Edgeio just opened its doors and announced its Angel financing

One of the most exciting and scary moments for a startup is the moment it ships its product/service for the very first time “for real” – without any password, limitation, etc. It is often the result of months of effort by a dedicated team, and gets you to deal with a new constituency: users. Tonight is Edgeio’s turn, and this is indeed an exciting moment.

As Om Malik wrote, Edgeio has received a lot of coverage already and therefore I won’t get too much into a lot of detail of the functionality: Edgeio extracts listings (classifieds, jobs, etc.) made available via RSS feeds, and tagged “listing”. Once a listing has been taken into account, the publisher can add metadata such as the main category under which the item should appear, its price and additional tags. Users can search the marketplace, or use tags and location as filters. There is quite a detailed FAQ here. Here is the item I just posted on my blog listed in Edgeio, and check the Edgeio widget on the right side of my blog.

I became aware of Edgeio months ago upon reconnecting with Keith Teare (who I had met years ago), and meeting Mike Arrington as he started TechCrunch. The concept of edge aggregation of semi-structured data was clearly the next logical step in pushing RSS beyond text syndication, hence the appeal of the Edgeio solution.

Disclosure: I was lucky (and grateful) that Keith and Mike asked me to get involved in the company as a (paid) advisor about six months ago. More recently, I also invested in the $1.5M angel round that was just announced.

A lot has been said about Edgeio, and a number of questions and suggestions will be addressed by the team in the coming weeks – and there are still a lot of interesting features coming up. In the meantime, take a look at the service and send us your feedback.

A bonus: here is the end of the IM chat we had with the team just after opening the site. Congratulations again to you guys.

More:

• Keith Teare announces the launch
• Fred Oliviera, who designed the Edgeio UI, chimes in
• If you are interesting in keeping track of Edgeio’s development, the blog is here
• The TechCrunch review is here, written independently by Nik Cubrilovic

Tags: edgeio

Comments

[Frank Gruber]

Hi Jeff,

I like the new edgeio right rail widget. I have a few things around my condo that I could sell on edgeio so I may have to add a widget too. Thanks for the heads up.

Best,
Frank