General

Here at Ilium Software, we now have three RSS feeds: the one for this blog, the one for our News Page , and the one for our ListPro List Exchange. These work great in desktop RSS aggregators like NewsGator, FeedDemon, or in Windows Mobile software like our own NewsBreak.

I’m not much of an early-adopter. I bought my car as soon as it was introduced because I needed a car, I bought my shiny Apple iMac Core Duo because a refurbished one went on sale for a good price, and I bought my first PDA because I was going through that age where I wanted to buy everything that was a gadget. These things were coincidences; I didn’t intentionally jump on the bandwagon while it was still a skateboard, I just happened to step on it and didn’t fall off.

RSS aggregators confuse me, because they take content from a website and shove it into one little new and special place that still makes me open up the original website in a browser. Most websites don’t post entire articles to their feeds, so why not just go to the site and read the whole thing? (Incidentally, I don’t like RSS aggregators on the desktop, but on a PDA? I’m all for packing information into a compact central place.)

That changed when I discovered Google’s Personalized Homepage. The idea is similar to portals such as My Yahoo!, where all kinds of stuff like weather, news, photos, stock quotes get aggregated onto one page you can set as your browser homepage. It’s been around for a while, and jumped out of Beta less than a while ago, but now is as good a time as any to mention it to anyone who wants to try out RSS without investing in a complete standalone program.

You get a simple website that shows news headlines from various websites (and other information), in classic Google bare-bones style, and you can add anything you want to it. It’s right in your browser, something you already use all the time.

That said, our RSS feeds go great with it. You can click on the following links to add them right away:

Blog:

News:

List Exchange:

You don’t even need a Google account to use these – it can work with cookies in your browser to recognize you when you go back to the Google homepage. Of course, My Yahoo! has become a similar service, and they basically offer the same features with a Yahoo! flavor. I’m not promoting Google for any reason besides the fact that I like them and I know about them. Google Homepage, NewsGator, Yahoo – similar ideas, different flair.

I want to encourage you (the user) to subscribe to our RSS feeds somehow, because they help us tell you interesting and important things without having to send out mass-emails. When you subscribe to a news feed, you are in control. If a company sends out mass emails, they have to figure out how to avoid being marked as a spammer or blacklisted for putting out 10,000 emails in one day, and it’s often hard for you – the user – to control whether or not you get the email.

Imagine: instead of hoping that an upgrade email that we send out makes it through the muddy waters of the internet and through spam filters, you simply open your browser and right there, “Ilium Software announces a new program that will do everything for you!”. We’re not there yet, but if you subscribe, you’ll find out when we are.

When Pocket PC Magazine first suggested the idea of building a huge CD filled with the winners of their annual software awards, and then giving it a $300 price tag, I’ll admit…I was skeptical. I just couldn’t envision a person shelling out that much money for a collection of PDA software. Still, the folks at Pocket PC magazine have always been good partners so we agreed to give it a shot.

As it turns out there are a lot of people out there who are happy to pay a high price to get all the best. I imagine that this is a pretty handy option for on-the-go business types who don’t have time to wade through the stacks of product at Handango or who don’t want to try 20 programs to find the best one.

This is a great example of something I’ve learned working at Ilium Software. It is extremely difficult to predict what people want and will pay for. Things that get lots of buzz and everyone clamors for end up with lackluster sales. Things that no one was really excited about end up being best sellers. In the end it is often just as important to go with a product that feels right as it is to listen to the ‘hard data’ you get back about an idea.

And in the end, if you really believe in something, you just need to take the idea and run with it. Sometimes you’ll flop and sometimes you’ll soar, but until you get that idea out there you’ll never know if it can succeed.

Mobility Site recently covered the CD here . Pocket PC and Smartphone Magazine actually started talking about the latest version back in April but the official announcements just went out to the mobile community in the last week.

The 2006 edition of Pocket PC Magazine’s Best of Everything CD is available at: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/CD/

Some people may not know it but we have a great mobile version of our website (in fact we’re only officially announcing it this week). The thing that I like best is the mobile List Exchange. You can get access to any of the 600+ lists on the exchange from your Pocket PC or Smartphone, even performing searches and downloading whichever lists you need. I thought of it again over the weekend because my friends and I were arguing about which season finale of Deep Space 9 had that great battle with Klingons and the Jem’Hadar (it was Season 5 if you’re interested…yeah, this is the kind of thing we argue about) and we ended up betting on it. I won the bet and proved it by pulling the DS9 episode guide down from the list exchange onto my e800 via the coffee shop’s wireless network. Woo-hoo! Free coffee for me. 🙂

If you want to check out the List Exchange on your mobile device just visit http://mobile.iliumsoft.com and pick the List Exchange link at the bottom of the page.

Today we released our newest online service, PassBuilder.com. It’s a free password generator program that can create unique passwords based on the different criteria that users choose. It’s really great – it lets people pick lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. They can even choose to get a memory aid when they generate their password – which is important these days, when nobody has just one password to remember! I admit, for some things that I need a password for on my home computer, I still use jumbled versions of my cats’ names and book titles. Maybe now that PassBuilder is out, I’ll go home tonight and fix some of those passwords online!

Another great thing about this new service is that it works with or without JavaScript enabled in your browser, and it works great on mobile devices too. So now, wherever anyone goes, they can visit PassBuilder and create new passwords at the drop of a hat.