Attensa

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."

Flog Blog: Goodbye Bookmarks!

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

P.S. My boss made me write this.

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 for Outlook 1.5 on Performancing - "All Smart and Stuff"

Chris Garrett on Performancing says the new version of Attensa for Outlook 1.5 with the river of news and AttentionStream predictive ranking that automatically prioritizes your Web feeds based on their importance is “all smart and stuff.”

He sums up his first take with “If you are an outlook user like me it is well worth trying out. I wouldn't be without it now.”

You can try the beta free for 60 days. Active contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the final product.

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.

"Making Corporate RSS Dreams a Reality" - Somewhat Frank on the Attensa RSS Server

We met Frank Gruber at Syndicate in New York in May and last week our Director of Product Management, Matthew Bookspan, brought Frank up to date on our RSS server plans. He's posted an overview on Somewhat Frank covering RSS applications, how an appliance approach simplifies installation and how having a central access point for receiving and distributing internal and external feeds uses bandwidth efficiently.

Thank you Frank.

The Growth in RSS - The Fire Hose is Getting Connected

Jupiter Research has a report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS" by Greg Dowling. Currently 29 percent of large companies ($50 million + in annual revenues) publish content via RSS. That number is projected to jump to 63% by the end of 2006. That's just six months away.

The report's recommendation's include, "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."

If you're one of the companies making the move to RSS, talk to us about lowering the barrier for feed management and deployment while helping users control the flow of the inevitable RSS fire hose. It's what Attensa is all about.

The State of Enterprise 2.0

Three articles caught my attention this week and together they create a snapshot of the current state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0.

The first is BusinessWeek's CEO's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 written by Rob Hof. It's a terrific overview with examples of how innovative companies are using blogs, wikis, search and RSS to improve customer communications, overcome information overload and streamline collaboration. The article concludes with an observation by Tim O'Reilly that companies who embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies will outperfrom those who don't.

Next I read Enid Burns' piece on Executives Slow to See Value in Corporate Blogging on ClickZ. In a survey with 150 senior executive from Fortune 1000 companies only 5 percent said they see corporate blogging as a communications medium; 3 percent see it as a brand-building technique; and less than 1 percent see it as a sales or lead-generation tool. Many respondents doubt the credibility of blogs as a communications tool (62 percent); brand-building (74 percent) and a sales or lead generation channel (70 percent). Robbin Goodman, EVP and partner at Makovsky & Company, the firm that released the study, said in what may be the understatment of the week, "There is a learning curve that needs to take place." Robbin also points out "The benefits of blogging for a business can significantly outweigh possible risks."

I also listened to David Berlind's podcast Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never Heard of Them. He turns the table on a technology tradeshow by interviewing the attendees instead of the exhibitors. His conclusion, technology executives who are beginning to explore these new technologies and tools are extremely clear on why they need to embrace the newer technologies but they're just not sure what those technologies are.

Taken together, the articles are a clear indication that companies including Attensa need to do a better job explaining the benefits of adopting our technologies. They also point out that technology executives who embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools early can have a significant competitive advantage.