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?

Attensa, Web 2.0, and the Merc

I just read the San Jose Mercury News article that was "catching up" with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington. The article was a quick Q&A about Web 2.0, his popular barbeques in Atherton, etc. Toward the end he is asked what is overhyped and of course the "RSS Area" is mentioned. Attensa's $9M series B is mentioned. SearchFox's demise is mentioned. Dave Winer's new reader is in there too. I also learned i am one of some 20,000 foks that regularly read his blog! Wow. But I digress.

I guess for the most part I agree with the "ridiculous" nature of interest in RSS. It is my job and our marcom folk's job to keep beating the drum on our positioning of focusing on information overload generated by RSS. We believe at Attensa that the current sources and volume of RSS is only the tip of the iceberg. Blogs and News Headlines helped relaunch RSS, but it is the expected pervasive use of RSS as a communications vehicle in the enterprise (and throughout the supply chain) that will drive massive use of RSS. Checkout basecamp, a collaborative web application, which allows participants to receive RSS updates of any changes or updates to a project. We think this type of use of RSS will dwarf blog updates and/or newsheadlines in the business world. That will cause consdierable information overload. At Attensa we aim to solve THAT problem with our AttentionStream technology.

Attensa often gets lumped in to these conversations about either Outlook 12 launching our business into obscurity or compares our client software to companies focused just on RSS aggregation. So it is up to me to keep beating the drum of "we can't wait till Outlook 12 it will be AWESOME for our business!" Lastly, and having been here before, I can honestly maintain we are still probably most like a stealth company. I write this because the core of our technology can be applied to a hell of a lot more than just RSS (and will be) and our business model has not been fully exposed either.

P.S. We have no interest in being a media company like some of our contemporaries. We ARE a conventional Client/Server/Infrastrucuture company. We intend to partner (via best of class synchronization and more) with the Yahoo/Google/MSN/Bloglines folks - not compete with them.

Attention has arrived

Attention has arrived!

What a difference a week makes! I spent most of last week in NYC and at Ad-Tech, the premier internet advertising conference, and was reminded of more exuberant times in 1999 before the bubble burst. The sold out conference in my opinion emanated an enthusiasm not experienced since those times, but for many of us the exciting part was not just the expansion of F1000 marketers’ dormant budgets but the willingness of these major brands in exploring RSS as an advertising vehicle ahead of the curve. It appears that nobody wants to be left out, and questions were rampant about the emerging RSS medium. Of course most of the interest was surrounding blogs, but by the next event all will surely be aware of the pervasive nature of RSS and how much more it is than just a means to get blog updates.

That said, and selfishly speaking on behalf of Attensa, you can’t get very far contemplating RSS as an advertising medium without running into the obvious benefits of attention metadata. Yes, it’s a mouthful to the uninitiated, but it seems this week a lot more folks are paying attention to attention.

Yes, attention has arrived…

• Steve Gillmor eats sleeps and breathes attention (as he sees it) as President of AttentionTrust.org. And he pokes fun at OPML champion Dave Winer.
• AttentionTech is focused on it exclusively in their podcasts
• Seth Goldstein’s RootMarkets just launched their beta and their business depends on it. I met Seth at his office a few weeks ago and their project looks really interesting. Check it out.
• Joshua Porter’s Bokardo, author of a web 2.0 focused blog I recently encountered, covers several interesting subject but a lot on attention data lately. Here is a great post entitled “why should I trust Microsoft with my attention data?” and another about AttentionTrust and its philosophy about why you should own your attention data. I just subscribed.
• Scoble has commented more frequently recently...you are probably already subscrtibed to his blog, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
• While “attention” was not used in the press releases or in commentary by its executives, Microsoft’s adCenter will certainly use attention in ways we have not yet seen by the ad networks. Here's a blurb on marketing vox about it if you hadn't heard.
• Though they are being their traditional sneaky selves about it, Google’s Personalized Search is essentially about attention data gathering and leveraging it to improve search!
• The Attention.xml spec over at Technorati is waking up (improved radically by Attensa’s own Eric Hayes incidentally) and if we have anything to do with it there is more to come as Eric was invited as a co-author earlier this year.
• Last but not least, RSS infrastructure company Attensa closed its Series B financing last weekto expand development and roll out its attention network (more on this any day now!) and our blog will include more frequent postings as well. By the way, we are hiring!

The team here at Attensa has been working on sophisticated attention metadata infrastructure since early 2001 (only then we just called it personalized transient metadata because we hadn’t heard of the term “attention” yet.) At Attensa, our first step is to release our RSS reader for Microsoft Outlook, and we believe it to be best of class in terms of performance and ease of use. But the real sea change will occur for users of our technology when our "attention streams" automatically improve the gathering and use of RSS delivered information to the point where you will wonder how you ever got along with plain old “raw” RSS articles derived via standard RSS subscriptions.

Viva Attention!

New Forrester report on RSS released

Charlene Li of Forrester has released two reports on RSS that summarizes the state of RSS and how early we still are in the growth of the sector – some 2% of US households utilizing RSS – and a second report details best practices by Marketers. Marketers that are on the ball are already looking at RSS (some 50% of those surveyed back in February) as a more efficient and less annoying way to communicate with customers than e-mail. This wont be the only reason to make the move to RSS but an obvious one to get started with RSS.

The number of users of RSS in North America is not surprising (2 – 5% depending on the segment) but that is “consumers.” The numbers are considerably higher in business and changing the way companies communicate internally, throughout the supply chain, and with customers. Our data is only anecdotal, but in most of the companies we talk to the percentage of users using RSS is already north of 50% - and growing fast. And other than companies such as NewsGator, Attensa and a few others the commercial grade applications/servers available (or soon available) are few and far between.

I am speaking on a panel next month at a Software Association of Oregon event on this subject – Blogging and RSS. It is a Marketing SIG event and an active area of interest of software companies of all shapes and sizes. There are lots of unknowns but one thing is already clear - smart marketers are digging into RSS now.

Structured Blogs and Attention Data...they need each other

PubSub is leading the cause for structured blogs and has some nice simple examples for book and music reviews replete with links to buy on Amazon. At Attensa we have been looking closely at structured data types, beyond even those of blog origin, and hope that standards such of these catch on (at a minimum) with mainstream consumers. Obviously internet retailers will also benefit if such structured blogging is accepted…and at Attensa we believe the results can be dramatically improved for all participants.

Enter “attention streams”

Structured blogs in our view might be just half the equation, as it will be sophisticated (and anonymous) utilization of attention data that will make examples such as these truly useful to consumers AND the businesses that will ultimately benefit. Charlene Li’s blog has several other consumer level ideas that are particularly conducive to the structured blog approach. John Batelle goes even further discussing the implications on search and tagging.

All of these ideas though are predominantly consumer-centric. While interesting and useful, we feel the real opportunity is most certainly in the enterprise including CRM and throughout the supply chain. Imagine structured blogs from everything from RFPs to Expense Management to Annual Reviews to Applications for Employment. Consumers and retailers will no doubt benefit from structured blogs but it will be miniscule compared to the potential in the enterprise. That’s my (Attensa’s) take anyway.