in addition to the adoption of standard sized icons (you’ll see the exciting reason for this in an up-coming release) resulted in the display of fewer feeds per page.In an effort to optimize screen real estate, we have removed the “My Channels” header (which really served no useful purpose), thereby giving our users the ability to view more channels on the home screen without having to scroll.

User-Defined Fonts

Previous Viigo builds used to partially override BlackBerry’s ‘theme settings’, giving users little choice but to live with what some called “large, squishy, bold text”.As of this release, Viigo will simply use the font you have specified in your Blackberry screen defaults (i.e. the same font as your eMail).

Delete Key shortcut

While Viigo currently supports many of the BlackBerry’s intuitive short cut keys (such as ‘T’ to go to the top of a screen), users were hoping for an easier and faster way to delete feeds they no longer wanted.Viigo’s new release now enables the user to remove feeds - and articles within feeds - instantaneously by hitting the ‘del’ key.

Send Article to Me

In sifting through hundreds of feeds, mobile users often come across one or two articles they would like to save and read at a later date. In addition to allowing you to save an article in Viigo, which we have supported for some time, this new release gives users a one-click option to email an article to themselves– all without leaving the application.

How:

When viewing an article, launch the menu and select “Send Article to Me”.

Blogging tools

More and more bloggers are discovering the advantages of using Viigo as their tool of choice for rapidly keeping abreast of and blogging about breaking news while on the go.The convenience of publishing articles directly to one’s blog from within Viigo is indeed appealing. However, in prior releases, the inability to remove “[Viigo]” from the email subject line was proving to be frustrating to users.With the new version of Viigo, users can now customize the subject line … entirely. Post away!

Maximum Articles Per Channel

No two RSS feeds are created equal. Some feeds deliver a handful of articles a day, others deliver hundreds.Until today, Viigo users could only customize the ‘Maximum number of Articles’ cached on their device, but they couldn’t control the ‘Maximum number of Articles Retained Per Channel.’ As a result, some feeds - especially those that published a lot of content each day tended to monopolize Viigo, leaving fewer articles resident in other feeds. No more!With the addition of a Maximum Number of Articles Per Channel option, users are able to set the maximum number of articles they want delivered per channel. This allows users to balance articles across all their channels. The default is 50.

How:

Launch the Menu > Options > Article Settings Foreign Language SupportWe have improved our support for foreign character sets in “Full Article”. All foreign character sets should now be supported.

Support for the Mobile Optimized Web Content

We now have the ability to open “Full Articles” automatically in the browser for feeds that have excellent mobile optimized content.One excellent example of this can be found in the default Reuters feeds (for example Reuters: Business). We encourage you view the articles in this feed, and to click on “Full Article” for a closer look at how well this works.

Google Reader Integration (Phase 1)

You will be pleased to hear that Viigo now allows you to automatically synchronize all your Google Reader feeds.

If you have a Google Reader Account (or a Yahoo, or Bloglines account for that matter) you can now establish a dynamic link to these accounts right from Viigo.Once the link is established, all feeds that you currently subscribe to in your Google Reader account will appear automatically in Viigo. Furthermore, any time you add or remove feeds from your Google Reader Account, these feeds will be added or removed automatically in Viigo.

It may take a few seconds for the first articles to appear in these feeds, so be patient.We call this Google Reader Integration (Phase 1) because it is only the first step in our plans for integration with popular web readers. We’re hoping to offer full read/un-read synchronization in later releases.

How:

In the Channel Library, go to Add your own Channel >Add Aggregator (Google Reader…), and follow the Wizard instructions.

Desktop View

Our articles now have support for the “Desktop View” … i.e. BlackBerry’s emulation of a Desktop Browser.In this mode, a cursor appears, and the browser attempts to display the contents of the article as it would on a larger screen. Moving the pearl, moves the cursor around (useful for selecting Links to follow for example).One interesting use of this feature is to scale images (cartoons, for example) that you want to see at a larger size. Check it out on the Dilbert feed.

We’re pleased to announce the latest version of Viigo, 2.3.35 for Windows Mobile devices.

Here’s what’s new:

• Account Creation / Registration Wizards – to simplify the account creation process.
• Favicon Support – Viigo now displays the logo of the corresponding content providers in the main screen.
• Channel Notifications – when new content arrives, Viigo displays a red ‘tomato splat’ on top of channels to notify you.
• Channel Renaming – users can rename their channels, giving feeds their own custom titles.
• Viigo Help - Help is now a menu option.
• Bug Fixes - Bug fixes and overall improvements to robustness.

Here’s how to get the latest Viigo:

a) Point your mobile browser to http://getviigo.com and download OTA.
b) From your desktop, browse to http://www.viigo.com/download_wm.html, send yourself an email download link.
c) For Active Sync to our Windows Do More cobranded version, browse to https://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/domore/viigo.mspx

We’re happy to announce Mark Ruddock has joined the firm as President and CEO.

Mark comes to Viigo from Ventures West, one of Canada’s largest private venture capital companies, where he served as Entrepreneur in Residence.

Mark was the founding CEO of INEA Corporation, a financial software organization that became a key strategic partner to many of the world’s leading financial institutions. INEA was acquired in June 2005 by Paris-based Cartesis Group. Following the acquisition Mark joined the Cartesis management team as Chief Product Officer, where he led the successful integration of the two companies. Cartesis was subsequently acquired by Business Objects in 2007.

“Mark’s hire is a key milestone for Viigo as we seek to accelerate the expansion of our company and our industry changing product suite,” says Jay Steele, founder and CTO, “Mark and I have worked together for a number of months in his capacity as EIR at Ventures West, and we’ve already gained much from this partnership. I’m thrilled to finally have him on board full time.”

Version 2.2.70 (OS 4.2 and higher)

Version 2.2.69 (OS 4.0)

We’re pleased to announce that a new version of Viigo is now available for BlackBerry.

Here’s what’s new:

• Account Creation / Registration Wizards – simplifying the account creation process.
• Channel Notifications – Viigo displays a red ‘tomato splat’ on top of channels and within feeds when new content arrives (think BlackBerry email notification).
• Article Alerts – Users can create a custom notification (sound or vibrate, etc.) for each ‘BlackBerry Profile’, alerting them when specific content arrives.
• Channel Renaming – Users can rename their channels, giving feeds their own custom titles.
• Viigo Help – There is now a ‘Help’ menu option.

Here’s how to get the latest Viigo:

a) Point your mobile browser to http://getviigo.com and download OTA.
b) From your desktop, browse to www.viigo.com/download.htm, send yourself an email download link.

If you’d like to download one of the Viigo partner versions (such as BlackBerryCool, Pinstack, etc.) simply browse to their web site, find the Viigo button on their page and click it, and you’ll be guided through the process.

Windows Mobile users, stay tuned, we’re only days away!

We’re excited to announce that Viigo users can now avoid the daily headaches of rush hour traffic.

Currently available for major cities across the US and the UK, traffic alerts provide users with up to date information on highway status, jam factors, and other critical traffic alerts.

To subscribe to the Traffic Alert feed in your area click Add Channel > Useful Services > Traffic Alerts.

US – New York Traffic Alerts,

courtesy of www.traffic.com

UK - England, North West Traffic Alerts, courtesy of www.highways.gov.uk

Mea culpa… during the last few hours we’ve had some of our web site services (including the form that allows you to send yourself a link to the Viigo application) break down. If you’ve been angrily trying to send and resend and resend yourself a Viigo download link lately, please try again, its working now. And we’re sorry… we’ve caught the gremlin and he won’t cause us any more problems.

Just as the title indicates, Viigo has launched two new
channels that you can subscribe to. Firstly, for the sports fanatics, we’ve
added a Customizable ESPN Sports Search and Alert feed. Secondly,
for the worldly travelers, we’ve added an Exchange Rates feed.

The ESPN Sports Search and Alert feed (found under Add
Channel > Sports) will definitely come in handy for the upcoming
NFL Season. Simply type in any search term you like (Teams, Players,
Coaches, Scores, Standings, Blogs, etc), and based on your input, Viigo will
create a customized sports channel for you.

The Exchange Rate Folder (found under Add Channel
> Business & Finance) has over 40 different currencies from which
you can choose as your base currency. This feed will provide daily
updates valuing your specified currency against all other currencies.

We’re pleased to announce that a new version of Viigo is now available that adds some new features and fixes some issues. Nothing earth shattering in this release, but we’re trying to keep up with our promise to make continual and frequent progress and updates. Here’s what you’ll see:

• A brand new banner on our Viigo branded version (to quote one of our loyal users, the old green one was “fugly”)
• Following links is supported in the item description screen (open an item and scroll to a link)
• When opening an item in the browser, content is proxied through a mobile-enhancement service (this option can be turned on and off under Options->Application)
• Improved Suretype keyboard shortcuts (we now support the standard “go to top” and “go to bottom” keys in the item list, for example)
• Multiple recipients are supported now when sending articles and referring friends
• Improved caching of the initial Channel Manager library (under “Add Channel”): this used to take a few seconds to load
• Better error messages, some of the old ones were pretty confusing

The new release is available for Viigo and all of our partners. To get the latest release, you can proceed to our corporate web site and send a link to your mobile device, or alternately browser directly to http://getviigo.com in your mobile browser.

If you want to get one of the partner versions (such as BlackBerryCool) simply proceed to their web site, find the Viigo button on their page and click it, and you’ll be guided through the process.

Enjoy! Lots more coming!

A number of people have been asking us how you can import your Google Reader feeds into Viigo, so I decided to post a short summary on how to do it. Its very simple, and means that you can synchronize the channels you read on the desktop in Google Reader’s RSS reader with Viigo.

Creating a Viigo Account

Note that if you have never created an account in Viigo, you will need to create one now. Having a real Viigo account is valuable because it allows you to manage your feeds in a web browser, and it also lets you recover your subscriptions if you ever need to reinstall the application on your mobile device. If you already have a Viigo account, you can skip the next section.

Creating a Viigo account is simple: Load Viigo on your mobile device, and open the “Options” menu from the main screen. In the Options screen, select the “Account” item. Bring up the menu and choose “Update Account” - this will allow you to change your username from the default username assigned by the system, and will also allow you to set your password.

Getting Your Google Reader Feeds

The first thing you need to do is login to your Google Reader account and click on the “Settings” link at the top of the page:

And select the Import/Export tab (see below):

On the Import/Export screen you’ll see an option to Export your current Google Reader feeds as an OPML file on your computer:

OPML is a file format that simply lists all of your RSS subscriptions. When you click on the “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file” link, you’ll be presented with a dialog box. Enter a directory and filename in this dialog to save the file.

Importing the Feeds Into Viigo

Once you have the OPML file saved, browse to the Virtual Reach home page (http://www.virtualreach.com), and select the “My Viigo” menu item on the left hand side of the page (located at the bottom of the following screen shot):

Selecting this link will allow you to login to your Viigo account… use the username and password combination that you selected when you created your Viigo account in the first section of this post.

Once you’re logged in, select the “Import OPML File” link on the left side of the page. You’ll see the following section on the page:

Choose the OPML file you exported from Google Reader, and click the “Import OPML” button.

The next time you update your channels in Viigo, your Google Reader feeds will appear in your Viigo List.

We’ve been getting some excellent feedback from customers using Viigo in the last few days, and we wanted to say thank-you for the help. We genuinely appreciate the information you’re giving us, and we are listening carefully: Many of the suggestions you are providing are going to be appearing in the product as soon as we can get them in.

We’ve assembled a subset of the comments in this Virtual Speach post as a way to answer back to all of our customers and give people an idea where we’re heading:

“Now if I could just Cache on the MicroSD for offline use it would be perfect.”

External Media is an important part of where we’re going with the Viigo platform… stay tuned for this feature in an upcoming release.

“Prior to owning a BlackBerry and using Viigo I had a Windows Mobile phone and I used NewsBreak. NewsBreak has a feature that after an automatic update you’d receive notification of new items. I would love to see such a feature with Viigo.”

Notification is a tricky issue, but we agree an important feature. We’re working on this, but we want to make it compelling. We don’t want to add it in a way that is annoying or frustrating for people. Suggestions would be welcome here …

“I’d like to have opening links directly from within viigo ala freerange webreader. Opening it in the browser can be a chore sometimes…“

We agree… this is an area where FreeRange has done a nice job, but we are working on what we think is a very compelling solution that includes links and a much improved use experience.

“…Also, when on a suretype device, you should follow suretype conventions for next/previous article etc shortcuts. I was spent a whole day trying to figure out the shortcuts, and in the end thankfully found the shortcuts document in your website.”

Good point! We’ll fix this as soon as possible.

“Is there a way to mark unread items as read without opening it? Love the service.”

You can do that now: In the Item List, select an item you want to mark as read (or unread) without opening it. If you bring up the menu, you’ll see the “Mark Read” or “Mark Unread” commands (depending on the current state of the item).

“Hey I am just sending in some suggestions, I know I have my settings to update every 2 hours and it doesn’t seem to be doing so…“

There are a number of reasons this can happen: it could be local coverage or network issues with your service provider, or it could be that your update period happen to fall on a peak load moment for our servers, in which case the updater may time out and try again a bit later without causing too much fuss. In the latter case, while these situations are rare, we acknowledge this is not acceptable long term. Our rate of subscriber growth lately has been rather impressive, and we’re working hard to keep up with this growth and to evolve the system to be able to handle much larger loads in the future.

“… Also what about an option to look for numbers like a 411? Just some thoughts thanks….”

Stay tuned for more on this soon.

“Hi there — I really enjoy using your product there are just a couple of things I am having issues with. I am using Viigo on a blackberry 8300.

You need a page down key. Using the trackball causes the page you are reading to jump all over the place. This mainly happens while images are loading and it seems that the screen is jumping to the next link in an article. the bb browser does the same thing but you can hit the space key to go down a page.”

This is an issue we acknowledge, and we are addressing this pretty aggressively. Because we use RIM’s built-in browser control on the BlackBerry we have limited control currently, but improvements are on the way.

“The other problem I have is that the first column of text sometime gets pushed off the screen. This happens when there are in-line images that tend to be large. It only happens on some feeds though.”

We’ll look into this as well. Thanks!!!

“I would like a function to mark all as read in a single channel.”

There is a way to do this, currently, although you have to open the channel first. Simply scroll to the very top of the item list (or press ‘t’ to jump to the top), open the menu, and select “Mark Prior Opened.” If you’re asking for a way to do without opening the channel first, we’ll investigate. The reason why we would be reluctant is because we don’t like to clutter menus.

“I also would like the space bar to page through a single article in addition to using the scroll wheel.”

Agreed, we need to do this. It’s coming.

“Hi, I’d like to be able to actually click on web links from within viigo.. They show as a clickable link but nothing happens when I click on them I have to open the article in the browser first and that’s a pain sometimes.. Please fix/add this feature. Thank you.”

We are definitely working on this one… we agree it is very important.

“…I also noticed that I was unable to select any text or email links within the RSS hence I had to open in the browser to respond. It would be useful to be able to select text or email links. “

We agree, thanks for the input. We’ll add this.

“Finally, I thought it may be useful to have more services to cater for the UK market such as weather channels as the current channels service the US.”

We have started an initiative to better cater to a more broad range of geographies, and you’ll start to see the results of that soon.

“Add the following feeds:

· New Scientist

· The Register

· Crackberry.com

· Slashdot”

Slashdot and Crackberry.com are already in the library! (however, as I’m writing this I realize that Slashdot is under “Science” and it should be under “Technology” – we’ll fix that) Crackberry.com can be found under BlogsàMobile.

We’ll add the other channels as well. However, did you know you could simply go “Add ChannelàAdd Your Own ChannelàAdd From Web Page” and enter “www.theregister.co.uk” and Viigo will go find the RSS feeds associated with that page.

“Support for Nokia E61”

Symbian is a really important platform for our future… bear with us, its coming.

“The cities are very limited in the weather channel. I live in Georgia and there is no city close to me to chose from.“

Better weather support is imminent!

“I love the program for my 8800. It’s the first time I’ve really had a need for rss. The only suggestion is to be able to program the times for the updates. And the max number of articles for each channel. And to have some channels download the whole articles for when you’re on a plane.”

There are changes coming in the next couple of releases to address most of what you’re requesting here. Content management is one of the strengths of the platform, and something we’re improving on a continuous basis.

“The total articles indicator at the top left of the screen was good.”

We’re definitely looking into good ways of accomplishing this, lots of people are requesting it.

“ A selection of colors would be good ( that green is hideous ). The ability to “”follow”" a weblink would be great.”

The guy responsible for the green (that would be me) is getting a lot of flack from all sides. Consider it fixed for the next release.

“First, let me thank you all for putting together a great product! I’ve been an avid Viigo user since the days of NewsClip. Your product stands head and shoulders above the competition. The ability to read items offline vs. going to a website like bloglines is bar far your biggest and best differentiator.

I noticed your note on the bulletin regarding feedback, hence this email. Below is a list of opportunity items I would love for you to tackle. I ranked the list in priority order (items that are more important to me will make it to the top):

Email - This is my biggest frustration with the product. The ability to send feeds via email is great. The two biggest downfalls of the email functionality are: A)send to multiple addresses, and B) Selecting the right “”to”" address when a person in my address book has more than one email address. I know that this is a known issue. I also know that some of this issue stems from the API into BlackBerry’s address book. However, there has to be a better way. Maybe using BlackBerry’s email client instead of the Viggo template would remote this issue. Of course, it stops you from adding the signature at the bottom (powered by Viigo) and the altered subject line. I’m not sure of the solution, but this is by far my biggest frustration. I want to send feeds to anyone in my address book no matter how many people or which email address.”

You are correct; the email issue is related to BlackBerry bugs we’ve communicated to RIM about. We’ll probably end up doing what you’re proposing here, as the bug has existed since BlackBerry 3.8, and it doesn’t seem like a high priority to them.

“Feed Headers/Titles - I would like the ability to rename the header/title for each feed. For example, I use Yahoo’s word of the day feed (http://xml.education.yahoo.com/rss/wotd). When I subscribe to this feed via Viigo, the title on my BB says ‘Yahoo! Education: Word of the’ and it doesn’t fit the rest. Why not give the ability to rename the feed to ‘Word of the Day.’ I don’t need the ‘Yahoo! Education:’ text. It just takes up space. I have a lot of examples (such as ‘Yahoo! News: Top Stories’), but you get the idea.”

We agree, we’ll add this feature.

“Feed Rendering - I have a really weird situation with a few of my feeds. For some reason, the feed only loads the title of the article, and not the abstract.”

We’ll investigate this… thanks.

“Adding Feeds - I like what you have done with the ‘Add Channel’ section. You recommend some good feeds. However, I usually know what feed I want and I want to just add it. In NewsClip, I could do this within one or two clicks. In Viigo, I have to go to “”Add Channel -> Add your own channel -> Add RSS Channel”" and then enter the feed info. Not really a big deal, but something I noticed. I could easily live with how it is done today, but thought I would mention it anyway.”

This will no doubt create an internal debate on where we should place things in the Channel Library… placement of different things is always contentious. We try to balance number of clicks with how often we think people are going to use the feature. Promote things that are used more often higher, and demote things that we think are used less frequently. But we see your point… we’ll look at it again.

“Please note that I am very happy with the Viigo application. As with anything in this world, it is always easy to point out flaws. It’s also good to know what can be improved on. You have a great application and I see it getting even better as time goes on. Thanks a ton for all of the work you have done.”

Thanks for this feedback… we appreciate the good AND the constructive, and it always helps morale and drive to hear stuff like this. We are working very hard on this product.

“User adjustable font scaling.”

This one is often requested, and we’ll add it.

Thanks again for all of this feedback, and we hope responding on our blog provides value for everybody. Have fun using Viigo!!!