Thoughts from the Range

PC World just did their 101 Fantastic Freebie’s list, not only including FreeRange in the list but choosing it as Best Download !

See the whole article here:

PC World - 101 Fantastic Freebies

FreeReader Brings the News to Your Mobile Device
“With scores of free programs now available on the Web, an application has to have more than just good looks to get the nod for our favorite shareware product. Our winner brings your news to places other free news readers can’t.”

FreeRange FreeReader brings the speed and convenience of RSS feeds to a wide array of mobile phones. Install this clean and fast feed reader, and the fun little games on your phone will soon suffer from neglect as you instead go straight for all the latest news reports from your favorite sources….”

We’re pleased to announce a partnership today with ContentNext to mobilize their great sites - mocoNews and paidContent. If you are in the mobile or publishing industry, you’ll want to get these for your phone. MocoNews can be downloaded from your phone’s browser from http://moco.mwap.at and paidContent is be downloaded from http://paid.mwap.at

The press release announcing our partnership is below and the announcement on mocoNews site is here

Date: 2/28/08
Portland, OR - FreeRange Communications, a mobile technology solutions and services company, has been chosen by ContentNext to design and deliver mobile versions of their popular paidContent and mocoNews websites. Using the FreeRange Mobile Publishing Platform, readers of ContentNext sites can now have all the latest news, updates and commentary delivered automatically to their mobile devices in a direct channel format.
“The FreeRange platform gives our readers the latest breaking news with an attractive interface and quick load time,” said Ted Rupp, Director of Business Development at ContentNext. “FreeRange app’s vastly improve the mobile web experience, and provide an excellent outlet for sponsors as well.”
Using the FreeRange Mobile Publishing Platform, ContentNext is now offering downloadable mobile channels for mocoNews and paidContent. Subscribers can download these applications to their Blackberry, Windows Mobile or other mobile devices with a data connection. By clicking on the mocoNews or paidContent icon on their phone, subscribers get all the latest news and updates immediately available. The applications update themselves in the background while running on the phone, ensuring that all the latest news is immediately available to subscribers, even when the subscriber is outside of mobile coverage. In addition to the website content, the application delivers targeted advertising and sponsorships within the branded mobile channels.

“paidContent and mocoNews are daily ‘must reads’ for me and anyone else in the mobile world or new media technology M&A business, and we’re excited to provide a way to extend this valuable content to the mobile marketplace,” said Jon Maroney, CEO of FreeRange Communications.
From a mobile phone browser, download paidContent from http://paid.mwap.at or mocoNews from http://moco.mwap.at
Or visit either site from the internet from http://www.contentnext.com
About FreeRange Communications
FreeRange Communications enables media companies and consumer brands to deliver their content and advertising to mobile phones in a way that is fast and easy to read. The FreeRange Mobile Publishing Platform allows publishers to have mobile widgets that work on nearly all mobile phones, extending their business models and content to mobile phone screens around the world. The FreeRange Platform powers a wide variety of mobile widgets, including those delivered by Portland TrailBlazers, VersionTracker, Travelocity Business, NewsGator Go!, and MobHappy. Mobilize your publication today by contacting Brad McMahon at +1 503 445-4010 or emailing bizdev@freerangeinc.com .

Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune wrote a nice column on the value he’s found in FreeRange during his commute.

Check it out here:

Getting the most out of your hand-held

Deal to bring up-to-the-minute Trail Blazers info to mobile phones

PORTLAND,Ore. The Portland Trail Blazers today announced a new way for fans to get the latest news and information on the team via their mobile phone or other handheld device.

Trail Blazers Mobile gives fans instant access to news, special offers and Trailblazers.com content such as Mike Barrett’s blog and Greg Oden’s rehab update, delivered directly to their mobile device. The application, developed in partnership with Portland-based FreeRange Communications using FreeRange’s Mobile Marketing Platform, is available immediately.

“Nearly all our fans have mobile phones today, and many have Smartphones,” said Trail Blazers Vice President and CIO, Chris Dill, “This mobile widget allows our fans to get their fix of Trail Blazers news wherever and whenever they want. I was addicted to this technology as soon as I tried it, and it’s great that it’s built by a company here in Portland.”

Fans can log onto trailblazers.com, visit the for fans page, find the mobile news button and download the application to their mobile phone.

Trail Blazers Mobile is a stand alone mobile widget that runs on Smartphones, automatically delivering the same news, blogs and scores that appear on the Internet directly to mobile phone. Because it doesn’t use the mobile phone’s browser, there is no waiting for pages to load, which on many mobile phones is prohibitively slow. The mobile application runs on Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian Smartphones. For fans without Smartphones, the same information is available via a mobile WAP site from any web enabled phone by pointing the phone browser to: http://m.trailblazersmobile.com.

FreeRange Communications (http://www.freerangeinc.com), a Portland-based company, enables media companies and consumer brands to deliver their content to mobile phones in a way that is fast and easy to read. The FreeRange Mobile Publishing Platform allows publishers to have stand alone mobile applications and widgets that work on nearly all mobile phones, extending their business models and content to mobile phone screens around the world. The FreeRange Platform powers a wide variety of mobile widgets, including those delivered by Portland Trail Blazers, VersionTracker, Travelocity Business, NewsGator Go! and MobHappy.

- trailblazers.com -

Another Great Review of FreeRange WebReader on Blackberry is available at BBGeeks . It’s great that more and more people are seeing the value of mobile RSS and how it can change how they use their Blackberry’s.

Their final opinion: “Overall, I believe the FreeNews reader will be a valuable asset to any BlackBerry owner. The installation process is straight forward, information is handled efficiently on all levels, advanced flight mode options provide extended functionality and image viewing is a breeze.

I would reccomend this RSS/Feed reader to all BlackBerry owners, particularly those who are offline for extended periods of time, whether in the air, flying the friendly skies, or underground riding the tubes.”

Ewan Spence did a great round up of RSS Reader for Symbian phones at All About Symbian, and he liked FreeRange on his Nokia N95!

FreeRange is very pleased to announce the final release of our latest product, FreeRange WebReader. The goal of WebReader is simple - to do for Internet content what Blackberry did for email. WebReader brings the Internet to your fingertips, giving you access to the websites you want, wherever you happen to be, and without making you wait.

Download and try FreeRange WebReader today from http://mwap.at

If you’ve used FreeNews in the past, we think you’ll love WebReader! Some of the new features include image support, link and full browser support, background updating, better feed management from on the phone, and tremendous overall speed increases. WebReader replaces FreeNews completely, and we hope you’ll find it much more useful. Simply download the new version and enter your FreeNews user name and password to get started.

If you’ve been helping us test WebReader (code-named Fontis) - THANK YOU! You’ve helped us create an amazing product. Make sure that you get the latest version to experience the full speed increases.

As always, we love feedback. Let us know what you think at info@freerangeinc.com

Newsgator has begun shipping their latest products for mobile phones, NewsGator Go! for Blackberry and NewsGator Go! for Java . What is great about these products is that they answer the top feature request from our existing users - the ability to synch mobile phone with desktop and web based RSS reading.

These products were developed jointly by FreeRange and NewsGator. As NewsGator is the leader in the consumer RSS reading space with their great NetNewsWire and FeedDemon products, we were very excited to be selected by NewsGator to be their development partner in these products. Our sense has always been that we want to partner with companies that have market leading technology to bring their benefits to mobile phones, and NewsGator Go! is a great example of this.

Both products have free trial versions, so if you’re using one of NewsGator’s desktop or Online apps, give the mobile version a try! Be sure to let us know what you think! - JM

If you came to our site yesterday, you noticed that the site was missing and all emails to anyone at freerange bounced. This was due to our host provider ‘upgrading’ our server, which resulted in them bringing down our server completely and indefinitely. We decided to do our own “upgrade” to a new host provider, and now have our site back up and running. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience!

The FreeRange service is actually run on our own servers so was not affected by this event.

A great post by Steve Gillmor on the bigger directions of RSS and how a lot of the technologies being developed around RSS today make it increasingly more useful.

» Who do you trust? | Steve Gillmor’s InfoRouter | ZDNet.com
Who do you trust?Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 5:41 pm

RSS got another big boost today when portals-in-the-headlights AOL and Yahoo? decided they wanted to scrape some vig off of the email stream. Notice that this idea, first championed by Bill Gates several years ago in his famous “I will fix this problem in 2 years” speech, is in fact not coming from Redmond but two companies firmly in the grasp of carrier partnerships. But those who cast this as the enabling shot across the bow of Google and other broadband hitchhikers may not be right. My bet is that someone like Sun, with their Redmonk-promoted lead in identity services, could provide email certification for free in return for participation in the Sun server stack. Hmm, it is Google that Sun is partnering with, isn’t it. Goodbye AOL mail, just when they were getting a clue. Hello Gmail plus, still free. Microsoft, your bid.
Of course, RSS breaks spam, and Attention breaks glut, and Gestures break pre-paid authorized corporate spam. When I walk into Eats for breakfast, they hand me 4 quarters for the parking and the usual meal. They put the quarters on the bill, and the decaf in a to-go cup from minute one. Gesture-driven personalization. I don’t have a spam problem anymore. Most of my information comes to me on demand, and more and more sorted by gestures. Fixing something that’s not broken puts a big bullseye on the publisher. Remember: RSS readers are self-selecting, Attention readers mine affinity group data for targetted streams, and Gesture-sensitive publishers have a consentual relationship with their audience, aka partners.
Those who see this as a battle between them (MSM) and us (us-ers) may be consigning themselves to observer status, while those who harness the power of naturally forming affinity groups can act now to deincent those clouds and carriers who are taking silo stumbles. If Gabe Rivera is tuning Memeorandum more and more by content as differentiated from the easier-cloned linkrank, then he is moving toward the assent of gestures and away from the tyranny of transactions. What you bought is more a predictor of what you won’t buy than what you will, at least for some period of time. What your neighbor (in an affinity sense) bought, however, can have an immediate and opposite effect. Who do you trust?
My bet: those who shift the profit from the Spam Flag to the us-ers-in-charge.