Craig's Lemonade

Lotusphere 2007: Is Lotus Connections the real "Enterprise 2.0" McCoy?

What a difference a year makes, especially in LotusLand here in Orlando at Lotusphere 2007. Yesterday IBM formally introduced "Lotus Connections" to an enthusiastic and even surprised crowd. Here's the press release, the web site, and ZDNet's coverage. There were other announcements of course and there are breakout sessions on everything IBM/Lotus including Notes, Domino, and WebSphere. But, the excitement and focus is clearly around Connections. This is the first true "Enterprise 2.0" Suite. Focused around Social Networking, it is integrated from the ground up, very simple to learn and use, and can be used a la carte. The Five components are; Profiles (people), Communities, Blogs, Dogear (tagging), and Activities. I think it's really well done.

So, is this Lotus Connections vs. Suite 2.0?

Intel's Suite 2.0 (to be fair this is Intel Capital, not the software people at Intel behind it) will have a tough time against this offering - IMHO. While the two offerings are different, there is considerable overlap. The most important distinction is that this suite was built as an integrated solution from the get-go and even more importantly is built on one platform. S2 is from 4 or more vendors, cobbled together by SpikeSource, and contains components utilizing both LAMP and .NET platforms. And will reportedly run $150 - 200 per seat. I have no idea what IBM will be charging.

So why is our company here? Attensa is showing some exciting new things publicly for the first time. We are also seeing some faces light up to our attention-laden (auto-prioritizing) "river of news" aggregator sitting inside of Hanover (Lotus code name for next version of Notes) as well as inside of Lotus SameTime (their enterprise IM product) that has some 15 million users in the enterprise I am told. We've also seen strong interest in our Outlook 2007 savvy version too. More on all of this soon.

Technorati Tags: lotusphere+2007 - lotus+connections - suitetwo - attensa - attention - sametime - social+networking

Common Feed Store Sync...it's a feature not a product

So, like any exec who monitors competition and the category in general (using RSS of course), over the past several days a lot of hay has been made over the syncing of RSS to Microsoft's common feed store. My thoughts are, it's useful, but it's just not a big deal.

Attensa has had this capability for some time now, since IE7 beta 2. And the only reason it took that long is because we were waiting on the C++ APIs from Microsoft to enable it. NewsGator and others use the .net APIs and too many of our customers don't want (or flat out won't allow) the overhead that uses the .net framework on the desktop.

This bring me to another point, we've had fully functional IE and Firefox toolbars (windows) for some time too. Also, no .net, they're small and fast, and are just another thin interface that accesses our engine. You can read fully sync'd posts from the toolbar without any other clients installed if you want too. It is also probably the simplest interface and quickest means available for creating and viewing del.icio.us tags. Lastly, the autodiscovery is best of class too...finding all of the RSS feeds on a given page vs. just one.

Feed store sync is a simple, obvious feature, not a product, and I am genuinely happy for NG users that they have this now too. Outlook users that give NG and Attensa the Pepsi challenge will find other decisions obvious too - and not just because the new Attensa for Outlook is free.

CEOs not using RSS are irresponsible, lazy, or clueless

For years I have been an avid reader of trade publications, business books, business and tech magazines, etc. I firmly believe any current or aspiring CEO, and for sure any software/technology CEO, has to be to be successful. Luckily, I enjoy it and read as often as I can. Further, I don't enjoy or really have time for fiction (unless you count fairy tales and blue's clues.) I am now reading several books (yes I have a short attention span) and in particular I am about done with Scoble and Isreal's "Naked Conversations."

Whether monitoring competitors, keeping tabs on trends, reviewing the opinions of pundits and media, learning what folks think of your business, tracking user forums, exploring new products, technologies, markets, etc etc etc. There is no mistaking that RSS makes it so much more efficient to stay on top of things. Period. All CEOs will better serve their customers, employees, and shareholders if they embrace and utilize RSS. By the way, Venture Capitalists, also a no-brainer, so get with the program folks! There has never been a better tool to wade through more material and in less time. Last time there was such a paradigm shift in information consumption the creation of the Internet itself was responsible. I am amazed when I meet a seemingly motivated and informed person (or successful venture capitalist) that does not take advantage of it. And guess what? I met several CEOs and several VCs over just the past several weeks that have NO FRIGGIN' CLUE!

Raw "dumb" RSS (what we have today) is amazingly useful to be sure, but our vision at Attensa is to take it all to a whole new level by automatically re-prioritizing and even recommending RSS items based on your behavior and interests. Call it Attention, call it Gestures, but the how/who/what/where/when/why of things will work to your advantage in ways you can only now imagine. So stay tuned...

In the meantime, current and aspiring CXOs (yes all in the proverbial executive suite, not just the CEO,) get your butts in gear and embrace this new tool or get left behind.

P.S. I can cut some slack on not knowing what tagging is or why it's important. For now anyway.

Tags: attention, RSS, CEO, VC, Software Business, Naked Conversations

Morning DEMO 06 so far...Riya wins

Jeff Clavier's morning summary here for DEMO 2006 in Arizona. Standout for me this afternoon is... Riya

Riya is awesome and useful for anyone who has digital pictures. Beta is a few weeks out or so. You define who people are by selecting several examples and the service will go find all instances and automatically catalog. It also automatically discovers and converts text in photos (including even nametags on people's jackets as an example) into tags so you can categorize automatically and later easily find images. The Riya demo was impressive. One of the big guys will buy this one.

In the meantime my old company Extensis should license the engine and build into Portfolio (DAM). Perhaps Adobe would be an even better fit, but for professional photographers, seems obvious and useful to me. Maybe ononesoftware could build a plug-in for Photoshop to go along with their other commercial photographer offerings?

Attensa implication? well, we are just looking for more data that can be part of the attentionstream and any means of reliable automated tagging can only lead to improved results.

Tip of the iceberg - Attensa Outlook and Online

Today is a huge day for our company. After a long public beta period, with a bunch of dedicated folks working their collective butts off, this morning we are taking the wraps off of Attensa for Outlook (Free trial/$20), Attensa Online (Free), and even a redesigned and richer Attensa.com.

Also as part of this release today we are also unveiling a novel new approach to synchronization that leverages our AttentionStream technology and I believe significantly raises the bar in this area and will fundamentally alter user expectations. And yes we will expose an API soon, and we are significantly raising the bar there too. Note to del.icio.us users; we fully support delicious tags and our toolbar gives you the best user interface we know of for working with del.icio.us tags while you browse....that alone warrants a look!

We are all anxious to hear the feedback on our new products to be sure, BUT, what is most exciting about these product releases is that they represent just the tip of the iceberg. We have a slew of offerings that will soon follow that leverage our significant investments in infrastructure;

• Attensa Mobile is due later this quarter and is based upon the FreeRange offering but connected to our back-end. The biggest benefit of their approach over other offerings is that you can read your RSS offline rather than through slow clumsy browsers. Also, AttentionStream based Sync screams. Try it.
• Attensa Enterprise RSS Server will be available in Q2. We will also expose our product and services roadmap at that time.
• Attensa Toolbar which we introduced last summer is best in class with regard to finding multiple feeds on pages as you browse in IE or Firefox. The del.icio.us tags support makes it second to none - including the new IE7 capability in the beta Microsoft released Jan 31. The Toolbar is a reader in its own right and expect some cool stuff there too.
• Attensa Engine is a core foundational component of our client strategy. One of the biggest benefits of this engine today is that is does not bog down Outlook because it is an independent app that just communicates with Outlook. This is why our Outlook offering is so much faster and lighter than the status quo.

Attensa Outlook/Online and new AttentionStream Sync are the new performance leaders. Congrats and a big thank you to the team, the products look awesome! Now I need to finish getting ready for our board meeting on Thursday!

Microsoft buy NewsGator? Attensa has no API. C'mon Scoble!

Scoble penned a column for webpronews about this. Usually I keep quiet if other vendors are mentioned in the news, but since it stated "we have no API" I decided to write the legendary Microsoft blogger and part-time NG advocate directly. So I dropped Robert a private e-mail to inform him that we will soon release details of our API (with a simple subset that is compatible with NG's) and invited him to visit us an learn about what we are REALLY doing at Attensa. And, for the record, stringing together a bunch of disparate aggregation applications (or trying to duplicate them) is NOT what we are doing. In fact long term Attensa technology will likely be available for all of these apps (from NG or whomever) to help make them perform better through real time analytics...we are after all, an attention based infrastructure company.

In our view, perhaps we are miscalculating, market share doesn't mean much right now in the RSS reader world. It's too early. It's like when PageMaker 1.0 came out (it was $129 SRP by the way) and you needed an Apple LaserWriter to get B/W output out of it. Long story short we are still VERY left of the chasm - so to speak. As I have been preaching, we can't wait till Outlook 12 (and 13) and IE7 (and IE 8)make RSS ubiquitous so that our technology can benefit millions - not just the 50K to 100K early innovators. Oh yeah, Steve Jobs and co. won't sit still on this either so expect better RSS support from the Apple OS and their free Apps than whatever it is Vista/O12 will deliver (as usual.) Again, at Attensa, we can't wait.

Attensa has a deep and "attention-laden" API that we think developers and the enterprise will LOVE. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, whomever, hell even NG, we want to add value and make the experience as wonderful and as efficient as possible for the end user (aka "knowledge worker.") And, incidentally, there are hundreds of millions of these folks and they don't know or care about what happens left of the chasm. Don't get me wrong, it matters, just not that much just yet.

So, based on Microsoft's recent M&A history, I doubt it Robert. But, if so, that would be great for the Attensa technology foundation and its business strategy.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us, legitimizes tagging

So, I get back to my desk this eve and what do I learn? Yahoo buys upstart del.icio.us, and legitimizes tagging overnight!!! Syndicate SF is around the corner and this will no doubt be one of the biggest developments deserving of focused discussion. The tagging session will no doubt see a considerable increase in participants. Charlene Li (as usual) has spot-on observations about this development and her post includes several interesting links including for new tagging companies Wink and Raw Sugar.

Our Attensa for Outlook (which goes 1.0 beta on Monday) is not only compatible with del.icio.us, but our Firefox and IE toolbars are (near as we can tell) the best user interface out there for viewing existing, and creating new, delicious compatible tags. Further, we have built a virtual superset of the delicious tags engine at Attensa and see far more interesting opportunities in the enterprise with tagging than is being speculated now with consumers in so called “social networks.” Check it out, only Attensa for Outlook and our toolbars embrace del.icio.us tags! And for now it’s free!

At Syndicate we are also announcing our “AttentionStream” technology and social bookmarking “tags” are an exciting and useful invention. Yahoo has now helped legitimize their existence and should rapidly increase their adoption among mere mortals. Tags are an important component central to our vision at Attensa of utilizing massive amounts of transient metadata for the betterment of the user experience in real-time. Stay tuned....