Tom Morris

Adam emailed me earlier with the announcement, which has already rippled through the blogosphere (Mathew Ingram, Mashable, Alex Barnett, John Tropea).

Grazr has taken $1.5m in Series A funding, and Dan Bricklin is joining the board. Adam's blog has the full details.

They are also rolling out some product improvements - including a hosting service for OPML files and GrazrScript. You can sign up, and you get a new button for "My Files". When you choose to upload a file, it takes various file formats - "OPML, RSS, RDF, Atom". Possible SemWeb integration coming?

The file upload function certainly will be useful for people without hosting accounts or who don't want to use outline hosts like iJot, OPML Workstation and the OPML Editor. It'll be interesting to see if they make an API available for upload - I can certainly see value in a "Clone My OPML" service for instance.

There is also the promise of improvements to GrazrScript, a tool which is so ripe for building things with - I've got a few little projects that I may be using it for. One of the things that is coming is making it more procedural. Mike has more.

Where Grazr fits in to the ecosystem is interesting - it's sort of what I was saying yesterday about attention. It's not an end user product, it's a tool to make the lives of geeks easier.

I always find it sad to hear marketing people saying "well, when will my mum be able to use it?" That's not the point. My mum doesn't need to know what an RDBMS is - but there is not a clear delineation between the übergeeks and the newbies. There is a clear set of people between the people who are afraid of computers and the people building web servers out of yoghurt pots.

Tools to make their lives easier are a vital part of the software ecosystem. Otherwise, it'll just be MySpace at the one end and Oracle at the other.

Tags: grazr, opml, venture capital, rss, grazrscript

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Josh Catone has a post at Read/Write Web discussing the current round of IPTV startups - Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo - and two smaller deals, ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube.

And it's all totally irrelevant. What do these services give me that a copy of QuickTime and an MPEG file don't? I'm struggling to see what the hype is all about. These companies will be as relevant in five years time as RealPlayer is today. It would only take the BBC and a few other large news organisations to switch to progressive downloaded FLV and the whole enterprise would fall apart.

By the time the TV companies and movie studios realise the situation they are in, most of the likely target audience for a competent video download service will already have mastered downloading their shows from BitTorrent as the geeks already do.

Joost et al. are doing for video on the Internet what Rhapsody and Napster are currently doing for music on the Internet - absolutely nothing at all. They seem somewhat comforting for the broadcasters and content producers because they're not threatening to their current business model. Which distracts from the fact that the Internet in and of itself completely destroys their business model.

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Sony have mapped out their future. And it's the same dull arse future as everyone else is selling. It sounds more like another bloody MySpace clone than anyone actually building good games. I'm fed up of companies saying "yes, we're building Dynamic Social Network Whizziness in to our product" and thinking that basically out-sourcing the content production to their users is going to make up for their dismal platform.

Sorry, but how exactly is high definition advertising exciting for me? The prospect of hanging out in a piss-poor social network filled to the brim with adverts and gimmicky crap makes me want to buy a PS3 even less and throw up even more. Whatever next? Shall we just deliver empty newspapers to people and start telling them "it's all about user-generated content!"

These guys have lost it. Perhaps they are planning to launch a MySpace clone or a ringtones website next. Anything to save them from the terrible fate of having to actually publish some decent games.

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