Stanford Student Enterprises Drops 1st Investment on Diffbot

Some of the most successful companies have come out of Stanford University,  such as Google and Yahoo, to name a couple. Universities such as Stanford are willing to license the technologies produced in their labs for two  reasons: 1. To catalyze the commercialization of great technologies 2. And, to produce additional revenue streams in the form of equity and dividends from those startups. It is no wonder why more campus seed funds have been popping up to aid in this process.

Stanford Student Enterprises is one of them, and according to TechCrunch, has funded their first investment, DiffBot. The startup offers a service called Feedbeater that creates RSS feeds for websites that don't already have them by filtering new content and leaving out advertisements and comments. All you have to do is input a URL.

I'm not sure how much potential this type of service has. I say this because of the growing trend for websites to be built off of content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. All of these platforms make it easy to build in RSS feeds. Many websites are also trying to migrate their sites on to these systems. I can't think of too many times when I have come across a website that didn't have an RSS feed that I wanted to subscribe to. I do have a feeling that this is the start to something else and that they other ideas up their sleeves.

On the other hand, this type of service may provide indirect value in making it easier to migrate sites. It is usually fairly time consuming to convert an "old fashion" html based site into a more dynamic site. Perhaps this type of application can help index those types of sites, separate content, and make it easier to port into other systems. I wouldn't know the technical feasibility, but from my understanding, it seems do-able.

We'll likely see more startups from Stanford Student Enterprises. They have $13 million in assets and is an organization of several hundered employees. The fund is restricted to undergraduates and graduate students.

Via: TechCrunch

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