Stanford’s new on-campus venture fund, SSE Ventures, has made its first investment. The company, Diffbot, offers a RSS reader and a tool called Feedbeater that creates RSS feeds for web pages that don’t already have them.
Feedbeater monitors unstructured web pages for new content, filters out unimportant stuff like comments, advertisements, etc., and pushes that new content in a structured way to a RSS feed.
Great idea, but it’s been done over and over and over again, without much success.
Maybe the company has some other product ideas around the core content extraction technology they’ve developed. Otherwise, this thing is a goner.
An overview demo video is here.
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dapper
yes. one of the examples linked above.
Haha… thanks to ‘too much’ and Marshall, I typed dapper.com instead of diffbot.com. Anyway, Diffbot seems like a good practice ground for the uni students:) so I hope that it’ll have enough number of supporters to keep it going
I love Dapper and use it every day! Just, fwiw!
not the next google for sure. i expected bigger for their first investment.
I just gave the diffbot reader a try and it seems there is something a little different here than what’s been mentioned. I was able to upload all my bookmarks and it started automatically extracting content from them, without having to do any “feed building” step.
I think you’ve under estImated , just saying
As Doris said, Diffbot seems to extract content from site you bookmark. It intelligently pulls in only fresh content. Seems promising, not sure we’ve seen all that Diffbot can do
feedbeater is a proof of concept application we’ve pushed out that makes use of our content extractor.
our bookmarking reader plugin is still under development, but it makes syndication accessible to non traditional feed users. we hope to use data we gather from feedbeater to improve our document analysis algorithms which in turn will improve our reader application.
we were hoping the techcrunch community could help us out by using feedbeater on some of their non-rss sites, since it’s relatively easy to use (it just makes use of our api over at diffbot)
‘Otherwise, this thing is a goner.’
lol!
If Stanford is going to act as a “parent” in nurturing and raising ventures like this, why didn’t anyone there think to call the effort “Stanford and Sons?”
Diffbots reader is not an RSS reader, it’s an HTML reader. big difference
diffbot is an amazing product. dapper can’t do crap! i have to say this is not a “goner” like that idiot up there said. this is going to make the internet easier and save our time. so you write like a 2nd grader… get a life.