AvantGo to Greatly Restrict Custom Channels

I doubt AvantGo wants to be totally dominant in the "giving stuff away for free" department. It is not a very profitable business model.

No, but it's too soon for them to start demanding sites to start coughing up the dough, which is why I said its too bad that they didn't have more cash.

...the real bummer is that not only do I have no idea as to which of my channels are going to be nixed and which aren't, I don't know what time they're doing the deed on Wednesday and so I won't be able to save them.

*sigh* Plucker is such a pain, but it is the only automated solution left to me.

> but it's too soon for them to ...

AvantGo has been around for years. I understand quite well why they can't afford to give you and thousands of other people free service. Would you like to provide a bunch of servers to proxy content and Internet bandwidth to sevrvice thousands of people for free? In fact I'm sure AvantGo would be glad to just let you pick up those costs for them, and save you the effort of getting those systems and services set up.

This is a travesty!

I run an avantgo channel. I have a contract with them, but I am not paying 1 dollar per subscriber. That's insane. I guess they will be doomed. It's funny because they certainly will be facing the challenege of high bandwidth always-on portable devices that can pull down and render full sized webpages.

Cut out the middleman. I guess they have to make cash back for the investors now before it's too late.

[http://www.mediathreat.net]

They did. It was called Avantgo 1.0. I think they flat out skipped version 2.0 and moved 3.0 to their current incarnation where they host your channel setup. I'd still be using 1.0 if it supported color and more than 1 bit graphics.

Time to try an alternative.

Like heck you are...I'm hounding it at midnight. Along with the onion and GameSpyDaily

Agreed. Who the hell's going to pay $6-$10 a user. Maybe $.6-$.10 a user. At one time I actually considered recommending to my customers (I'm an internet developer) that they set up a channel with AvantGo. At these prices, if you aren't planning on having over 1000 users, and negotiating a price with AvantGo, you may as well put a plucker tutorial on your website instead. Way more cost effective.

With these changes, I would expect about 20%-30% of all of the channels on AvantGo to disappear within the first month after this takes place. Obviously all of the Custom Channels are all gone on Feb. 20th, but these prices are going to force many smaller channels out pretty quick as well. Too bad for the little guys!

Umm.. I checked the link. It's an ANNUAL fee. $10 per user per year? That's like $1.2 a month. I don't see what the fuss is all about.

Add a special subscription price for Avantgo users of your site, and I don't think that many users will complain about paying $10 a year to get AvantGo if the content is worth it.

It looks like a fair deal to me.

Fair deal? How about FREE????

Try Plucker, you can get to the same sites, and their browser is much, much better!

Nothing is truly free.

> It's been my impression that they've not really
> *wanted* personal users any more.

They don't want to pay to give you free content anymore. What is so hard to understand about that?

I think you have to realize that the entire public offering was just proof of concept for AvantGO. They needed to prove that they had a scaleable solution in order to grab the enterprise market. If they can give the service away to 4.5 mil users, they can show that they can handle the average enterprise deployment.

Now that the end users have proven their case, they don't need to absorb the cost of providing a free deliver service to everyone who wants it.

If you like the service they provide, then you are goint to have to pay for it. If you don't need the control of custom channels you can use some of the other widley available, advertising driven channels.

I would like a free alternative, not $200 (the cheapest PPC is the Jornada 520, to be able to use Mazingo).

how do we know you're not carmine gallo, if that is your real name?

From their website/manual:

Mazingo currently does NOT support the following devices:

Casio BE-300
HP 720, 660, 620 LX
Other H/PC devices
Palm OS devices, including the Handspring and Sony Clie.
Philips Nino

I am beta testing the new version of HandStory right now, it lets you sync up news sites and set up custom channels to sync to your palm. It has many of the popular channels right now, supports hi-res and can use the back button on the Clie. I use it more than AvantGo right now. Once 2.0 is release I would suggest you give it a try.

I think you have no place here since this is Palm OS site. Come back later when you have a Palm OS Application. I hope you will know what is the difference between a Palm OS application and PPC application. Try to read something to educate yourself. Okay!!!

I'm looking forward to use HandStory 2.0. HandStory is one the PalmOS software I use the most right now. The 2.0 version looks very tempting... :-)

a HALF alternative! Mazingo only support Pocket PC as now.

Huh ?!?

Why the heck should Avantgo give you free service? The purpose of the company is to make money--not provide social welfare to people like you.

The whole purpose of the "free" service was proof-of-concept. If you want the service in the future, then pay for it.

Obviously, you like the service. Now, pony up the cash if you find it indispensable as you state. Put your money where yer mouth is.

That's a silly argument. AvantGo didn't give us, the end users, the option to pay for the service. I certainly would have, just as I pay for other services that I find indispensable such as Mapopolis.

The point is that AvantGo did what it did really well and could have found all sorts of better ways to make money off the service. Why not, for example, allow users to gain free access to two or three channels, but charging a monthly or yearly subscription for additional channels? That way, they could allow custom content providers to advertise to their hearts' content while providing incentive to maintain high-quality content.

I think you're way off base.

I don't think that you understand Avantgo's decision. They are not asking the USERS to pay a subscription, but they are asking the PUBLISHERS to pay a subscription. This means that non-profit organizations (like PalmInfocenter, no doubt) will not be able to afford the subscription fees.

I, for one, would be willing to pay $5 a month to view public interest content (i.e. news, hobby pages, etc).

If my company chooses to provide a channel for the sale of their product or for service to their customers, then they have a reason to pay the subscription fees.

I, too, find this a sad, sad way of dealing with a revenue problem. I find AvantGo one of the top two useful apps on my Palm Vx. The ability to easily add web content to non-wired handhelds via sync'ing is a powerful example of the usability of these devices. As a user of a beneficial service, I would also gladly pony up a monthly subscription fee to continue using AvantGo uninterrupted. Unfortunately, the company seems to have decided that they would rather slowly choke off the public subscription service. A shame, considering the alternative to profitability in these tight economic times.

I think the first person who replied to this feedback obviously has a huge chip on his/her shoulder! Nobody is asking for a free lunch and it was a figure of speech. It was also interesting to note that some of the smaller publications will be choked off and we end up with big boys that already saturate our airwaves (i.e. CNN, NBC, etc) who can obviously afford the fees set by Avantgo. It makes us less "rich" when information is only controlled by the few.

Either Avantgo re-look at their fees charged to publications and make it more affordable or as one reader suggested limit the free channels and introduce a premium account surcharge. Alternatively, sell Avantgo as a software with things that we REALLY like to see such as clipping.

On the other hand, HandStory seems like an interesting alternative.

Let's say it again:

Avantgo is not a provider of social welfare to people like you. They're in the business of making money. Understand?

If you like the service, then pay for it. Say again: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL).
And again... TANSTAAFL.

TIOAFLFUSC

(there is only a free lunch for US citizens)

Hm, don't worry. Just get the mobile page for the sites you want (eg, www.slashdot.org/palm or p5.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=news ), and use another program. None is as good as Avantgo now, but there wasn't one needed with Avantgo being free. There'll be a good replacement soon, I predict, and if someone writes one and charges $5 for it, they'll be rich (hint to programmer/readers)

yeah.... and what about Mazingo for Pocket PC?

>yeah.... and what about Mazingo for Pocket PC?

Pocket PC users are a small percentage here, you may gather more business at a relevant site.

Hey Belgian friend, look into www.mobipocket.com. MobiPocket Reader is a European e-book reader that comes with a news synchronization tool. MobiPocket publishes in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It works on PalmOS, PocketPC, WindowsCE, Psion and Franklin eBookMan. Its format is Open eBook, which is based on XML and HTML, and uses XML/XSL files as a way to configure the retrieval of web pages; so anyone that knows XML/XSL can "make" a "channel". You're not limited to low-graphics pages, since XML/XSL config files allow you to retrieve only relevant data, without the ads. All in all, it's a quite more flexible product, not only targeted at enews reading.
My only beef with MobiPocket Reader is that it obviously comes from the PocketPC world: it has a too graphical interface, and therefore I find it too slow for e-book reading on my 16MHz Palm IIIxe (compared to iSilo and PalmReader). So I went back to using iSilo, until I upgrade to a newer Palm, that is.
As for AvantGo, I haven't used it in quite a while: it uses way too much memory, and I didn't find it very stable. It was a great idea, but I would have liked it more memory-efficient, more stable, and I would have liked the ability to cut & paste text.