Dear Daily Update users, I spent Tuesday through Thursday at PCExpo in New York City, in order to promote News Clipper with Binary Research International (BRI). Overall, I think it was a great success. In case you didn't know the situation, I have created a company called Spinnaker Software. Spinnaker does all the software development for News Clipper, and BRI does all the sales, marketing, and distribution. It's a nice collaboration that allows us both to specialize in what we are good at. Anyway, BRI had purchased a booth for PCExpo in order to promote News Clipper along with 5 other products. (See http://www.binaryresearch.net for a description of them.) BRI is most famous for Ghost, which was recently sold to Symantec. Since then BRI has restructured themselves to be marketers and distributors of software. I spent all of last weekend getting News Clipper "ready for prime time". Monday I flew to New York, and Monday night I worked on the 5 minute presentation that I would give people when they walked up to the booth. You can view that presentation at http://newsclipper.binaryresearch.net/presentations/pcexpo99/ I'll try to move it to the main News Clipper website soon. On Wednesday and Thursday I gave 15-20 minute formal presentations to people who were willing to have a seat and listen to me. Those went really well, especially the one on the last day. Basically, I would do the normal presentation, then I would use News Clipper on one of their own web pages. This demo was really effective because it showed how easy it was to add dynamic content to *their* web pages. Besides making connections with potential customers, I learned a lot about the market. A number of people are hoping to use News Clipper to create custom news sites by filtering the news from numerous sites on the Internet, extracting only those that are relevant to them. Others want to use News Clipper to create a daily newsletter. People behind firewalls want to bring content inside the firewall. Some people want the content automatically shipped to their pager or cellular phone. Others want to collect data from the web and store it in a database, or take it from a database and publish it on the web. Finally, I got the best filter idea yet from BRI's Latin America distributor: automatically translate grabbed data to other languages. I also got a chance to meet the Binary Research personnel, as well as representatives from other companies working with BRI as I am. The BRI staff is very professional, and do what they do extremely well. In talking to other people who know them, I've found that they have developed this reputation over time. I also found the other developers like me to be competent and nice to boot. :) Each of the products that BRI is currently selling is innovative and interesting. I'm glad to be in such company. _________________________________________________________________________ In the next couple of weeks I'll be working on packaging up the trial, personal, and corporate versions of the software for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Oh yeah, I *gotta* do the translation filter. That would be one cool filter. :) The feedback I got means that the next actions items are: - Ability to cache linked-to information. (This will bring the news articles that URLs point to inside firewalls.) - Write an output handler that can handle databases - Write an input handler that can handle databases - Write an output handler that sends the data to cellular phones, or Palm Pilots. - Allow multiple inputs so that people can merge them: <input name=in1> <filter name=filt1> <input name=in2> <filter name=filt2> <merge> <filter name=filt3> <output name=array> (This will make integration of links easier.) If you want to contribute to this effort, I would be happy to give you a copy of the commercial version. Later, as the software becomes more well-known, I will be hiring News Clipper experts to help with software development and related services. Let me know if you're interested. Best regards, David _________________________________________________________________________ David Coppit - Graduate Student [EMAIL PROTECTED] The University of Virginia http://coppit.org/ "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain." There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything." - If you would like to unsubscribe from this mailing list send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe newsclipperlist YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS" (without the quotes) or use the form provided at http://www.NewsClipper.com/TechSup.htm#MailingList.
