Craig's Lemonade

Attensa joined by TouchStone with another take on Attention

Like some 90 thousand or more folks (according to FeedBurner stats) I monitor the TechCrunch blog through RSS subscription. Late last night I ran across this post by Marshall Kirkpatrick who Mike has pulled in to help monitor and report on this web 2.0 world evolving around us. Marshall covered new entrant Touchstone and their beta of their consumer facing "attention engine." I was made aware of touchstone some time ago and read the blog of its founder occasionally, Chris Saad, though I hadn't looked for a while....until the TechCrunch coverage.

And I did post this reply in the comments (and fixed some typos here):

" “First Attention Management Engine” …ummm, I don’t think so. But, it looks kinda cool though.

“Information overload” is indeed a problem and has been our focus at Attensa for some time now. As our name implies, our “attention engine” is the core of our IP. We clearly have a different approach than touchstone from a business model perspective, but we agree with muc of the “manifesto.”

Attensa has invested literally millions over the past several years on our attention engine technologies, with some work dating back to 2000. While we agree on the requirement of client side attention engines (like the one that communicates with and is in Attensa for Outlook 1.5) we believe it is equally important that this capability be buttressed with a massively scalable server side infrastructure to glean the same attention benefits for the community at large (or affinity groups) for intelligent priortization and recommendation. Doing this with very large amounts of transient meta data - in real time - is very, very complex. And, obviously, we believe, very very useful.

Incidentally, RSS just happens to be the first data type we are utilizing to enable our customers to cut down on information overload. The “first attention management engine” was shipped a long time ago - by Attensa. We didnt say anything for a while but did unveil the existence of the technology at Gnomedex in summer 2005 surrounding our “attentionstream” technology. It handles instantaneous syncing for us but in the background it is monitoring literally hundreds of detailed behaviorial characteristics and, btw, clickstreams are hardly the most interesting or useful mecahnism for deriving attention value. For ad targeting, MAYBE, for attention, NO.

In any event, welcome to the show Touchstone, we’ve been carrying this bag solo for some time now. "

Attensa is focused on business, enterprise business more specifically, and recommendation and prioritization are priorities. Further, while our "Attention Engine" is a well-functioning client side app running on hundreds of thousands of desktops, the real value of what we call attention streams are best realized when applied across users and groups. The Attensa Feed Server is the first such implementation of our server-side attention engine and I'm happy to report that it was installed (as an appliance) in the data center of a Fortune 500 company just last week and working beautifully! Stay tuned for more info on that...

Lastly, TouchStone's Saad has also commented that their offering is a companion to RSS readers. He is spot on with this too, to a point. Long term, I'd love for Attensa to not have to do the actual readers, but to create the necessary attention data and deliver the optimal user experience - in real time - it is a necessity for now. Outlook 2007 and its RSS? It is a DREAM for us, but I'll save that for another post. We are licensing our technology to others are in in some exciting discussions, but our business model (for the time being) is not in the web 2.0 "mash-up" genre. We are doing some very complex math on a massive scale (client and server side) to make all of this work without end user intervention - such as creating rules, filters, or manual overrides. Client-side only engines are the small part of an exciting equation, or at least that's my view.

The net, net is that attention is getting more attention. For consumers (web 2.0) and for business (enterprise 2.0.) "Are you paying attention?"

P.S. More posts soon from me on Microsoft's impact, open XML spec for attention, and where Attensa is going (not just RSS readers...)

Technorati Tags: Attensa, Attention, Enterprise RSS, microsoft outlook, Touchstone, Marshall Kirkpatrick, RSS, TechCrunch, Touchstone, Web 2.0

OSCON and Open Source in Oregon

O'Reilly's OSCON is in town, and it is looking more and more like the metro area of Portland, Oregon is becoming ground zero for the open source movement. CNN was here a few months back according to the Oregonian. Just a few of the groups in our state active in the community include Oregon State University's OSL, Beaverton's OSDL and OTBC, and even the SAO. That said, the Always On Summit conference is running this week too down at Stanford and of course open source is a hot topic. Dan Farber covered the open source session on his "between the lines" blog (which incidentally is required reading for software executives in my opinion.)

I'm not sure how we will participate in this revolution at Attensa, but I have been thinking about it. While we are using open source technologies for our server appliance, we are not clear how or if we should offer some component of our core technologies to take advantage of the clear benefits becoming apparent.

Tags: open source, OSCON, SAO.org, OSDL, OTBC

When an Intern blogs, it matters

Perusing my Technorati favorites I noticed under my "attensa" keyword watch a new post about Attensa and Outlook 2007 - and was pleasantly surprised that is was in fact written by one of our summer interns Chris Chamness! This is a small example of how blogs can influence and inform when they originate from anywhere in a company, not just the marcom department or the corner office. Blogs are working for businesses of all shapes and sizes, this is just one tiny example. Thanks Chris.

Tags: Attensa, Outlook 2007

Enterprise RSS and the new Attensa Feed Server

Today we formally announced the first iteration of our Enterprise RSS Server - The Attensa Feed Server. It is an appliance offering and can be installed very quickly. While the press release does not state it I think it's obvious that we will offer it in whatever form customers want...we just started with the appliance because it was the simplest, least costly, and quickest way for customers to get a RSS proxy server into their data center. That said, and this is not an announcement, but we will offer the Attensa Feed Server first as an appliance, then as installable software, and later as a service (SaaS.) BTW we also today announced the open public beta of our Attensa for Outlook 1.5.

Though we are the new kids on the block having just announced our server, our experience with pilot customers has been different than our competitors it seems. Really different. Both Greg and  VC Brad Feld have commented on their customers not wanting an appliance - or at least "preferring" installable software. Hmmm. All of the pilot customer installs of our appliance, coincidentally, have come on the heels of their rejection of conventionally installable software. In some cases these customers had fiddled for weeks, not days, attempting in vain to install the software and just "get the damn thing to work." The Attensa appliance takes a scant few hours to set up and get running...not days...not weeks...hours.

Also worth noting is that our appliance is far more affordable since we use Linux and open-source technologies, so there is no need for the customer to have to buy other software or tamper with their current software investments to get our appliance easily, quietly, and rapidly  into their data center. TCO baby, TCO. From the press release:

"The turnkey appliance is deployable in less than three hours and resides behind the firewall ensuring all data is kept private. It is a Linux-based system utilizing Java, TomCat and Apache. The appliance uses an open source database for its data store and can be optionally integrated with Microsoft Active Directory for user and group information, and with Microsoft Exchange for feed delivery via Outlook and other Exchange clients."

While it is not my personal style or our company's policy to articulate in detail our "roadmap" publicly, like Greg has posted a few times now for NewsGator, we do share it in depth with important partners and prospective customers under NDA. As one might suspect there is considerable overlap with our product line and NG's and thus there is similarity with our roadmap. Our technology approach is very different, however; utilizing a single code base across clients, an un-tethered RSS aggregation engine, and all of it buttressed with deep infrastructure based on handling massive amounts of transient attention meta-data - in real time. Further, RSS is just another data type to us, not the end-all. So, there's a hint to where we're going I suppose.

Short term we are in fact competing with both NewsGator and KnowNow, although probably more directly with KnowNow from a focus perspective since we both target business exclusively (as opposed to publishers through private label offerings or that of the general consumer like NG, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) What about competing with Microsoft on the RSS front? Not so much. Microsoft will be handling the basic plumbing sufficiently we believe (as I am sure my contemporaries do) but more important than this is their impact on RSS acceptance. Microsoft will no doubt radically raise the awareness of RSS and slowly gain loyal users of RSS through Vista/IE7/Outlook07 on a massive scale. The need for enterprise solutions will quickly become obvious far beyond the early, but rampant, interest of F500 customers we are already seeing today.

Tags: Attensa, Attention, Microsoft Outlook, Enterprise RSS, RSS, KnowNow, NewsGator, Attensa Feed Server, RSS Appliance

Open Source On The Brain

Over the past several years, and especially over the past couple of months, I've been trying to better understand this whole open source thing. I've been to conferences and even heard Kim Polese's pitch on why we need SpikeSource in Las Vegas not too long ago. I have several perspectives but the most dominant one is that of an ardent capitalist. Do i need to apologize? For the past 21 years I have lead or at least been present as scores of really smart people created some amazing products with real value and then (gasp) SELL those ideas to people (a.k.a. customers) who also recognized and appreciated the value. We called this "the software business."

OK, sure, the business models have all changed and continue to change but I never thought we'd all start doing this for free! Well, as much as the whole thing still annoys me because I am still in the camp that believes higher education researchers and Microsoft-haters started the whole thing out of spite. Of course, now I am a bit wiser and I am starting to see why this is all happening. I am on the executive committee of Oregon's Software Association (SAO) and we have been actively discussing how open source fits with our mission and affects our members for some time now - to no conclusion of course. Further, Oregon is quickly becoming Open Source Ground Zero ever since Linus T. moved to town (Beaverton) and park at our OSDL. Apparently even our state government is going to invest a few million dollars in some open source thing - for the jobs of course. Huh? Lastly, O'Reilly's OSCON is due here soon too.

So, what to do at our shop? At Attensa, we (for now) have no plans in this area but perhaps we should look more closely? Our value add is all about attentionstreams as a tool to mitigate information overload...not just selling an RSS proxy server. I think this "component" of what we are doing, as well as NewsGator for that matter, is essentially a commodity or will be soon. Hell, the RSS reader has already been commoditized for consumers. So, i keep asking myself, should Attensa just open source our proxy server and admin console? Let's be honest, syncing read status across multiple readers is hardly defensible long term. Plus, MSFT is doing most of the basics soon anyway with Vista/RSS/Outlook. We're focused on value-add and the business market segment (not consumers) at Attensa, so no matter what you will see some surprises from us over the next few quarters.

Open source. It's an idea worth exploring for Attensa...I think. Any thoughts? Write me, I have an "open" mind. ; )

Technorati Tags: Attensa, Attention, Enterprise RSS, IE7, microsoft outlook, Open source, OSCON, OSDL, spikesource, RSS, SAO

"River View" Round-up and our take at Attensa

While we've spent an inordinate amount of time with a new "river view" at Attensa, I didn't think too many folks paid a whole heck of a lot of attention to it. However, since Dave Winer brought it to the forefront here, over the past several days there have been several posts and active commenting and now I have been thinking about it even more. Scoble poses the question as does Orchant. Jupiter's Gartenberg does too. Dave Winer describes how he think it should work and why the "river view" is useful:

...Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up. To me, this more approximates the way I read a print newspaper, actually it's the way I wish I could read a print newspaper -- instead of having to go to the stories, they come to me. This makes it easier for me to use my brain's powerful scanning mechanism. It's faster, I can subscribe to more, and my fingers do less work.

Dave Winer likes the new EarthLink FeedReader even though his aggregator back in 1999 apparently did something similar. He writes:

...It apparently seems counter-intuitive even to very smart users like Mike Arrington, who said "Neither are cutting edge," of the two new Earthlink tools. As much as I adore Mike, the Earthlink reader has the essential feature all others (except mine) are missing. They show you the new stuff first. You can't see how important that is with just one use. Go ahead and import your OPML and go back tomorrow, and the day after, and you'll see what a huge difference it makes to have the computer figure out what's new for you.

Of course, so-called "River Views" are nothing new. Our Outlook reader did not have a scrolling river view until our 1.5 feature set was being solidified, but it was the clear, if not only, user interface that made sense for the roll out of our "predictive ranking" which is enabled by our AttentionStreams. I know this sounds like a nbunch of marketing jive but it is totally unique and worth a look. Here is a very specific page with call-outs to our new river view. Essentially the new river view displays three attention-derived views:

• 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.

This last view, "Date", is essentially what most "river of news" products deliver that you would find in other products (online or off.) That said, I agree with most folks (punits or otherwise) that it is of dubious value. This feature will likely be possible in Microsoft Outlook 2007, I haven't double checked and I am on a mac now so I'm just guessing. There is also some good discussion on other tactics such as according to Technorati's own Kevin Marks...just upload your OPML and search (avoiding deletions) or follow Andrew Grumet's lead and use radio time stamps (?) which has says is working well. Lastly is a winer post about the new EarthLink FeedReader and calling it an "important product." I haven't looked at it yet but appears that I will be soon...more later on that specifically but on the surface looking at their claims, "recent items" are less useful than your attention based behavior. Well, that's our position anyway.

NOTE: We ARE in public beta and many power users (with LOTS of feeds) will need to be patient importing your OPML to give our "smart river" a try. Upon the initial running of the app it will take a while for the attensa engine (which does not sit in outlook btw) to load all the feeds and set up...this is a one time event. Once you start using it the app it observes your behavior and there is no performance hit.

OK, it's time for me to chime in with an opinion rather than just discuss the Attensa "River." Despite the novel advances found in Attensa 1.5, I still think both views are useful - even a plain river of news that we have all seen to date. I have hundreds of feeds subcategorized into about 20 sub folders, and in some cases those subfoldfers have folders too. Like Scoble, I can go directly to a folder and read only the contents of one particular feed. This is a natural way of working and for those that take the time to set up Outlook's rules to auto categorize their content...it is VERY natural. The river of news can be a big time saver in a business environment, especially if it delivers some value add rather than being ONLY a "view." With Attensa's river view you can have just a river view of a sub-folder, which is how I am using it most of the time.

The email in-box (in any application) is set, by default, to what amounts to a most recent first, unsorted "river of news." We can probably all agree that without any filtering this can be overwhelming and perhaps the primary reason that e-mail is falling out of favor as a productivity tool (except for spam and viruses of course!)

Attensa for Outlook is our take at a first look at a "smart river." I'm anxious to watch how folks respond.

Perhaps too late, but end of ramble.

Tags: Attensa, Attention, Microsoft Outlook, River of News, Scoble, Dave Winer, Marc Orchant, EarthLink FeedReader, OPML, RSS

Scoble hasn't seen the new Attensa "river"

Today's "The River vs Folder RSS Approach" post by Scoble was timely. We just entered a public beta with our award-winning Attensa for Outlook 1.5. It includes an attention-laden new view, or "river of news" that delivers a prioritized stream of news based on your behavior. Social networking obviously will follow but with this first release it has amazed early users how just re-prioritizing based on behavior makes reading RSS so much more efficient.

There are dozens of other performance, feature, and ease-of-use reasons for using the Attensa offering over the others - but this new feature is completely unique in the field and is only the tip of the iceberg of the AttentionStream technology. For example, any folder can be selected for a river of news, not just the root. What does that mean? Well, I too read TechCrunch (sometimes multiple times a day) but Mike A's feed is in a folder with dozens of other industry analysts and thought leaders, so, if i choose I can show a prioritized river of news just on that folder rather than all feeds in all folders. It is hard to explain with words and the download is free a quick OPML import will demonstrate. So give it a try Robert, you may just change your mind!

Technorati Tags: Attensa, Attention, microsoft outlook, scoble, TechCrunch

Failure is Necessary

I've been involved as founder and/or CEO of several software companies over the past 21 years and have been fortunate enough to work with smart, energetic people that created innovative "first" offerings in several markets. These products were financially successful, solved real business problems, and more often than not garnered industry awards of excellence. First it was development tools (a visual user interface builder called "Prototyper" in the late 80s), client/server PIMs (Now Up-to-Date and Now Contact in the early 90s), and numerous offerings for creative professionals at Extensis (including a portal called creativepro.com.) What's the point? There were many, many failures at these businesses too. And I can say without regret that all of these failures were worth the risk and ultimately we all learned more from those failures than the commercial wins. I know I certainly did.

"How Failure Breeds Success" is a great feature article in the July 10 issue of BusinessWeek that showcases numerous "failures" by known industry leaders. I believe firmly that leaders must allow their people to fail by encouraging them to push the envelope. And, I practice what I preach.

We took (are taking?) a huge risk at Attensa with our technology strategy (and laser focus on business) and its clear to me that most folks who track our little corner of the industry have no idea how significant this risk really is (and admittedly don't care either.) We invested heavily up front in our technology both in infrastructure as well as in portable client-side architectures. And, as our name suggests, "attention" is the foundation of everything we are doing. It is our bet that truly useful, real-time utilization of attention meta-data cannot be "bolted on." That's it. That's our bet.

Without describing future products and/or strategies - or defining what true "attention" really is - let's just say we think our approach will deliver significant advantages for customers. I believe our investment in a true "platform" up front was the right move. I believe our early, deep work with massive quantities of transient meta-data we call "AttentionStreams" is a revolutionary development and will enable "game-changing" capabilities that will be extraordinarily difficult for our competitors to replicate.

So, the net-net in my book is that failure is necessary. If you haven't lived through a failed product/business/service then you simply aren't pushing hard enough. And in most businesses, especially software in my experience, the risk takers are the ones that usually win.