Vysr Packs Quicker Route to Web Content

RoamAbout Business pack provides access to Wikipedia. Source: Vysr

RoamAbout, a browser extension designed to streamline access to Web sites, has been further customized with today’s release of prebundled “packs” or collections of Web services. Vysr’s RoamAbout Business and RoamAbout Social Packs are available for download.

Released in April in beta, RoamAbout is designed to let users
quickly tap the Web sites and services they want to without having to jump around or “surf” the Web to find information on sites they don’t need to spend a lot of time on.

While RoamAbout lets you assemble the sites you want to access, the packs provide a precompiled grouping to simplify the process. Vyser said it has more packs in the works.

“The idea is that right off the bat we give you access to the applications you want to use, though that doesn’t mean you’re stuck, you can add or change the list,” Guda Venkatesh, CEO of Vysr, told InternetNews.com. You don’t have to bring entire Web pages in, just the reference you need, whether it’s an address book in Facebook, a map from Mapquest or something else.”

The first Business Pack features access to map, news, and information services from MapQuest, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), and Wikipedia, respectively, and a content sharing service.

Social Pack provides access to Flickr, YouTube and Twitter services. Both packs are available for Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

Venkatesh said Vysr plans to offer further customization for RoamAbout, but for now, it wants to make the free service as simple as possible for users to get started.

“What we’re doing is making it easier for people to take the services with them they need, even on a mobile device, rather than go to a separate Web page,” he said.

Vysr is positioning RoamAbout itself as a Web services platform with a rich set of service enablers such as a voice and text communication infrastructure, connectors to social networks and identity management.

The company said RoamAbout exposes a “rich set of service enablers” such as a voice and text communication infrastructure, connectors to social networks and identity management.

With the packs, Vyser has done some of the initial heavy lifting. Longer term, the company said it’s giving developers a way to create portable Web services and expand their distribution channel.