Betaworks, Cuban Invest in Real-Time Transformer Superfeedr
Superfeedr, a service that transforms a wide variety of feeds into normalized XMPP or Pubsubhubbub format, announced a seed round of funding from some very high-profile backers this morning. Betaworks, backers of Twitter, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Tumblr and more, and Mark Cuban, have invested in Superfeedr's parent company Notifixious.
Superfeedr offers services to both publishers and subscribers. Current marque users include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed and Posterous. Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux first met Betaworks CEO John Borthwick at our event last month, the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.
Superfeedr is one of a number of real-time as a service providers, related if different competitors include Notify.me and Kaazing.
These services offer developers plug-and-play real-time publishing and subscription, allowing them to instead focus on building the features they can offer the most unique value from. "We do something stupid so you don't have to," is a slogan used on the Superfeedr website.
If there's a downside to using the service it's reliance on a third party for critical syndication functionality. Superfeedr experienced an outage for several hours earlier this month. Genestoux blogged about the problem and eventual solution on the company blog.
Genestoux says he plans to build out hardware and personnel with the backing. These relationships will also facilitate important introductions to potential customers and offer big validation of the Superfeedr service.
Superfeedr is one of ten companies profiled in the case studies section of the forthcoming ReadWriteWeb research report on the state of the real-time web market, which will be published later this month and can be pre-ordered here.
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Thanks Marshall.
Superfeedr is offering really interesting abstraction in what could grow to become a big market overtime. Congratulations to Julien and team!
How does this compare to GNIP?
Hum, I'd have to ask Eric to follow up on that, as I am not fully sure of what they're new strategy is.
Up until a few weeks, I'd have responded that they focus on API caching, which means that they store a lot of API data.
At Superfeedr, we think feed are the ubiquituous API (however they carry probably less value), and we don't store anything, we're really about stream : information passes and disappears :)
Finally, Superfeedr is actually providing services to GNIP, but, again, I'll let Eric complete that.