Notify.me is a San Diego startup trying to take over the web-based alerts space already occupied by companies like Alerts.com, , and Yotify.com. Basically users can add any source with a RSS feed to their source list, choose the destination for the alerts (SMS, IM, or email), create filters for the type of information to be received, and voilà a notification is sent to the destitation of the user’s choosing when there is new content available.

Jason Wieland, CEO, and I recently grabbed a cup of joe together and discussed all things Notify.me. Most of the conversation was spent discussing how Wieland plans to distinguish Notify.me from the competition. According to him, Notify.me has three distinct advantages.

  1. Notifications are publisher friendly and direct users back to a publisher’s site.
  2. They’re taking an open approach with an XMPP API allowing users to receive notifications on the clients of their choosing.
  3. Wieland is pretty proud of the fact that with Notify.me notifications are near real-time, taking 1 to 2 minutes from the time a source is updated to the time the notification is received. Wieland claims that Yotify takes 2 hours while Alerts.com takes up to 30 minutes, making Notify.me a far superior choice if you’re trying to get first dibs on a classic car listing from Craigslist.

Notify.me is in private beta, but you can sign up and play around with the service using this link.

Quick Stats

  • 500 active users
  • 1 – 2 min notification time, near real-time
  • $400k – desired amount for funding

To Watch or Not

Wieland openly admits that Notify.me’s biggest challenge at the moment is to raise funds. Right now he’s full time on the project, but his CTO Arne Claasen still has a day job at MindTouch; together they just can’t currently afford to staff full-timers or cover additional operational expenses.

Should the company find the $400,000 they’re in search of, I could easily see Notify.me staying afloat. The service itself is incredibly functional, although not mindblowing or revolutionary, and Wieland has a few revenue-producing ideas for a sustainable business model. Plus as a (although the tutorial could use some work), it’s actually really awesome and faster than Twitterspy—I use Notify.me and my Jabber client to track all Twitter mentions of jbruin, san diego, and sdtweetup to name a few.