ReadWriteWeb

Today IBM announced several enhancements to its SmartCloud computing services collection, focusing on disaster recovery and continuity features. The new services include:

• IBM SmartCloud Archive, specifically designed for eDiscovery and other regulatory requirements for records storage,
• IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, and
• IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup enhancements to integrate the above two services in the backup stream and in automated backups.

RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

My6Sense, the personalized recommendation engine for both iOS and Android, comes to the desktop today with a Chrome extension that brings the my6sense experience to Twitter.com. What exactly is the my6sense experience? my6sense uses what it calls "digital intuition" to determine what parts of your stream, whether Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz or RSS feed, are most relevant to your interests.

We met up with Louis Gray and my6sense CEO Barak Hachamov last month to take a tour of the new product and discuss the company's plans for personalizing the Web.

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS Readers and start pages were all the rage. Over 2010, though, more people used tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Flipboard, LazyWeb, Feedly and TweetDeck, to track news.

Nowadays I'm more likely to find stories to read via a vertical aggregator (the media-focused Mediagazer is my current favorite) and save them to Instapaper for later reading via my iPhone or iPad. I still use Google Reader, but in all honesty I now use it more to scan than to read.

Using algorithms to give personalized recommendations is hard. A lot of online services try to leverage their users' social graphs to determine the stories, books, songs or movies that are potentially of interest to them. Given that your own interests can be quite different from those of your friends, though, these systems are often limited. my6sense, on the other hand builds a personalized and constantly evolving profile for all of its users and provides recommendations purely based on what its algorithm thinks is most likely to be interesting to you. Starting today, Android users will be able to find the most interesting items in their RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds with the help of My6Sense.

Apple acquired the military-technology spin-off, mobile personal assistant app called SIRI this Spring, but SIRI isn't the only consumer startup cut from the cloth of the $200 million DARPA investment in an artificial intelligence project called CALO.

The next SRI/CALO app to launch may be TrapIt, a news feed reading and recommendation service designed to act as a "cognitive prosthetic" to "adapt to unexpected events" in situations of "intense information overload". The US Navy has used the core technology TrapIt is based on to parse through huge quantities of information for what's most relevant. Soon you'll be able to use it to find the best news about your obscure interests, in the web's otherwise overwhelming ocean of Justin Bieber references. The spin-off company has lots of high-profile backing (including Li Ka-shing), will launch later this or early next year and we've got the first screenshots below.

Personalized news recommendations on the go - that's the dream of many an online news nerd and the startups that would serve them. One strong entrant into this field is My6Sense, a well-designed, venture-backed, Israeli company that uses implicit behavioral data from users to recommend the most relevant content in your personal river of news.

It's a good service, and one you're likely to hear a lot more about soon. The company will announce this week that it has hired Louis Gray, a self-made Silicon Valley internet celebrity and startup consultant, as its VP of Marketing and first US employee.

My6sense just announced a new version of its iPhone application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature learns from the user's implicit and explicit actions and builds a model of what is interesting to the individual user. Mytweetsense works best for tweets that include links. The app's features are clearly geared towards these kind of tweets and include previews for links, videos and images.

Google Reader offers a nifty mobile interface, and apps like Byline (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire (iTunes link) are well-designed native apps that allow iPhone users to keep up with their feeds. But slogging through a few hundred subscriptions on the iPhone's small screen can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. My6Sense, which launched the first beta of its web-based mobile feed reader last December, is now finally ready to release its native iPhone app. Thanks to the app's ability to organize your feeds according to a personalized recommendation system that automatically learns from your preferences as you browse through your feeds, keeping up with hundreds of feeds on the iPhone is now easier than ever before.