Feed Crier, Kiko — the innovative beat goes on, without spending millions

Feed Crier is a new service that lets you subscribe to blogs or other content within your instant messager (IM).

Feed Crier intends to be your instant news reader. Right now, it lets you subscribe to any RSS feed using your AOL instant messenger account, but author Adam Kalsey says he plans to expand the service to other IM services.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1713,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"A"}']

This way, you can stay on top of job listings from Craigslist as they come in — or breaking news, or favorite blogs, whatever.

We find Kalsey’s start-up philosophy noteworthy. He co-founded Emeryville-based Pheedo, but left last fall. He then started Tagyu, we wrote about here last year, a service that auto-suggested tags, and which we wondered was really a stand-alone product.

Well, Kalsey started wondering too, and he soon pulled the plug and moved on to the next thing. He is based in Sacramento, and says he’s working on these projects on the side. It’s easy to take an idea and execute on it, and see if it sticks, he says. If it doesn’t, you can move on — that way, you haven’t invested millions, or even thousands of dollars.

Kalsey

Kalsey is offering Feed Crier for free, but charges $4 for a premium version which lets you subscribe to more feeds. He is also selling a branded version, where say, the Mercury News can offer the service to its readers directly without the Feed Crier name being associated with it. We asked him whether he thought this project is a full-fledged business, and he said it is too early to tell.

Techcrunch mentions competitors, including Peter Brown’s immedi.at, Eduard Sherstnev’s Zaptxt and the most “sophisticated of them all,” Rasasa, from the Netherlands — so we will see if Kalsey has staying power.

Here, we also note the story of Kiko, an online calendar service that apparently got killed by Google’s calendar. (Yet another competitor, 37Signals, scorns the notion that competition from Google was the problem, because 37Signals’ own calendar has survived; but that is a different story).

But the point is that advisor Paul Graham, via his incubator Y Combinator, is funding the next project of the Kiko founders:

There’s another encouraging point here for the new generation of web startups. Failure is not a disaster when you’re very light. The total amount raised by Kiko in its existence would be about six months’ salary for a first-rate developer. There’s a good chance they’ll recover most of it by selling their code. They only had one employee besides themselves. So this is not an expensive, acrimonious flameout like used to happen during the Bubble. They tried hard; they made something good; they just happened to get hit by a stray bullet. Ok, so try again. Y Combinator funded their new idea yesterday.

Our emphasis.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1713,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"A"}']

Kiko is going for $50,000 on eBay, as has been noted elsewhere.