Attensa

MoveableType Enterprise up and running at Attensa

Rahsaan Roland Kirk released an album in 1973 titled Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle. It features a live 21 minute saxaphone solo. When you listen to it, it's impossible to discern when the man took a breath. Incredible.

We are in the process of transitioning sections of Attensa.com to the MoveableType platform. Yesterday our crack web team showed me MoveableType Enterprise in action working on our servers. We're starting with the news section so that loading news releases, updating our news coverage and event schedule will be as easy as posting to this Typepad blog and there will be a feed for each section. I'll be working with this miracle. Incredible.

The ROI of Collaborating

As part of Attensa's Project Dogfood we've been using BaseCamp  and Central Desktop to manage projects and collaborate with partners. These tools definitely makes working with a distributed team easier. Both of these collaboration tools feature: milestones, to-do lists, file storage, messaging and Web feeds.

Apparently we aren't alone in experiencing the communication and collaboration benefits.

Benchmark Research recently completed a sponsored research study looking at the returns from the use of collaboration technology in the construction industry.

• 98% of collaboration technology users felt they benefited from having information held centrally
• 93% of users said there was less chance of losing important documents
• 90% said it was easier to find and retrieve their documents.

I'd add, getting project updates in a Web feed makes it easier to stay on top of progress.

 

 

Enterprise 2.0 is Self Service

If you are looking for insights into the role of social networking in the Enterprise, you need to subscribe to Dion Hinchcliffe's Enterprise 2.0 blog.

In today's post he looks at the new Gartner Hype Cycle report.

Gartner sees collective intelligence as the most important trend coming from the application of Web 2.0 technologies to solve business problems.

Here's the Gartner definition:

collective intelligence: an approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost effective way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Dion explains the why...

"That might be because Web 2.0 offers a sort of inverted way of looking at the way we do things now.  Web 2.0 frequently embodies the emergent and freeform instead of the predefined and structured.  It's often bottom-up instead of command-and-control.  It's self-service instead of being mediated."

Both the Gartner report and Dion's analysis make the point that companies who have a clear vision and plan for putting social networking to work behind the firewall will have a clear competitive advantage.

Meeting TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick

Michael Arrington has created a phenomenon building his TechCrunch readership to 80 thousand in less than a year. Impressive.

Attensa's history with TechCrunch goes back to our launch last summer. Last Thursday we sat down with Marshall Kirkpatrick who recently joined the TechCrunch team. Marshall just moved to Portland and we were delighted connect and bring him up to date on our products and progress and talk about all things related to RSS, social networking, Web 2.0 business and where he should eat and drink now that he's here. We even offered to help him.

Marshall got right on it and posted on the Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 on Saturday. We really liked this line..."Attensa’s use of attention data in both its Attensa for Outlook and Attensa Feedserver products is impressive now and the potential for the future is really exciting. Just about any source of information can be delivered by RSS and as the practice becomes more common we’re going to need more sophisticated ways to take advantage of the medium." You can read the rest of "Attensa Offers Two Rich Enterprise Products here."

Introducing Project Dogfood and Michelle's Flog Blog

There's a project at Attensa called Project Dogfood. We've set up internal wikis and blogs to help us track fast moving projects, collaborate a little more cleanly and to give everyone on the team experience applying Enterprise 2.0 tools to our real world programs and projects.

Part of the motivation for Project Dogfood comes from our work with Six Apart. After sitting through three Business Blogging seminars, you can't help get caught up in Anil Dash's enthusiasm and wanting to apply the practical pointers on approaching business blogs that flow from DL Byron.

As part of Project Dogfood, I wanted to get more people involved in telling the Attensa story. I'd like to introduce Michelle, our customer service lead and author of the Flog Blog posts. I've asked Michelle to share her knowledge of Attensa for Outlook to help people get more out of the 1.5 beta.

We'll be sharing more about our learnings from Project Dogfood as soon as I flog the next victim into blogging.

Running Ahead with the Attensa Feed Server

David Utter has written a thorough overview of the Attensa Feed Server for WebProNews. His take - "A savvy company that steps up today for the Feed Server will be running ahead of the curve in the business world. Used effectively, the beneficial information a quality site can provide rapidly over a feed can help competitiveness in the marketplace."

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 and the Attensa Feed Server - Two steps forward toward putting the simple in RSS

Michael Gotta of the Burton Group sums up the role of Web feeds and attention in addressing two of the major issues facing IT organizations and information workers.

"Providing users with the right information, at the right time, in the right context has been the holy grail for IT organizations. At the same time, users have been frustrated with either too much information, too little information, information that isn't timely and information that isn't relevant."

Attensa is announcing two new products that address these issues head-on.

For enterprises and IT organizations,  Attensa is introducing the Attensa Feed Server, the first Enterprise Feed Server Appliance. The Attensa Feed Server is an appliance that can be easily installed behind the firewall and enables IT administrators to easily set up and manage feeds for groups and individuals enabling improved collaboration and knowledge sharing. 

For knowledge workers, Attensa is announcing the public beta of a new version of Attensa for Outlook, the first RSS reader utilizing AttentionStream technology to automatically prioritize information based on the user’s behavior history to automatically bring the most important RSS feeds and articles to the top.

You can read the news releases here:

Attensa Introduces First Enterprise Feed Server Appliance

Attensa Announces Public Beta of the First RSS Reader to Intelligently Prioritize RSS Feeds in Order of Importance to the Reader

Take a look at our new Web site update. You  can find detailed Attensa Feed Server information here and you can download the beta of Attensa for Outlook 1.5 here.

Attensa and KnowNow on RSS in the Enterprise Podcast

Charlie Wood interviewed Matthew Bookspan, Attensa's Director of Product Management and KnowNow's CTO Ron Rasmussen for his first podcast. It’s solid overview on the state of the enterprise RSS market, how companies are using RSS and the road ahead.

The audio makes everyone sound like they are in a Warner Brother’s cartoon but stick with it.

 You can listen here.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 Public Beta - RSS reader prioritizes RSS feeds based on what's important to you

At Syndicate in New York we gave a preview of Attensa for Outlook 1.5, the first version of Attensa for Outlook that uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and articles you find most interesting to the top. We said the public beta would be announced in June. We were off by about two weeks.

We are opening the public beta today and we’d like to invite you to give Attensa for Outlook a try.

Download the beta here.
You can download a getting started with 1.5 guide here
You can see screenshots here.

Attensa’s predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process RSS articles. By constantly analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to you. Feed priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of attention is processed.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 lets you choose how you want your feeds and articles presented.

Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you subscribe to.

Articles can be read in order of importance based on:

• Priority – This view uses Predictive Ranking to intelligently predict which subscriptions and articles will be most important to you at any given time.
• Favorites – Articles are displayed based on which subscriptions are read most frequently and consistently. In addition to viewing prioritized list based on AttentionStream analysis. You can manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.
• Date - This view displays articles based on the most recently updated newsfeeds.

Of course, you can also read their articles using a standard Outlook view.

If Outlook is the first application you open in the morning and the last one you close at night, you need Attensa for Outlook, the RSS reader designed for business users looking for an easy to use, secure RSS reader for Outlook that helps track and monitor critical business information… automatically.

Participate in the beta - Give and Get

Active contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the finished product.

Once you experiment with Attensa for Outlook you'll probably have suggestions for features and improvements. We've set up an Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta forum where you can post bug reports and provide feedback.

Attensa at Supernova in Second Life & Real Life

On Thursday evening  at Supernova, the real world and the virtual world can watch Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, explain in five minutes why the AttentionStream technology and products we are building matter. It's all part of the Supernova Connected Innovators showcase and gala created in collaboration with TechCrunch.

If you have a Second Life account you can catch streaming video of Craig's pitch in the Supernova Lounge.

You can keep up on the Supernova happenings in the Supernova media center and you can access the Supernova blog, wiki and more at the Supernova Community Connection.