News feed aggregator NewsGator Technologies has struck new partnerships to expand its enterprise sales and tie its online service with other desktop newsreaders.
NewsGator on Wednesday announced a co-marketing agreement with Six Apart Ltd., one of the leading makers of Weblog software, and integration of subscription information from its Web-based aggregation service with FeedDemon, a leading Windows desktop reader.
The deal with San Mateo, Calif.-based Six Apart reflects both companies' increasing focus on selling to enterprise customers, who often want a tool for consuming feeds as well as one to create blogs.
"We'll come in and definitely be the right way to read feeds, but inevitably we're asked about publishing as well," said Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's founder and chief technology officer.
The partnership allows NewsGator to resell the Movable Type blog software and allows Six Apart to offer NewsGator for Outlook, a newsreader for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds that plugs into Microsoft Corp.'s e-mail client, he said.
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Along with marketing, the two companies are planning joint development work, but Reinacker said it's too early to discuss specific projects. Denver-based NewsGator within the next week or so will release a plug-in that lets users of NewsGator's Outlook tool publish directly into Movable Type and Six Apart's hosted blog service, TypePad.
On the desktop front, FeedDemon has added support for users to synchronize their RSS subscriptions from NewsGator Online Services with the desktop newsreader.
In January, NewsGator launched NewsGator Online Services as a paid, Web-based service complementing its Outlook aggregator and began to provide synchronization between them. NewsGator Online Services starts at $5.95 a month and, along with Web access to feed subscriptions, provides feed reading on mobile devices, televisions and other POP e-mail clients.
Reinacker said NewsGator is interested in connecting with other newsreaders, even though some view NewsGator's Outlook aggregator as a competitor to the desktop applications. Instead, the desktop readers also expose users to NewsGator Online Services.
"Our markets overlap, but it's not like we're selling head-to-head constantly," Reinacker said. "The people wanting to use a standalone product on desktop, they have the same needs as [our] Outlook users and want to be able to synchronize."
The NewsGator support is FeedDemon's second connection into an online feed aggregation service in as many days. On Tuesday, Bloglines announced FeedDemon as one of three desktop aggregators tying into its service.
FeedDemon's developer, Nick Bradbury of Bradbury Software LLC, wrote on his blog Wednesday that both integration efforts are similar and that they are available in the latest FeedDemon 1.5 beta. He didn't say when a full version of FeedDemon 1.5 would be released and could not be reached for comment.
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In a third partnership, NewsGator also announced that it is adding news-search feeds and data from Moreover Technologies Inc. to both its online service and Outlook aggregator. The terms of that deal were not disclosed.
Last week, Moreover joined the nascent trend of RSS advertising. The San Francisco-based company made available a set of free RSS feeds that aggregate news into various categories—and also include contextual ads from Kanoodle.com Inc.
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