Grade A Entrepreneurs

Some of you asked me about Notifixio.us – which I installed about two weeks ago.

This is a product created by young French entrepreneur, Julien Genestoux. He has a double master in business (French business school – ESSEC 2006) and Computer Sciences (Illinois Institute of Technology), has already created one successful company (Jobetudiant.net ) and started Notifixio.us in the US a few months ago.

By placing Notifixio.us on your site/blog, you offer your visitors the ability to be alerted in real time on any thing new happening of your site. They click on the Notifixio.us widget, subscribe and select the channel through which they want to be alerted. So far, the channels that are implemented include email, text messaging, Jabber, Google Talk, AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ. The list of potential available channels is most likely to grow as the Notifixio.us platform offers an API enabling external developers to create custom channels (Julien told me that the iPhone app. is coming, as well as some Desktop Air Clients and a “digest channel” sending an email once a day with all the notifications you received).

When visitors subscribe, they are able to filter the type of notifications they want to receive based on a variety of criteria including keywords, languages, and later: authors, geo-localisation, time, etc.  or any metadata available within the selected content.

The benefits of using Notifixio.us are clear:

In addition to being able to choose different channels depending on the information source, users free themselves from their crowded RSS readers!  The real-time factor is as well very important, as it encourages real-time interaction with a site. People leave fewer comments on older stories, even they are only one week old.

For content providers, the advantage over RSS feeds is obvious. Current feed mechanisms duplicate the content created by content producers and basically deprive them from visits to their site, which, I believe, can be detrimental to their business (loss of ad revenues or discarded copyrights, for example).

A few similar products have popped up lately. All of them are new and I suppose that they will evolve over the next few months. Although I did not go into the details of each of them, I am under the impression that Notifixio.us may be built from the start with one of the largest features set in terms of usability, channels, filters, extensibility as well as openness for external developers – and it seems to have the most effective subscription approach for both users and content producers (such as the widget you see on this blog). 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Julien’s site: http://notifixio.us