Josh Harrison » Startups

SportUltra.com: Great Idea, Missing Key Features

Josh — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:08:50 +0000

A local Seattle company launched today. I was excited to hear about it. SportsUltra.com promises to deliver sports news to you that you care about. I have been waiting for a site like this for a while now, especially since I moved to the Seattle area. It’s a lot more difficult to follow the Utah Jazz outside of Utah. The site is missing some key features. But it did just go live today, so hopefully they will keep on improving.

One great thing about SportsUltra.com is that you can try it out without signing up for an account. You just add all of the teams, players, and sports writers that you want to follow. The site will then pull then show you a list of sources across the web that are saying stuff about what you want to know about. If you register for the site, you can receive updates via email. Filters are provided at the top to filter by team, player, video, etc. A widget can be added to your web site based on a filter as well that will list news on your blog/web page.

This will be great to follow BYU and the Utah Jazz.

There are a few features that I was expecting to see but couldn’t find anywhere.

Where is the blog? I know you’ll can send site news and info but I want to read about how you guys work. Get a blog.

I want to subscribe to my news via an RSS feed. This was key for me. And do you guys just search news sites or do you search blogs as well?

They could also add some other features such as adding images to your customized news page. It is not necessary to be a social network, but the site could use some networking features.

For the most part, when customizing my content, everything was there. A few reporters weren’t listed that I was hoping for. There were a few things that I found odd when adding college alumni.

After reading around a little, I noticed that there are some other sites that offer similar services. I need to take a look at those to do some comparing. SportsUltra fell a little short for me. I’d like to see some improvements in the next few months. I’ll definitely keep my eye on them.

Here are some other reviews:

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Lots of Seattle Startups

Josh — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:37:35 +0000

Looking into the Seattle startup scene, I’m finding there is a lot going on. Drew Meyer from Zillow.com left me a comment to my last post to point me to a recent post of his on the Seattle tech scene. He includes lots of good links that lead me to a lot of blogs. Thanks Drew!

I took a look at Seattle Startup Blogs and decided to subscribe to all of them using the OPML file. There seems to be a lot happening. Hopefully I can start getting to some of the events going on around here.

If you know of any event or any company I should know about, please do.

Seattle Startups

Josh — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:39:10 +0000

In my job search, I have found that startups respond a lot quicker to resume submissions than bigger companies. I thought I would start searching the Seattle startup scene to see what companies are out there.

I am a little familiar with a few Seattle startups, such as Redfin and Zillow, but I know there are lots more.

Doing a google search for Seattle startups, I found a blog on the Seattle-PI site that has some good information on it. John Cook is the VC reporter for the Seattle-PI. I’m going to browse the site and see what I can find.

I did subscribe to it and quickly found that it is a partial text feed. Another topic for another day. I don’t like it when blogs do this.

If any of you know of any good startups in Seattle, please let me know. I would love to see what they have available for employment.