Alertle, a Toronto, Ontario startup is an RSS Reader that is focused on breaking out beyond the more technically inclined crowd that uses services like Google Reader and Bloglines.

The company, which has been bootstrapped so far, has been making quick progress. I have used their reader a few times in the last month and there has been obvious progress on the UI and the general flow of the applications.

When you first log in, the most noticible difference between Alertle and other RSS readers is their focus on “bundles” of feeds. While most readers come with a large set of default feeds, Alertle takes it a step further and provides almost 20 bundles, each with well over a dozen feeds. These include bundles like “Life”, “Autos”, “Videos”, “Nasdaq” and more.

Alertle really goes beyond just being a feed reader and really offers an easy way for a novice user to change how the browse the web in general. Their interface is relatively easy, but does take some getting used to (at least if you approach it from a traditional feed-reading mindset like I did), but I have found that it grows on you. My one complaint is that the titles of the feeds, which appear below nice large icons, are often cut short and are hard to read. I would prefer to have the titles displayed clearly and in full somehow.

I was able to easily import my existing subscriptions from Google Reader using OPML, and I think that with a little tweaking I could really get used to this interface. I really appreciate how uncluttered the display window is for the news item that is currently being read, and the list of unread posts is also clear and easy to navigate.

Alertle plans to generate revenue through advertising and potentially by offering a premium product for enterprise customers. I can imagine that there will be other revenue opportunities for them as well if they manage to build up their user base, such as charging for inclusion as a default feed and generating revenue through Google search referral if they can convince users to make Alertle their default homepage.

Contact Varun Mathur

Jonas and I dropped by the Savvica offices today for the launch of LearnHub.com. LearnHub is the first site from Savvica since their funding in the fall of 2007. We previously covered the return of Savvica’s founders, John and Malgosia, back to Toronto after a year in San Francisco. Savvica is based in Toronto and recently took significant investment from Indian e-learning company Educomp.

LearnHub is in many ways the evolution of their first product, Nuvvo, which was a much more traditional learning management system. LearnHub on the other hand has a lot more social networking functionality and the “community” model feels a lot more engaging.

Users can connect with other people, can join communities and can help build courses in those communities by bundling tools such as “Debates”, “Lessons”, “Tests” and “Discussions”. There is also an explicit “Authority Ranking” in LearnHub that rewards users who participate more regularly and in more ways.

Once you have built a course, you then have the option of charging for it. LearnHub becomes a marketplace for online courses where experts in a subject area can quickly and easily build courses and then make money by charging for them. There is a lot of potential here if LearnHub can get enough exposure and adoption inside the right communities. They then also have to attract a mass audience who will pay for these courses.

By running their own support site as a community on LearnHub, Savvica is eating its own dogfood. The support site gives the best demonstration of how a community can be structured and how the different components of the community can be used differently.

In talking to the John and Malgosia, it became obvious that this is just the beginning of their long-term strategy. Without giving away the secret sauce, I can say that I was happy to hear that their revenue model was much more mature than you might assume up front.