Craig's Lemonade

TechCrunch – Get your daily dose

I am a long time fan of the top technology blog called TechCrunch, and like any curious, aware, and informed technology CEO I read it daily. It’s a must. Actually, I read it more than daily as I have an icon on my iPhone that take me directly to it so if I’m stuck in line at Whole Foods, I generally will take a peek at the recent stories before I look even at my RSS feeds. I am a startup junkie, no doubt about it. Despite the economic doldrums that hammer us all day in the news – many would be surprised to learn that there is a lot of exciting new stuff coming at us like a fire hose and it is not all doom and gloom.

I still regularly ask folks around town (Portland) if they read/subscribe to TechCrunch and remain amazed at how many folks have either never heard of it, or, only read it occasionally.  While shamelessly showcasing Panels while I am at it, here are some but of course not all of the interesting tidbits in just the last 24 hrs from the venerable TechCrunch:

• Apple, sans Steve Jobs, featured long time VP Phil Schiller and today has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. The Macworld Expo keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. This year was a bunch of new software, a 17” MacBook Pro, and the removal of DRM from iTunes. More…
• Otalo, a vacation rentals search engine site, was just launched and looks impressive. What surprised me about this TC article is that some company called "HomeAway" raised $250 Million (with a valuation of a billion. Vacation rentals, who knew? More...
• Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, and others, reportedly streamed 180 million hours of premium video last year to 55 million viewers. More…
• Pandora, a free personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception today released Pandora 2.0. According to TechCrunch the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent). More…
• Intel reportedly isn’t happy about 12 Inch NetBooks, according to TechCrunch’s editors, who claim that new models from the likes of Dell, Samsung, and others are becoming more popular with consumers despite their serious limitations. More...

So, there’s five stories yesterday from TechCrunch. Sure there are other stories, and there are many other great tech sites, but for light, fun, informed, and a steady stream of tech news. I'm thinking of doing this once a week with the top web 2.0/software stories for my readers. But in the mean time, visit and/or subscribe to it.

ReadWriteWeb is in this same category of "must read" - I'll post about that useful and more technically oriented blog soon.

P.S. The article is much more useful with Panels, don't you think?

Panels v 1.0, circa 1999

It started here, with the nutrition panel, in 1999.

It was actually the winter of 1999 to be exact, and it was around the time I shook hands with the CEO of ImageX (then a high flying newly public company) to sell my company – Extensis, for about $140 million. Extensis also started and owned CreativePro.com, the first portal for the creative professional market segment. This is important for the story, as you see Extensis/CreativePro.com had grown to be an industry leading, profitable $24 million business selling graphics software to creative professionals all over the world. Funded by Adobe Ventures and H&Q Ventures (now Granite Ventures), we sold to the exact same customers as Adobe and, like them, had millions of users. It was a lot of fun, we built great products and kicked-ass.

This was the same time that the new bubble bible Industry Standard dominated the conversation in our industry. Back then, and for those who didn’t get it or are too young to remember, this magazine was often ½” thick and made it very clear that the web was taking over. “Creative Professionals” in particular were being affected so it dominated my thinking. Print was moving to the web in a big way, banner ads were the rage, and our customers were the ones creating them. We all have our own recollection of what happened next with Internet advertising, but what’s important for the story here is that we recognized as many have since 1999 that banner ads were wrought with problems and the industry needed a solution.

Knowing that I had the proverbial “desk by the door” having just signed to sell my company, I got a lot more serious about solving the “problems with internet advertising.” Dissecting a lot of research available at the time from Jupiter and others, and having a lot of conversations around our proposed solution, we distilled the “problem” down to two main, directly related, reasons why Internet (banner) ads didn’t work:

1)    There isn’t enough information about the ad to cause the user to act
2)    Even if there is enough information, the user doesn’t want to “detour”

We developed the “panel” to solve these two problems for any ad of any size from any network. The same problem still exists today, and though some ads are more targeted, these two keys problems persist. The nutritional panel was and remains our model and inspiration. We figured, and tested the hell out of it too, that if people could find out the who/what/where/when/why etc, without clicking or being interrupted – everybody would benefit! Specifically, users would get the info that want/need without leaving the page, Publishers could keep users on the page, and lastly the Advertisers’ ads would ultimately work better. Yes I know there are rollover from Pointroll, and others, we tested all of this before all of that in 2001/2002.

This is what panels looked like then vs. what you see today (examples on this blog.)
This is demo of a panel coming off of a BMW banner ad for the x5, back then our panel was the same width as banners by default. Today our panels are standard white, much smaller, and tabbed rather than specific regions as you see here - though we had tabs then too. You'll also note the "call to action" box on the bottom right, which have not yet exposed in the "new" panel.

We finished the system and rolled it out privately in 2002. And, it worked great, really great in fact. For now I’ll spare the details, but we delivered panels as a component of national campaigns for BusinessWeek, InFocus, and Adidas. Results were amazing. But, investors didn’t care. And we needed them. You see as we rolled it out the bubble had burst and we ushered in the “internet advertising nuclear winter.” We needed about $5 million basically just to turn on the system and run in for a quarter or two. There were just no funds available. “Internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?!” I heard this 20 times at least from VCs up and down Sand Hill Road and Highway 101. So, despite stellar results, proven success with real campaigns, there were no funds to be had. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

So, we mothballed the system, and the team and I started another company now called Attensa – focused on Enterprise RSS. We raised a little over $12 million for it over several years, which is not nearly enough for the enterprise business incidentally, but we built a best in class offering nevertheless. I left in April 2007 to focus on resurrecting “panels.”

“We’re getting the band back together”

The team has worked together on a few dozen projects over the past 20 years at Now Software, Extensis, Attensa, and Panels and our software is in use by millions. The guys have won a lot of awards too including various editors’ choice, eddy’s, people’s choice and even an “Apple Design Award.” Panels mainly consists of my long-time collaborator Eric Hayes (CTO), Eric Barnes (BizDEV), Russ Hayes (Web Czar), Kevin Fox (Product Manager/New Guy), and several other all-stars that we'll just have to call the horn section for now.

Panels Network a.k.a. “panels” is what we are now sharing in our public beta and rather than waste the space here just check out the web site at www.panels.net where there is a video demo. We have improved, streamlined, and retrofitted the technology to make blogs considerably more useful than ever before. Early stats and feedback has been phenomenal.

The objective of panels is identical to the original vision of satisfying the readers desire for real-time information, without interruption and doing so in a standard, predictable user interface. Panels is a rich platform, built to scale, and is already making people’s blog reading lives better.

It’s great getting the band back together.

OK, panels was early, sure, but it is by no means too late!

Here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent all of our shareholders about a year ago. 2003 was indeed a very tough time as we were just “too early.” I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve entered markets “late” and “just-in-time,” and with Panels we were simply too early. When I say too early, we were not too early for the market, we were too early for venture investors. To be clear, we finished and tested the platform, but the internet advertising bubble had not recovered.

What a difference 6 years makes: Back in 2002, our solution was self-serve (users will never go for it), all text by default (boring), required a line of javascript on web page (too hard, nobody will go for that!), and of course – “internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?” Google , especially with AdWords, was able to capitalize on all of these things – we weren’t, but now all of these things are understood and expected. Now, the timing is right for panels. Thanks Google for making all test, self-service, user-first, java script enabled technologies commonplace!

Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Panels shareholders early this year on our "timing":

...
Then vs. Now – When we suspended operations in early 2003, we had exhausted all means to continue, despite the fact that we completed development and deployed the system with astounding results. From 2000 – 2003, Panels Network essentially invented, or at least brought to market first, numerous capabilities that are now industry standard practices. As you recall, the technology bubble had burst, and internet advertising was perceived as “broken,” with investors leery of anything that touched the category.  Google and other companies like it the world over have proven that contention very, very wrong.

I am often asked, “Is the technology and opportunity still valid?” Well, I can confidently and unequivocally announce to you…Panels is now more than ever an opportunity of a lifetime. Substantial and numerous favorable conditions exist today that made it essentially impossible to move forward in 2003, including;

• Infrastructure Expenses: The capital outlays associated with the hardware/software/broadband requirements and associated personnel were too rich for most investors six years ago. We had earmarked ~$5MM to basically turn the system on in 2002. Time and progress has provided the company, and the industry in general, with a 20:1 improvement. Today our system runs on the “Amazon Cloud” and the related costs are “pay as you go” and in the $250K range in totality.

• Constituents Behavior: Consumers, Advertisers, and Publishers were skeptical of many technologies and practices proposed by the company in 2002 that have since become commonplace. The standardized, all-text, self service, one-size-fits-all internet advertising popularized by Google over the past 6 years was core to how our system worked (then and now.) Now, all constituents are familiar with the technologies that enable how panels work, such as javascript, and as a result we have several partners engaged for roll-out that have not required laborious missionary-selling.

Panels Beta 2008 and beyond

Panels is a massively scalable platform designed to give users a standard “nutrition panel” for any object on the internet – starting with breathing life into your blog’s links for businesses, schools, and non-profits. Users love them, they don’t interfere, and they just work! It takes a few minutes to add to any blog and automatically make it, well, amazing!

Our javascript implementation for blogs (and the widget) represents just the tip of the iceberg, as we will be rapidly extending the platform in many directions. As we move the system forward we see a lot of utility and potential with mobile platforms, rich data sources, plug-in clients, and more.

Panels is a game-changer. And we think you'll agree that blogs are much better with them than without them. There’s no reason to not give panels a try.

Please drop me a line any time with thoughts, ideas, comments at [email protected]

 

Information overload in business!? Web 2.0 in the enterprise inevitable?! No shit.

So, despite being off on another project since April of this year, I still get my RSS  feeds and google alerts for anything touching the enterprise RSS space, attention (which is also gaining some steam), Attensa (which I and some pals co-founded a few years back), NewsGator, and KnowNow. I was surprised and thrilled to see that finally the media is paying attention to what has been going for years - yes years -  in the enterprise with regard to RSS. There were no solutions until NewsGator and Attensa showed up with our respective Enterprise Solutions. It is a big opportunity.

So, in the PC World article entitled "Companies Tap RSS to Tame Info Overload", Juan Carlos Perez hits the nail on the head about what is going on. Finally.

"The first problem we see addressed regularly with enterprise RSS systems is e-mail overload. Most knowledge workers these days are just about completely fed up with e-mail," said Oliver Young, a Forrester Research analyst.

Also in the past week Network World's Jim Duffy informs his enterprise readers that "Web 2.0 inevitable in the enterprise...", and describes how that with rampant user-driven utilization of web 2.0 technologies, if they are not careful they are going to get caught with their pants down....

"Companies should establish strict guidelines for employees' use of  social-networking platforms, RSS feeds, wikis and mash-ups, the panel participants said. Companies must consider the content and amount of information employees are sharing on easily accessible Web pages."

I have been pitching and explaining this for years, and unfortunately, the main people that don't get that this revolution is happening are INVESTORS. It guess now that is so obvious perhaps it will loosen up investments. But to be clear, e-mail is only part of the problem, RSS is in heavy use in pockets of enterprise companies already, independent of any e-mail overload problems. In the past I posted here a lot on the subject including this one about year ago about the "stellar demand of enterprise RSS." There are many other similar posts.

I am no longer affiliated operationally with Attensa, but with a vested interest I do keep my ear to the ground. Attensa apparently has finally closed a seven figure deal with a major company who will be deploying the enterprise solution to thousands of seats worldwide. Great job folks! Attensa beat out its competitors hands down...and it it only took TWO YEARS. Reportedly other purchase orders are now finally rolling in despite the lack of meaningful marketing spending by the company. This is a clear sign to the meek that the market is "real." That said, this may be a fast-paced, white-hot, changing-all-the-rules Web 2.0 world to many in the media and with the conference-going digerati, but conventional, proven, enterprise-wide sales methodologies are still alive and well - and are a long haul.

Still puzzling to me is Lotus and their new, strange and sometimes cool, Lotus Connections. While interesting they totally missed the mark. The research even says so, so not just my opinion. I wonder if they even spoke to any actual customers. How the hell did they decide to include tagging, blogging, and a wiki environment, and not enterprise RSS. Go figure. SpikeSource's Suite 2.0 got the feature set right, but it is a cobbled together "frankensuite" (as the folks at Jive Software called it.) Incidentally, s far as Jive goes, their ClearSpace is worth a look for installations who want a rapidly deployed, affordable suite for collaboration (though like Lotus Connections it is sans RSS enterprise capabilities.)

As far as Enterprise RSS via Suite 2.0, I dont see big business biting other than those early, early in the cycle that realize there is nothing else out there from one vendor that does just the critical stuff...that said, and to make matters worse, Suite 2.0 isn't even on one platform, as most of Suite 2.0 is apparently on the LAMP stack, Attensa competitor NGES is all .net. Ugh.

Looks like Enterprise RSS is here. Some of us already knew. But hey, ROCK ON!

Technorati tags: Attensa, Attention, NewsGator, KnowNOw, Lotus, Web 2.0, Jive Software, Lotus Connections, Suite 2.0, Enterprise RSS, NGES, Attensa Enterprise Server

Dave Winer thinks FeedBurner is in trouble. Me too.

I have been a FeedBurner fan for a while now, and, I think I still am. Unfortunately though, its because there is no viable alternative. Google had earlier acquired the only other similar service, MeasureMap, in early 2006, which near as I can tell was the only other game in town - then or now. I posted a few months back on my so called love for FeedBurner, and I recommend it all of the time to folks, but Dave Winer's two posts on the subject made me think about it a little more clearly. But first, the posts.

Winer's first post was spot on, in my opinion. I have had these same thoughts and similar conversations with others over the past 6 months or so. There is new FUD out there now since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner, and with good reason, and Winer articulates it clearly in this post;

So now someone at Google "owns" Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say "Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that's the one most people use." And by the way, more and more that's true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must.

The second post ponders how "doesn't work as well" can lead to "not at all"...

"It's quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn't be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that "prefer" other Google products. I've never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn't think that way, sorry to say."

I think businesses of all shapes and sizes, especially larger commercial publishers and the G2000 at large, need to take a very serious look at replacing FeedBurner (just to be prudent) given the relentless focus of Google on monetizing properties with targeted advertising. Businesses can still opt out and get their data, and I'm betting many of the will. In the meantime, I like FeedBurner and not going anywhere - because I can't they are still the only game in town!

What would take me away? an iPhone. What you say? Yes, an "iPhone." It's an analogy. So let me put it this way. I've had several Treos over the years, and, loved them all for the most part. Thankfully, several years back Steve Jobs and some other people at Apple tried the Treo too. They in turn realized that there was 1) a lot wrong with the Treo and 2) there was the potential to do a lot more. I mean, A LOT more. Now the Treo feels like an 8 track tape player.

FeedBurner will be "Appled" just like the Treo was. There are just too many ways to make it all work better.

Technorati tags: Dave Winer, FeedBurner, Google, MeasureMap, RSS

RSS and Web Analytics in a 2.0 world. Its attention.

A few weeks back a gave about an hour talk at the annual Software Association of Oregon (SAO) annual retreat. It was frankly a last minute addition to the agenda, but seemed like a poignant time in our association's history to jostle the old guard about what it means to be a software company in 2007. Great examples of new web 2.0. software companies I discussed included SplashCast, Jive Software, Aboutus.org, and others. There are no doubt dozens of budding new software companies that have yet to be discovered. Unfortunately, the SAO is the last to learn of them, in fact I learned about SplashCast from TechCrunch (which most folks at the retreat wrote down as if they had never heard of it.) So, what about web analytics in a 2.0 World?

Thinking and talking about this paradigm shift at our annual retreat, combined with my job as CEO of Attensa (where we have our own analytics component for the enterprise), it got me thinking. I believe the web analytics space is one of the more interesting established software markets to be profoundly impacted by web 2.0 than any other. I firmly believe this for three reasons;

1. RSS is a serious marketing tool for businesses of all sizes and industries and will become significant. More progressive emarketers are already seeing the benefits both for replacing/augmenting email programs and for distributing information to customers by broadcasting (rather than requiring a return to a marketers web site for information.) I believe companies will demand integrated measurement tools for RSS as through as those for email, advertising, and web site analytics.
2. Delivering the analytics TO the customer just makes sense. Currently, essentially all of the major players in this space require going to a dashboard/portal user interface. This is so 2005. Users at all levels, consumer and business, are proving that push vs. pull is the preferred means of discovering information. Industry watchers are already wondering why RSS feeds aren't used yet by the major players in the web analytics space. Using RSS as a means to distribute Web analytics updates/reports is so obvious it is inevitable, and perhaps new standards such as Microsoft's SLE, will be the best way for companies to deliver this type of information easily. I for one would like to get my FeedBurner stats this way, and I'm not alone.
3. Measuring the user is changing, and in the future its 'attention' not click residue. What is important for marketers, then and now, is getting the best read on their current or prospective customers habits. And, of course, to get them to buy. Clickstreams and clickthroughs are not the end-all, just a tiny part of the whole. Consider the phenomenon of end user tagging, which last month's PEW Internet & American Life Project report confirmed that already 28% of online Americans have used the Internet to tag content. This is pure "attention" and far more useful overtime than clickstreams or clicks.

Simon Wakeman, an industry consultant, discusses his experience using Google Analytics, StatCounter, and FeedBurner on his blog. And of course points out that he cant get RSS feeds from any of them. Steve Rubel has discovered a new service called Clicky that may be a peek at web 2.0 analytics. I have not tried it yet. Also worth noting, Google announced it will publish stats on its Google Reader and there is some chatter on the labs blog. I have a feeling all the major services will publish these stats over time and, accordingly, marketers will care.

As for Attensa, our Enterprise Server (AFS) has an analytics component, but it is focused primarily at behind the firewall use of RSS feeds for business users. We have no current plans to offer RSS for large companies that are adding RSS as a medium for communicating to customers. At least not yet.

In my opinion, the conventional web analytics software firm of the future will need to focus on the interactivity of customers across all media, not click residue. Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: SAO.org - Attensa - Attention - Attensa Feed Server - Web Analytics - RSS Analytics - Web 2.0 - Web2.0 - Splashcast - Jive software - Microsoft SLE - FeedBurner - PEW - Google Analytics - Google Reader - Simon Wakeman - Steve Rubel - tagging - StatCounter - Clicky - RSS - RSS Marketing

Attensa Feed Server 1.1, the first of many announcements coming your way

Our folks have been busy down in engineering, and in marcom too for that matter, and today we have begun a flurry of announcements. First up, Attensa Feed Server 1.1, and Scott's post on it here. The biggest news is that the 1.1 release is available as an appliance as always, but we've added its availability as software, and as a hosted solution. Pricing is not yet available. Anyone comparing our offerings to others I encourage a close examination of TCO, and to give our sales folks a call, our stuff is nimble and can be up and running in under an hour. Stay tuned for new product announcements, technology announcements, and more over the next several weeks.

Also note our positioning shift at Attensa. Like our contemporaries NewsGator and KnowNow, and with more evidence of enterprise adoption of web 2.0 technologies such as FastForward's appearing daily, we are backing off the "information overload" message. "RSS for enterprise 2.0. Putting web feeds to work" is where we are going with our marketing message.

At first I thought NewsGator's recent press release about the impact of Microsoft's Vista/IE7 and RSS technology on the potential of RSS was a big "duh" but I must admit Greg is spot on - and a well done release too. Read it. Then there's Outlook 2007. If anyone out there is trying to put a few hundred RSS feeds into Outlook 2007, be prepared to be disappointed. Ugh. And this is before one even starts to think about the impending .pst bloat that will follow soonthereafter. Attensa's new Outlook 2007 savvy version is around the corner, has been rewritten, and the new attention features and performance are indeed impressive. Look for the public beta soon. I'll bet one of the biggest discussions enterprise IT folks will hear once this thing gets deployed will be "how do I turn Outlook's RSS feature off?!" Yes, Microsoft's RSS related announcements are great news for all of us in the space. Apple is doing the same of course, and the mail app has very basic RSS integrated into it too.

Technorati Tags: Attensa - attention - Attensa Feed Server - EnterpriseRSS - Enterprise RSS - Microsoft - Outlook 2007 - Microsoft Outlook - Enterprise 2.0 - KnowNow - NewsGator

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

"Blog Schmog" got me thinking about it all

OK, so I am already off to a pretty good start with some of my new year's resolutions. Its been well over a month since my last post, which incidentally addressed one of my new year's resolutions of backing off the annoyingly persistent use of my phone. Another resolution is to post here with more regularity. I am on my way to Orlando, Florida to participate in the 2007 IBM/Lotusphere annual shindig, before I left I decided to buy a book I stumbled across in the Portland airport about a contrarian view on the value and "truth" surrounding the blogosphere - and more specifically the ROI of blogging for business.

I write this at some thirty eight thousand feet having just finished Robert Bly's 2006 book entitled  Blog Schmog and it got me thinking. I guess that's the point, right? As CEO of Attensa, this Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 space is literally ground zero for drinkers of the "blogs are a marketing revolution" kool-aid. Bly's book calls BS on it as a direct marketing expert, and he has some good reasons why. I think he is a too negative on blogging, as most direct marketing purists might understandably be, but the book got me thinking about the ROI of blogging, setting clear goals for my blog, and not giving up on traditional, proven direct marketing techniques for the software business. As an aside, the style in which Bly writes reminded me of shooting it with my Father, so it kept my attention from take-off until I finished. I enjoyed the rose colored glasses view of the blogosphere via Naked Conversations last year, but for a contrast and with author Bly's cynicism set aside, I DO recommend reading Blog Schmog to understand a perspective through the more pragmatic eyes of the ROI focused direct marketer.

I need to digest it some more but for 2007 I have decided that I am going to focus more on the starting, financing, running, strategizing, competing and selling of software businesses on my blog - and probably less on attention and RSS. This is my fourth time through a software startup journey as a leader and I have learned and gone through a lot already with Attensa and we are just getting started!

Though not at the top of my list, I think this particular New Year's resolution of being more regular with my posts should make for a more useful and interesting blog. So drop me a line, and here's to a great 2007!

Technorati Tags: naked conversations - blog schmog - robert bly

Google Reader and bringing RSS to the mainstream....awesome.

The RSS Weblog has a thorough review of the Google Reader by Brad Hill as it stands today. On CNet, Rafe Needleman is enamored with it, and praised what seem like obvious features done half assed to me. Apparently the Google Reader could not read his NewsGator OPML file. My Attensa for Outlook opml export worked just fine by the way (with some 500 or so subs.) But I digress. At Attensa our online reader (which is a better implementation utilizing AJAX IMHO) is just a technology demo, as we are focused on the enterprise. In fact our enterprise product Attensa Feed Server powers it. Our new Portland pal Marshall covered the Google reader announce at Techcrunch.

The net, net from where I sit is...it's all good. The more folks exposed to RSS the better. Most of us in the biz think these readers will all be commoditized anyway - if they are not already. At least, I hope so! Yes, I am counting on it for Attensa's business model to flourish. Rock on Google, between this new reader and the new yahoo mail and the new windows live work...2007 is poised to be the year of RSS.

 tags: Google+reader, Attensa, NewsGator, rss, attensa+feed+server

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