Need assistance badly
 

People,
we designed a software that collects news from a list of news sites for reading it offline. You can select sites news categories and schedule the software for a time of the day and frequency of downloading news. You can also search among downloaded news using keywords and user created filters.
It seems to be working pretty well.
WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO UNDERSTAND NOW IS WHAT NEWS SITES PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN. We are enlarging the list of supported sites basing on users suggestions.
So, I would very much appreciate your, people, ideas about what NEWS sites are we to include in the list of supported ones.
I won't give you the link to the free trial version of our app unless you ask for it, so that you don't think I am trying to sell it to you.
Thanks in advance, hope for your assistance.
Cheers,
Androx

Sounds similar to moreover, which I used to use when it was free.

Then I used newstrove.

It's pretty hard to beat Google News, which is now my start page.

http://news.google.com
http://www.newstrove.com
http://www.moreover.com
http://www.ask.com/news/headlines.asp

So this is like a sales pitch without the sales.
And you are correct about Google News being number one for news harvesting.

Thanks Nic Name.
I'll pass the sites to our guys for examination.
I know what Moreover technology is and in fact many news sites or just news sections are powered by their technology.
It's just our solution is a little different idea. The app gets news at the time you set with any frequency (several times a day, daily, etc) And you read them offline whenever you want or can transfer them on your Pocket PC.
Thanx a lot
Androx

Damn, you are right. But if you don't like it like this I can definitely try to sell it to you :D . Just ask...
Really, guys, to make the software successful we need to offer what people need, and that's it.
Androx

Well, you were quite correct to post this in the Entertainment forum.

It's been a hoot. ;)

Glad you like it.
:angel:
Hope some more guys will show up with comments.

Androx

The Google News engine rocks hard. It would be trivial to spider their top page with wget for offline reading. Or Plucker, so it could be read on a PDA.

My nightmare is that they decide to make Google News a subscription service. It's still beta...

This doesn't really sound like something I would pay for. It seems like it would be pretty easy to implement myself. What sort of hardships have you had in trying to program it?

I use a My Yahoo page for a "home" page, my "starter" page is blank.

I will use newshub(.com) from time to time to pick up the latest headlines.

Thanx everybody
 

Thank you guys.
I can't say that we had many hardships developing this app. It's just first version was on .Net but people said that they weren't going to download .Net framework along with our application. Total weigh would be about 30 MB. An we decided to redo it in C++. And we did it.
So, now we are making up a list of sites and news categories that would respond to people's expectations.
If you are interested to see it and possibly give some comments, you can download the free 15 days trial version here:
http://www.softaura.com/unic You don't have to use your email or any personal information to get it work. Just in trial version there are only 3 sites for download and a few categories.
Cheers,
Androx

Have you taken a look at MyWay.com? They appear to be a clone of the revamped Excite.com, except they have no banners, popups (something IE users will appreciate), or javascript.

You can create a personalized home page there as well.

I have seen it, but I was miffed that they didn't list a business plan on their about pages. If you're not going to make money with advertising, how are you going to do it? Are you going to change plans halfway through?

I used to use an Excite home page back in the day. You could make it a very pretty start page. But they died. Yahoo is the only blue chip internet services company because they've managed to figure out how to make money on what they do. If MyWay doesn't live because it can't make money, or if it doesn't scale, what good is it?

Did you read the "Our Mission" page?
http://info.myway.com/index/id/ourmission.html

Take a look at www.newsisfree.com. Completely customizable, with different pages and everything. I've been using it for about 6 months now, and it's great.