Viigo Blog

We’ve been pretty busy behind the scenes at Virtual Reach, with lots of product improvements and evolutions in the pipe. To get the ball rolling, we decided to freshen our Feed Library with lots of new useful feeds for people to use on the go, which you can browse here using the cool Grazr OPML browser.

(Click the Grazr Button to browse our Feed Library)

You can access this list from Newsclip by choosing the "Add Feeds From List" menu item on the main Newsclip screen.

We’ve really focused on getting 1-click access to content that is relevant to individuals - including Feeds for local weather, local events, sports teams, and finance.

We’ve just launched a completely overhauled look and feel for Virtual Reach - including a new logo and a brand new web site which you can check out here. Its definitely a better look for us, and we’re pretty proud of it. Its also a small sign of bigger things to come in the near future.

The corporate logo is new, as is the logo for our flagship product Newsclip. A new product build will be released soon to celebrate the new look.

Enjoy!

Its been a while since I made a post. Trust me - its not from lack of activity on the Virtual Reach side. On the contrary, we have some very exciting initiatives in the pipe that are keeping us pretty busy. Stay tuned….

Not too long ago I went to London England to attend the Symbian Smarphone show. Here’s a picture to prove it:

While I don’t really feel like this revolutionized my perspective on the mobile industry for me, it was good to escape my pretty BlackBerry-centric view of the universe (being a former RIM employee) and witness first-hand some of the excitement (and rhetoric :) around the Symbian platform.

Symbian isn’t as prolific here in North America as it is in Europe, but I certainly came away with the impression that it will be.

Just a quick note to let people now that our VP Business Development, Rob Belliveau, is in Los Angeles at CTIA Wireless. If you’re in LA and looking at touching base with us, drop us a line at contact at virtualreach dot com and we’ll try to make the connection.

I just downloaded Windows Live Writer, and I’m giving it a test drive with this Blog post. I had read a few reviews of WLW, most of which were pretty negative… but I’m pretty impressed. I’ve tried a few of these “heavy client” blog posting tools, but I’ve never been inspired enough to start using one.

Windows Live Writer may be the tool that puts it over the top for me.

Today we launched a new version of Newsclip (2.2.14) that has support for posting articles to Yahoo!’s del.icio.us service social bookmarking service. I’m already a big user of this feature just from the testing we’ve been doing, and I hope our customers like it as well. I used to email myself things I wanted to remember from Newsclip, but now I post them to del.icio.us and check them out later (especially things like video clips that you find in Digg, but just can’t see them on your device).

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

One of the latest features we added to Newsclip was a PC-based browser interface for managing your RSS feeds. Its not a web-based RSS reader: we’re not going there. But it is an excellent way to set up the RSS feeds from a browser so you don’t need to do it from your mobile device. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to feeds you find on the Internet via the browser, and they sychronize directly to your mobile device.

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.

I just found three really interesting blogs that are right up our alley at VR:

• LifeBlog
• gotomobile
• m-trends

What I like the most about them is the focus on usability in mobile, something pretty dear to my heart. Usability is so often overlooked, and is often the single most important deciding factor in the success (or lack of success) of a mobile service.

I’ll definitely be digging deeper into these three great resources.

One thing that immediately caught my attention was the references to winksite and  the use of qr_codes on LifeBlog. I knew of these things, but its time to do more reading, I think.

These are definitely going in my blogroll too!

I’ve been away for a week doing the vacation thing; when I came back I was pleased to find out that Mark Evans and Mark Goldberg had been posting nice things about us (here and here). Thanks Mark and Mark!

If you want to subscribe to either of their Blogs in your Newsclip account, use the following links:

Mark Evans
Mark Goldberg

I confess I’m a heavy Newsclip user on a BlackBerry 8700. Here are some of the QWERTY keyboard shortcuts that I find useful:

In the list of feeds:

• T, B - Go to the top, bottom of the list
• U - go to the next feed containing unread articles
• ENTER - Open an article

In a list of articles:

• T, B - Go to the top, bottom of the list
• SPACE - Page through the list
• N, P - Go to next, previous feed
• ENTER - Open an article

In an article:

• SPACE - Page down
• N, P - Go to next, previous article

A complete list of shortcuts is available in our support section for both QWERTY and SureType BlackBerry keyboards.