Back in June, Toronto-based Viigo released a private beta of its muscled-up RSS-reader for BlackBerry phones that looked poised to take a bite out of Yahoo Go 3.0. Viigo 3.0 beta took Viigo's core RSS newsreader and made it one meta-channel of many. Alongside a proliferation of customizable news feeds there would be weather, entertainment, sports, finance, travel information, and so on. Yet the design of Viigo 3.0 beta was a mere blueprint, a placeholder of what's to come with very limited working features.
(Credit:
Viigo)
At CTIA Wireless in San Francisco (full CNET coverage) on Friday, Viigo updated and opened its beta to the public, adding back-end and front-end changes that nudge the gap between Viigo 3.0 beta and its more successful Yahoo competitor. In addition to shrinking the memory footprint, Viigo has added the ability to add or remove services from the home screen. This is good news for folks outside of Canada who had previously been forced to live with the channel on Canadian sports. Viigo hints that with the next release, users might be able to not just add or subtract, but reorder information channels how they wish.
Fleshed-out information channels are also on the ascendancy, most notably the travel, finance, elections, and sports categories. Viigo's flight-tracking engine is now firmly in place, letting you keep tabs on flight status and create itineraries for Viigo to track. This travel function is not currently available from Yahoo Go, and could give Viigo an edge with some users.
Sports coverage has also grown to include a single sports channel that lets fans gather together stats feeds for each sport; in finance news, economic types can track industry leaders by market sector and monitor exchange rates. With a finger on North America's political pulse, Viigo has also bulked up coverage for the upcoming U.S. and Canadian elections.
There's still work to do before Viigo can catch Yahoo Go's breadth of services, but its differentiation in data types and sources, the organizational interface, and the ability to intuitively customize the channels and screen can only do Viigo good. At this point, Viigo needs to give its following greater control over filtering and manipulating data from the channels and more operating systems--iPhone and Symbian come to mind.
The blow-by-blow beta updates are encouraging reminders of Viigo's presence, but are beginning to wear thin. Let's hope that the next release of Viigo 3.0 is a complete one, and robust enough to withstand a thorough evaluation.
Until then, Blackberry users can try out Viigo's latest beta app by pointing the mobile browser to http://beta.getviigo.com. Windows Mobile users can also download Viigo, though that version isn't as advanced.
Viigo's flagship RSS reader is now only one data destination of many.
(Credit: Viigo)Another Yahoo department has cause for concern. Up until last week, Yahoo Go was top dog in the mobile widget arena, pulling everything from weather, news, and finance to local listings, Flickr photos, and search onto Yahoo Go 3.0 beta, the company's rich application for smartphones. But Viigo 3.0 beta has added many of the same elements to what is essentially a faster-loading and more visually straightforward wrapper.
I've sung Viigo's praises when it was flexing new-found muscle as a superb RSS reader for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The new beta, released June 19, still retains its RSS-fetching core, but news is now one tab of nine. Like Yahoo Go, Viigo 3.0 beta will report on sports scores, weather, entertainment, stocks, travel, and local listings.
The resemblance to Yahoo Go's more famous 3.0 beta has not been lost on Viigo CEO Mark Ruddock, who stated in an interview with CNET Download.com that the similarities between the two content programs are more coincidental duplication than deliberate emulation.
"[Viigo's] services reflect the services we believe will initially be the most interesting," Ruddock said. While it's true that Viigo will necessarily have to mirror much of Yahoo's content in order to make it as the "everything" source for mobile data, Viigo's engineers will have to work hard to introduce features that surpass its greatest rivals. "It's the way we will compete with anyone in this space," he added.
Viigo's weather-reading channel, in cahoots with Accuweather.
(Credit: Viigo)
More to come
Here's Viigo's vision. First, there's filling in the features laid out in this first beta build, many of which are mere placeholders marked by screenshots of sneak previews. Next come back-end changes that will mash up content for richly integrated data on a results screen. And as always, there's gaining new partnerships with content providers, among them a major music label with whom Viigo would like to offer band and concert information and audio tracks and podcasts. Opening up an XML-based development platform in Q1 is expected to also populate Viigo with content and new functionality.
Until then, Viigo 3.0 beta is in good shape for forging ahead and quite possibly for besting Yahoo Go. The product isn't yet where it ought to be, admits CEO Ruddock. The old RSS mainstay cries out for a visual overhaul to match the new look; the full feature set has yet to be completed; and the home screen demands customization--just ask users wondering why Canadian football deserves to be the third-most valued channel on their reader. That slot obviously belongs to the SPL.
Got a few minutes to kill? Sure, you could flip through your tunes, but when the same songs get old, and when you tire of your headphones winding from your ears like some extraterrestrial umbilical cord, check out the worlds of communication, learning, and game-playing applications to discover beyond the beats. Or, dare we say, while listening to them. Check out your burgeoning options for cell phone entertainment in the slide show.
If you think of your typical RSS reader or widget as a stream, Viigo is a river delta.
Unlike many services that feed headline news from a from a preselected widget or manually-entered URL, Viigo--available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile--gathers news channels into a dedicated client that looks great on your phone. With some saving and functions similar to e-mail, and an extensive library of additional news sources, the free application is the most complete RSS-reading environment for smartphones I've seen so far. Tune in to the video below to get a taste of how Viigo can simplify and extend your collection of mobile feeds. An unlimited data plan, by the way, is a must.
Mobile app publishers are obsessed with creating the fast, flawless mechanism to deliver content to mobile phones. That's great news for users, whose choices for accessing content through apps, browsers, or feed readers grow daily. Viigo for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 is a new contender. See the screenshot-by-screenshot blow in this Viigo slide show.
Incidentally, I've used Ilium Screen Capture (review) to nab my images. It's a great little program for Windows Mobile.
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