Investors Bet Bank on RSS Technology

Five investors—including John G. Palfrey Jr. ’94, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s (HLS) Berkman Center for the Internet and Society—are banking on a “really simple” code, popularized in the last year by bloggers, to power the third big wave of the Internet revolution.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology can deliver up-to-the-minute news feeds from media outlets to an RSS subscriber’s desktop. Now the technology may get a $100-million-dollar shot in the arm. Palfrey and James F. Moore, a former senior fellow at the Berkman Center, have teamed up with venture capitalists Richard Fishman and Ritchie Capital’s Steve Smith and Tom Crowley to raise $100 million for RSS Investors, LP, the first private equity fund geared toward investing in RSS technology.

“We are sticking our neck out with the following prediction: RSS, writ large, is the next layer of information technology,” Moore wrote this month in his HLS blog.

RSS technology has gained popularity in the last year by enabling internet users to track updates to their favorite weblogs. Mainstream media, including ABC and CNN, have followed by adding their own RSS feeds.

“The basic set of uses right now is subscribing to newsfeeds and podcasts, which are files embedded in news feeds,” Palfrey said. Podcasting is primarily the transmission of mainstream radio shows and grassroots audio blogs using RSS feeds.

“There’s been a huge growth in terms of feeds offered. It’s now in the tens of millions, and it’s expected to be hundreds of millions by the end of the year,” Palfrey added.

SEC regulations forbid the advertising of private equity fund capital campaigns like RSS Investors, LP. Palfrey would not disclose specifics about the fund—including when the group expects to finish fundraising.

Palfrey said he considers RSS the next step in the changing Internet experience, which started with e-mail and moved to interaction with a fixed, non-real-time World Wide Web.

“We see the next wave as being a world in which info is syndicated,” Palfrey said.

The technology is not limited to rebroadcasting headlines, and RSS investors are counting on the technology’s profit potential.

RSS aggregator programs can search constantly for user-specified material, and could be used for anything from scanning classifieds sites for sought-after items to compiling consumer or medical data.

Palfrey also emphasized RSS’ potential to collect customized, specific information in the business environment and the home.

“Lots of big businesses try to ensure that their employees are up to speed on relevant information, and RSS is an incredibly inexpensive way to do that and ensure that information can be much more cheaply disseminated,” Palfrey said.

The medium also has applications in entertainment. Apple’s iTunes software’s new podcast function is based on RSS feeds, allowing users to download thousands of radio shows at no charge for later listening, according to the company’s website. Podcasting’s provisions for non-real-time listening distinguish it from existing streaming-media technology.

Apple’s newest operating system, OS X Tiger, has RSS support built in. Both Apple’s Safari web browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser currently have RSS capability. Microsoft’s upcoming version of Internet Explorer will support the technology, too.

“RSS is key to how people will use the Internet in the future by automatically delivering the information that is important to them,” Dean J. Hachamovitch ’90, general manager for Longhorn browsing and RSS at Microsoft, said in a company press release.

But RSS is not without flaws, at least in its current incarnation. Like much else on the Internet, RSS has been troubled by spam.

“As much as a third of what we see coming across the transom in terms of RSS feeds is spam,” Palfrey said. “Similar problems are occurring in RSS as in other parts of the web. You’ll need similar kinds of security and authentication.”

Another criticism is based on the fund’s business plan, not on the technology itself.

Some Silicon Valley technology bloggers have criticized the fund for the narrowness of its scope, comparing it to an unsuccessful Java-targeted fund from the late 1990s. The focus on a specific technology could increase the fund’s risk to investors, its critics have suggested.

—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.