Being kept up to date via email is certainly nothing new. But doing so with RSS instead is still pretty new. Well, it looks like many retailers are able to see the obvious advantage to implementing this concept. Enter the RSS mall?

RubiconSoft, a development-stage startup, is getting set to launch its maiden product, RubiconSoft on Demand, a marketing service that employs RSS, email, and other technologies to help retailers retain online customers.

The service is in large part the creation of online marketing veteran Anu Shukla, who decided that the retail market had lost its appetite for expensive customer-marketing products that relied on collecting mountains of data to predict customer behavior.

She determined that collaborative filtering—using the customer’s past purchases to suggest new items of interest—had limited appeal and could be seen as intrusive by the customer. That relegates the effort to online clutter.

“If retailers want to know what customers want, the best way to find out is to ask them,” she said. Source: Red Herring