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!!!

Canada is hosting the FIFA U-20 World Cup in 2007, and we’ve added some new content to our Channel Library to celebrate. They are listed below; if you want to subscribe directly from your desktop browser using the My Viigo web service, just click on the feed title, and you’ll be redirected to My Viigo.

To access the content inside the Channel Library in Viigo, select “Add Channel” from the main screen, scroll down to the “Sports” section, and a category called “FIFA U-20 World Cup” will contain all of the new channels.

You can subscribe to the content from My Viigo by clicking on the following links:

• FIFA.com U-20 World Cup Feed
• National Post - Off the Post: U-20 World Cup Blog
• CBC | FIFA U-20 World Cup 2007 News
• CBC | Planet Soccer
• Blog: Nigel Reed FIFA U-20
• Blog: John F. Molinaro FIFA U-20
• Blog: Craig Forrest FIFA U-20
• FIFA U-20 World Cup Photos on Flickr

Enjoy!

Thanks to the folks at BerryReview.com for their great review of Viigo!
The Virtual Reach Team

Review: Viigo the free BlackBerry RSS Reader From BlackBerryCool & Virtualreach

Viigo BlackBerryCool To Go RSS reader
Rating 9/10
Link: http://www.virtualreach.com/bbcool2go.htm
Cost: COMPLETELY FREE

This program used to be called Newsclip by VirtualReach but recently it has partnered with the wonderful guys at BlackBerryCool.com to provide the software for free. I just love the day when a product that I used to pay $30 a year for is now provided for free. The only thing that has been changed from Newsclip when they changed to Viigo is the green home screen icon and the ugly green borders on the application but this program shines even with the ugly aesthetics.

Viigo is a wonderful free offline RSS reader. When you first download the application from the link above you will have some default RSS feeds on your BlackBerry. You can add and remove RSS feeds from the home screen of the application. They also provide a pretty comprehensive listing on RSS feeds you can choose from if you select add from list. (Sadly my blog is not included in the list).

Now to get into what makes the program shine. In the options you will find a setting letting you select how many RSS items the software should have stored at a time. The default is 250 but you can change that to 1000 by clicking on that box and typing 1000 out on the keyboard. The software auto-configures your connection but if it is incorrect change it in the settings. You then need to change if you want the software to autoupdate every selected hours or to only update manually. This is a great feature if you are on a limited data plan. You can also set if you want the software to handle rich text and download images.

The RSS reader is great once it starts downloading the feeds every two hours. The reading pane takes advantage of the BlackBerrys scroll wheel to control what you are reading. I wish they customized the software to let you hit the Spacebar to scroll down in an item but as of now you can hit “N” to go to the next item and “B” to go to the previous. You also have the ability to send the article link by email from your address book. The only downside of that is that it only lets you email the first email you have on file for each contact, even if you select another email address. They just added new functionality to be able to add the item to your del.icio.us account.

Other added features of Viigo include tracking packages (Excluding UPS) by just entering in the tracking number. They provide this service through simpletracking.com. You can get to that feature if you click add a channel in the main menu and then click on services>track a package. They also let you create an RSS feed from search terms, an opml file or even a technorati search channel.

Last of all VirtualReach offers you the ability to manage your rss subscriptions from their website in a section called myViigo where you can add and remove feeds and edit them. Suprizingly the BlackBerry interface is much more powerful than the web interface in this regard.

In conclusion this is a great piece of software that I would have advocated even if it cost 30$ a year but now that it is free I urge you to go out to the link above and install this wonderful contribution from both BlackBerryCool and VirtualReach.

Technorati is an amazing resource for Viigo users because it is extremely easy to subscribe to customized search feeds via Viigo’s new “Add Channel” tool. We’ve built two ways to find stuff using Technorati and Viigo. One way is to search for feeds using the “Search for Blogs” tool in the Add Channel tool.

In this post I want to explore in more detail how you can create customized search feeds that constantly search for and return results for a particular search term, making it dead easy to find out what is being talked about the topics you care about in the blogosphere. You can, for example, create a search feed for your company, or your products, or your competitors products as a tool for competitive market intelligence. Or you can create a Technorati search feed for your favourite sports team, or your favourite celebrity, or anything you want.

First, open up the Add Channel tool from the Viigo channel manager screen:

Then Select Blogs->Technorati->Create a Search Channel:

This will present you with a dialog where you can enter search keywords for the topic you’re interested. In this example, I’ve entered “viigo” to see what people are saying on the blogosphere about our favourite mobile content tool:

Click OK, and Viigo contacts Technorati and subscribes you to a feed on the topic of your choice. In our case, we get to see what people are saying about Viigo!

Its easy and convenient to create RSS search feeds with Viigo and Technorati.

Thanks to raanan.com for their great review of Viigo.

Last night I clicked over from GoogleReader, where I was catching up on some of my RSS feeds, notably blackberrycool.com, when I saw this promo on blackberrycool.com for ‘blackberrycool to go”:

Now I tend to try out at least one or two downloadble mobile apps a week, so i clicked through, put in my email and did a quick OTA (over-the-air) install on my blackberry 8700c. Not knowing exactly what it would look like, I was surprised and happy to see a very light-weight, fast RSS reader powered by a product called Viigo. (The blackberrycool version seems identical to the regular product - just a few extra pre loaded mobile oriented feeds)

So a quick review:

- ease of use: A+

- layout/format: A-. It supports images, and even displays Feedburner feedflares, but they aren’t really active

- connectivity: A. It downloads in the background so off-line use isn’t that bad. It doesn’t pull down images in the background, but other than that it feels snappy.

- RSS support: A-. Here is the funny part. It worked with EVERY feed I tried except when I tried to pull my own raanan.com RSS feed. My suspicion is that it doesn’t like the redirect I do from raanan.com/feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/raanan. I use Steve Smith’s wordpress feedburner plugin which is great, but maybe Viigo can’t handle that. (UPDATE #1: Feedburner actually “adopted” this plugin a few days ago - props to the feedburner team for doing so. So I updated the plugin but still having the same problem. Need to do a bit more testing to see what the issue is.)

Extras: A. It has delicious support built in ( very cool ! ). It also has a “full article” mode which strips out most of everything and pulls the full page — it’s somewhat useful. (UPDATE #2: Via the Viigo web account manager, you can not only import OPML, you can import your bloglines, and your MyYahoo setup )

Overall: A-. Definitely using this over the WAP/i-google mobile googlereader widget, which is what I was using up until now.

I posted earlier about going 100% mobile, and now I’m one step closer with this RSS reader. I’ve also been testing a killer mobile IM client that I will post about when it’s out of private alpha mode.

One of the latest toys we’re showing off in Viigo is our “Add Channel” tool; something we affectionately call the “Discovery component” and/or “Channel Library” internally. Rebranding Newsclip to Viigo was not just a name change; we have very good reasons for taking this path, and the discovery component provides both a) a lot of power for users to find compelling content and services and b) gives some pretty good hints to where we’re heading with Viigo in the longer term.

The “Add Channel” tool is far more powerful than the old “Add Feed From List” tool that exists in Newsclip. For techies you’ll be pleased to know that the new control is a full and complete OPML browser. You can enter the internet address of any OPML file you want, and if it contains links to other OPML files, you can follow them. Our own home page for “Add Channel” is an OPML file with links that we’ll be constantly updating and improving over time.

If you don’t know what OPML is, don’t worry; it’s not really important. What IS important is that the new technology provides a lot of power to you, and a lot of flexibility to us to manage, maintain and upgrade the content discovery resources over time. Try navigating around inside the “Add Channel” tool and you’ll be able to see it first-hand.

Most important, however, is the fact that the “Add Channel” tool is not only convenient lists of popular RSS feeds from all over the Internet… it also contains powerful tools for doing searches (for anything you want), tracking packages, and finding local content.

Here’s a quick guided tour of some of the more powerful (and cool!) features:

· Add your own channelàAdd OPML - Enter any OPML URL, which populates the screen with all of the feeds and/or links from that OPML file, allowing you to browse and subscribe. This is really powerful if you use a web-based RSS aggregator that publishes your OPML subscription list.

· Add your own channelàAdd RSS – If you know the exact RSS/Atom URL that you want to subscribe to (or if you have it copied into the device’s clipboard) you can enter and/or paste it here.

· Add your own channelàAdd from Web Page – Our personal favourite, just enter the web URL of any known web site (like cbc.ca) and the service will search for any available RSS/Atom feeds on that page, return them as an OPML and allow you to subscribe to any or all of them.

· Add your own channel àAdd Search Channel – Keep tabs on your favourite topics via RSS… enter some keywords and get a permanent feed that updates whenever new things appear on the ‘net.

· Blogs àTechnorati Search – Search for blogs, or create feeds to search the Technorati archives for items based on keywords. Alternately, browse the a collection of predefined Technorati blog categories for all your editorial needs.

· Services à Track A Package – Enter a tracking number for USPS, DHL or Purolator, and get a feed showing you exactly where your package is (or isn’t).

· Local Events and Weather à Your Local Events – A great example of our discovery scripting tools (and something we want to make big improvements on over time – think: GPS), you can locate a major city center near you to find local happenings and goings-on. Look for a lot more on this front coming soon.

Take advantage of the new “Add Channel” feature in the first release of Viigo!

Virtual Reach Serves up BlackBerry Cool To Go

Today we announced a new partnership with BlackBerry Cool, the foremost authority on all things BlackBerry, to launch BlackBerry Cool To Go.

With BlackBerry Cool To Go, the BlackBerry community now has real time access to all BlackBerry related news, reviews, insights, announcements and buzz from the BlackBerry Cool website, via their BlackBerry portable device. They will also have access to the rich content already delivered by the Viigo mobile platform, including breaking news, sports, weather, stock market updates, entertainment and thousands of other RSS feeds, creating a powerful handheld companion.

Here’s what BlackBerry Cool had to say ….

“With 1 in 5 of all BlackBerry users receiving the news primarily via their BlackBerrys, the Viigo platform gives us a powerful medium for communicating with our readers,” said Douglas Soltys, Editor in Chief of BlackBerry Cool. “What’s most impressive is the speed with which our online blog, both text and images, is delivered and rendered within the application. With the Viigo platform, BlackBerry Cool remains Your Source for Everything BlackBerry.”

But there’s more …

Virtual Reach and BlackBerry Cool will be working together to deliver special feeds from the upcoming Blackberry Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES), live from the show floor, including breaking news, product announcements, sneak previews, and behind the scenes gossip. This will be available not only to delegates, but the entire BlackBerry community via Viigo.

Here’s how you access your feeds…

If you are running NewsClip (i.e. you haven’t yet upgraded to Viigo)

Select Add Feed From List
Open the Virtual Reach Folder
Subscribe to WES Show Buzz, WES Product Annoucements and WES Floor Buzz

If you are running Viigo

Select Add Channel
Open the Virtual Reach Folder
Subscribe to WES Show Buzz, WES Product Annoucements and WES Floor Buzz

Welcome to Viigo!

Today we unveil an exciting new platform called Viigo that will forever change the way information is delivered and consumed on mobile devices. Viigo establishes a new standard, not only in the speed and efficiency with which anyone can mobilize content and services, but also in the quality of the mobile end-user experience.

The Viigo offering has four main elements, all built on a common foundation, and all complementing one another:

·         Viigo Enterprise – aimed at helping companies provide front-line workers with critical information, securely, in the palms of their hands. Employees can access everything from breaking news and alerts, to the full suite of the enterprise’s intranet resources. Viigo is designed to help companies unleash their human network by connecting distributed workers and empowering them with access to corporate data and services that will improve their effectiveness, wherever they are.

·         Viigo Publisher – aimed at helping content providers rapidly mobilize and monetize their offerings. Viigo allows publishers to unleash their content, more easily, efficiently and effectively than ever before possible on mobile devices.

·         Viigo Partner – aimed at helping application and service developers mobilize and monetize their applications more quickly and more compellingly than they ever thought possible. Viigo permits developers to unleash their web services and create fully interactive mobile applications in days, using simple open standards.

·         Viigo Personal – aimed at helping all of us access a rich array of content and services that are an integral part of our day to day lives (corporate or personal). Using the free Viigo service, you can pick and choose from a broad portfolio of useful information (news, entertainment, local events, corporate info, etc.) and fully interactive services (bookings, purchases, etc.), all with a user experience that will rock your world. Go ahead, unleash yourself

Viigo is a dynamic platform that is designed to be constantly evolving.  Over the next few months, watch for exciting new services, coming both from Virtual Reach and from an exciting network of partners. We can’t wait to show you more of what Viigo can do, and to finally reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes here for the past year.

Welcome to a new dawn in mobile.  Welcome to Life Untethered™