There has been a lot of buzz about a new breed of Attention based readers lately. Chris Abraham writes about Particls on Marketing Conversations and Jack Vinson writes about AideRSS here.

A great attention driven reader should make you feel like you need a tinfoil hat to protect you from its accurate mind reading powers. (Thank you Chris for perfect mental image).

I thought it might be helpful to take a deeper look into how these attention driven RSS readers differ in their approaches to finding relevant content. All of these tools are free so you can easily check them out and see for yourself which approach works best for your personal workflow.

AideRSS features PostRank™, a scoring system that ranks each article on relevance and reaction. AideRSS uses the explicit attention behaviors of others to rank feeds. The PostRank is a popularity contest ranking of explicit attention behaviors that takes into account the number of comments, bookmarks and trackbacks a given post receives. AideRSS depends on information from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines to work efficiently. These sites track the behavior of the most proactive readers who explicitly rate, comment and tag blog posts.

The challenge with this approach is that it focuses on the few to deliver results to the many. AideRSS gives you collective recommendation, not really a personalized recommendation. It ignores the lurkers and passive readers who may find highly relevant material but just file it away in their heads. This approach may also be prone to gaming and unchecked blog spam that can drastically impact results. More importantly it ignores your personal reading behavior which is ultimately the most significant indicator of what is personally relevant to you.

For PostRank to work it requires time to pass to allow for comments, trackbacks and bookmarks to accumulate. For time critical information this is a non-starter. In the enterprise getting the right information at the right time is the difference between success and failure. By the time the PostRank rating scales, you've may miss critical time sensitive information. It's like getting yesterday's news today.

There are some real advantage in this approach. If you can discount the time element, the PostRank technique is best suited for sites with lots of traffic and frequent posting covering content that isn't time sensitive. You can turn the RSS spigot up and down to control the flow and it eliminates duplicate posts. Best of all you can subscribe to a single filtered feed with top ranked articles from all of your feeds. (Note: you can get the same effect with the Article Ranking view in Attensa without setting up a special feed).

If you flip this tool on its head, the true benefit in AideRSS may be its value to publishers as an excellent reporting tool.

Particls

I might be missing the big picture but in my analysis but here's my take. Particls is a persistent search tool with smart filters requiring manual tweaking to optimize relevancy. Keywords are tracked and articles are displayed. I played with it and tried the keyword attention, Enterprise 2.0 and Attensa. After a few minutes articles starting show up in the sidebar that contained my search parameters. Posts on Attensa and Enterprise 2.0 were relevant but not complete. My search on attention produced articles on every topic under the sun with the word attention in the headline. On the plus side, there weren't any duplicates, which is a flaw in the current persistent search technique used by Attensa.

Particls is more of an intention capture tool than an attention tool. For Particls to be effective it requires constant attention (no pun intended). You create and tweak smart filters manually to improve results. From my own use I couldn't really discern any automatic ranking.

The Particls river-of-news sidebar is a paradox. The tool that is supposed to focus your attention ends up being a distraction. Articles flow by and if you snooze you lose. Articles are difficult to organize. In my own workflow I like to keep by feeds organized by subject and project and check out the articles when it best fits my schedule. I use alerts for time critical information.

Attensa AttentionStream

Attensa uses an AttentionStream based on machine learning techniques to bubble-up the most relevant content from all of your feeds to the surface. The AttentionStream technology behind Attensa's Article Ranking View of your feeds combines content cues (keyword, search terms, authors, titles, tags and more) with your personal explicit and implicit attention behaviors to provide a relevancy ranking. The beauty in this approach is you don't have to do anything special to get optimized results.

Attensa’s predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process feeds and articles. By continuously analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and the number of 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 and article priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of attention is processed. You don't have to change your behavior to get the most benefit. And, it's personalized attention - not group think. No tweaking, no adjusting, the inscrutable Attention engine works in the background continuously optimizing your ranking in real time. For the enterprise these behaviors can be tracked through metrics and reports that can be used to identify the most efficient communication channels for getting the right information to the right people and internal publishers can get reports on how their content is being consumed

The Attensa approach isn't perfect but the important stuff does have a way of coming to the surface. 

I left Portland late Sunday night, or was it Monday morning? Anyway it was way dark thirty. I arrived in Boston at 11:00 am. I headed over to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and sat down with CMP's Alex Dunne for this podcast interview. Excuse me if I sound rummy.

Andrew McAfee gave Enterprise 2.0 a report card at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference yesterday.

A - awareness of the concept
A- - Technologies
C - Communication of the results

And the professor has given us homework. He called on the industry to do a better job sharing best practices, applications and case studies. The Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition might be just the forum to share the love.

In that spirit here's a start. We put this together for an enterprise customer who is using the Attensa Feed Server to improve corporate communications across their organization. I've blogged about this earlier in a series but here's the complete document.

Download Attensa's Feed Reading Best Practices

Attensa will be exhibiting at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston June 18 - 21 in Boston. Here's CMP's official description of the conference.

"Enterprise 2.0 Conference provides thought leadership and instruction for forward-thinking IT and business professionals on the new Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise, the infrastructure required to support them and the cultural changes that must accompany them."

I think it might be closer to the Enterprise 2.0 version of Lucha Libre:

Monday features Harvard's Doctor Cerebro Andrew McAffee  versus Tigre Metalico Tom Davenport as they go mano a mano on the relevancy of Enterprise 2.0.

With nearly 50 exhibitors wrestling for attention the conference is destined to be the free fight.

The photos are from Malcomb Venville's amazing book Lucha Loco a striking collection of portraits and interviews of the real luchadores. Get this book. Your other coffee table books will tremble.

 Oh.... and get your tickets to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here. You can get a free pass for the exhibits and a $200 discount on the conference when you use the priority code: MLQUEB48 to register. Tell them Attensa sent you.

Ephraim Schwartz has a thought provoking post - Dumbing down and smarting up via the Web - on his Reality Check blog.

He comments of the thinking of Marc Prensky who came up with the descriptors Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (way back in 2001) to describe different approaches on how humans use technology to process information.

According to Prensky, Digital Natives are all "native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."

Digital Immigrants are "those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many of or most aspects of the new technology."

I believe this evolution is already well on its way in the workforce because it's generational. Look at how the newest information workers choose to work and the tools they choose when given the choice. They drive multi-tasking to an entirely new level using multiple IM chat sessions and collaborative workspaces (powered with RSS) to communicate and deliver  information where and when they need it.

They bring a new work ethic based on continuous partial attention that I believe increases productivity. They keep multiple dimensions of their tasks in in their peripheral vision and in their peripheral attention simultaneously. When these techniques are used to optimum advantage, opportunities are spotted more quickly, rapid responses seize theses opportunities and the power of collaboration is brought to bear on problem solving in a natural, free flowing way. 

When attention tools - the power of intelligent prioritization and the automatic discovery and sharing of critical business information are added to the mix -- there is real potential to unlock a new level of productivity.

Ephraim Schwartz has written a great overview of Attensa in InfoWorld based on interview with our co-founder and CTO, Eric Hayes . InfoWorld is featuring an enterprise startup a day in the month of May and we are delighted to be selected.

Here's the take away.

"Attensa's software works by pushing RSS or managed Web feeds to specific users and groups behind the firewall, allowing knowledge workers in the enterprise to cherry-pick just the info they want. On the back end, the Linux-based Attensa Feed Server gathers feeds in the background, and gives IT administrators control of where those feeds go. Meanwhile, on the client side, Attensa has software for Windows, Mac, and BlackBerry, plus plug-ins for Outlook, Lotus SameTime IM, and others. Conveniently, the server takes care of syncing, so that if a user reads something on a BlackBerry, that same item is marked as having been read in Outlook as well.

Behind this basic infrastructure is AttentionStream, the real substance of Attensa's IP. AttentionStream prioritizes content based on a user's behavior, pushing that information to the top of the reader. "AttentionStream has the ability to intelligently and automatically pull information that is important to the user when they want it and push away information that isn’t important when they don’t want it," Hayes says."

Jeremy Wagstaff is writing about Attention in his Loose Wire column in the Wall Street Journal and he's mentions Attensa in his Loose Wire blog.

We couldn't agree more with his take away. "This is just the beginning. Further down the track, tools like Particls (and Attensa - my edit) will feed into our attention streams to find out what we're paying attention to and use that information to further hone their grasp of what we want to know. Expect them to continue the march of personalizing not just your hunt for information but the way it's delivered to you -- when, where and how."

Attensa's first step is the automatic prioritization of articles based on your reading behaviors. Location is playing a role with the ability to channel specific feeds to specific access points (the Web, the desktop, your smartphone and instant messaging)so the information you want (and just the information you want) shows up where you want it.

When you boil it all down,attention is really about using technology and tools to pull the information we want toward us when we want it and to push things that aren't important away so we can concentrate on the task at hand and stay in the flow.

Our dev team has been working on article level prioritization since we launched Attensa and we'll be previewing the stellar results of their efforts at ETech. The Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2 is the first attention driven RSS reader that prioritizes articles (not just feeds) based on an individual's reading habits. This is a major step forward in our AttentionStream technology development.

You can read the news release here.

You'll be able to try it out for yourself (for free of course) on April 10th when we post Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2.

The new version integrates an AttentionStream® Learning Engine that automatically pulls articles that are most important to you to the top of the River of News. Stars indicate the estimated relevance based on your reading habits.

Attensa’s unique AttentionStream Learning Engine observes and learns from the user’s feed and article reading behaviors and works on the principle that past and present actions predict future behavior. Deep analytics of article content are matched to a personalization system that automatically prioritizes and recommends new articles that will be of interest to the reader.

The new approach matches content cues with personas (readers and deleters, skimmers, active readers and more) and matches their content choices and behaviors to rank the articles. The goal is to deliver a powerful, personalized, attention-driven reading experience.

This is much more than the popularity contest social networking sites use to suggest content. That can be interesting, at best, but when it comes to quickly getting up to speed as part of a work flow, frankly I'm more interested in cutting through to what I'm interested in.

There's more The 2.5 Beta 2 is a bottleneck breaker that significantly improves the RSS handling performance of Outlook 2007 (it also works with XP and Outlook 2003). The new version gives you two options for channeling articles into Outlook. User can stores their articles in a separate file or they can bypass Outlook’s storage completely by pulling articles on demand into the Attensa for Outlook River of News. Both methods speed up Outlook performance significantly and cut PST file bloat which drags down Outlook performance.

We met Jeff Whitehead and Jon Sofield of the Real Time Matrix at the Office 2.0 conference in October. We quickly hit it off and it became clear to all of us that the work they are doing with precision search technology using real-time matching and filtering and our attention driven prioritization are a perfect fit for helping enterprise users cut through information overload.

Today, Jon and Jeff are launching iJ.am, a new breed of search engine (they descibe more accurately as a "matching engine and content router" that precisely matches and delivers personally relevant content from the web the instant it is published.

And today we are announcing our partnership with the Real Time Matrix. We're coupling our persistent search capability from within Outlook and on our Feed Server with RTM's sophisticated aggregation, matching and filtering technology to bring an indispensable research tool to our Enterprise customers. With the combined power of these search techniques business users can create precisely focused search channels that automatically and continuously deliver exactly the content they are searching for without duplication.

Jeff Whitehead says it best. "This technology cuts through information overload and puts control into the individuals' hands. Users simply set up and refine their search criteria and we deliver accurate, relevant and timely results with extreme prejudice."

With Attensa and Real Time Matrix researchers can search the past and filter the future by tuning their search criteria, in real time to deliver exactly the information they want without duplication, as soon as it is observed on the Internet.

Here are the specifics and next steps for our partnership.

First, we'll be adding the iJ.am search engine to the persistent search feature in Attensa for Outlook.

We will be adding persistent search and Real Time Matrix filtering to the Attensa Feed Server. With the new distributed admin feature, the power to create precision search feeds can be accessed by project teams throughout the enterprise.

Together with Real Time Matrix we will be offering custom integration for Enterprise accounts to tie Web and blog search with premium content and internal information search.

Here's the Attensa and Real Time Matrix partnership news release.

Last week I attended the New New Internet Conference in McClean, Virginia. The conference featured TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee. Michael gave a hilarious and insightful overview of what separates the winners and losers in the Web 2.0 business arena. Andrew McAffee is credited with coining the term "Enterprise 2.0." If you are not reading his blog you should be. His whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration is essential reading.

Professor McAfee is a brilliant and engaging speaker who made me want to quit my job and go to Harvard (unlikely that they would have me). His talk included practical advice on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise by starting with collaboration tools. He also addressed the tension between structured systems and the open social network of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. A vice president of marketing I once worked for summarized this tension by saying, "Iron sharpens iron." It was his way of saying that the best decisions are reached and the greatest results occur when the strengths of two opposing forces are brought together for a common purpose. Forward thinking business and technology leaders who successfully integrate social networking tools with structured infrastructure will experience new heights of innovation.

To get to the New New Internet conference, I flew from the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Phoenix to Baltimore, expecting to arrive at midnight, giving me time to catch a few hours of sleep before setting up my demo station at 6:30 AM. Instead, because of a series of mechanical problems (a tear above the wing on the first plane and a leaking sink on the second, fixed with duct tape) I arrived in Baltimore at 3:00 AM, picked up my rental car and proceeded to drive around for two hours before finding my hotel. Was I lost? No, just bewildered. I talked the hotel manager down from a $300 room rate to $119. Took a $119 shower, shaved, suited up and headed to conference. I guess I'm gung ho for enterprise 2.0.

At 7:15 AM I demonstrated Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server to a panel of judges including Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners , Phil Bronner of Novak Biddle, Charles Curran of Valhalla Partners, Karl Khoury of Columbia Partners and Tom Weithman of the Center for Innovative Technology.

Attensa was deemed to worthy of the title "Technology Pace Setter."

Here's what they had to say about us:
"Attensa - a world class RSS reader that solves the problem of synchronizing your feeds among multiple platforms, and also has shared intelligence technology, so that "group wisdom" can be applied to news feeds over an enterprise. You should check this application out I particularly liked the idea that within an enterprise a user could get a sense of which feeds were drawing the most attention."

Attensa is adding one more mind, and it's a big one, to our senior technical team.

Dr. Andreas Weigend, a driving force in the study of behavioral analytics, is joining Attensa's Board of Advisors. Andreas will collaborate with Eric Hayes, Attensa co-founder and VP of R&D, and our senior technical team to bring more deep math brain power to bear on the advancement of our search, recommendation, and discovery AttentionStream technology.

Entrepreneur, acadamic and masterful speaker, Andreas teaches Data Mining and E-Business at Stanford and was Amazon.com's full-time Chief Scientist. Over the last 20 years, he has published more than 100 scientific papers and worked with Yahoo, Match.com, Alibaba, and Goldman Sachs to show people the power of discovery in a connected world.

Getting to know Andreas is one of the pleasures of my life. Boundless enthusiasm, energy and creativity. Net-net, a true global citizen and an inspiring human being to hang out with.

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."

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."

We are frequently asked about the impact of Outlook 2007 on Attensa for Outlook. Tris Hussey shares his experience using Outlook 2007 here. Tris is the Director of Strategic Partner Relations and unofficial Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana software, a great blog editing tool that I'm using.

I'll spoil it for you by jumping to the punchline. Tris has gone back to Outlook 2003 but supercharging it with X1 desktop search and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 for feed reading.

Tris has been using the Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta instead of FeedDemon for about a week and has this to say.  "Attensa. I think they are on to something here...I think my feed scanning is getting better."

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's good when your company name begins with the letter A. That puts Attensa at the top of the list of the Supernova Connected Innovators. Attensa joins 11 other companies with "extraordinary potentional to create new markets and shape the connected future."

The companies were selected by Supernova and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch from nearly 100 submissions. Thanks.

Supernova 2006  is June 21 -23. In San Francisco.

Luis Suarex at ELSUA - A KM Blog links to an article in CIO titled "Who Knows Whom and Who Knows What" which delves into the value of understanding Social Networks in your business. Social Network Analysis can be used to indentify experts, thought leaders and the most effective communication channels for disseminating critical information that can create strategic advantage.

It won't be long before AttentionStream analysis will be used to improve colloborative networking by automatically identifying the most efficient information distribution channels.

You can read more about the role of AttentionStream technology and SNA in our new Download attensa_enterprise_rss_whitepaper_0605.pdf .

Yesterday Craig Barnes, Attensa's CEO and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root Markets, discussed their views on how applied attention technology works for users. The Attensa approach is to use AttentionStreams to continuously and automatically prioritize information so that the most useful information bubbles to the top, helping to control the flow of the RSS information firehose. The Root Market approach is let user track their clickstreams on the Web and to use and share their history in a marketspace that trades qualified sales leads for offers of value.

The Agile Buzz has the play by play here.

And David Utter at WebProNews raises a valid question on the privacy concerns tied to an Attention based marketplace.

For the first time since we introduced Attensa nearly one year ago we are delivering on the promise of less is more. At Syndicate we are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which displays feeds and articles in the order you want to read them.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 uses a "river of news" to simulate a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds the user has subscribed to.

Version 1.5 uses our predictive ranking AttentionStream technology. By continuously analyzing implicit and explicit 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 the reader at another time.

Feed priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of attention is processed.Articles can be read in order of predictive ranking, sorted by date or customized by the user. This new version of Attensa for Outlook gives users the control to manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.
 
Attensa for Outlook 1.5 synchronizes with the new Microsoft RSS Platform. By leveraging the Microsoft Common Feed Store, RSS feeds added using Attensa for Outlook, Internet Explorer 7 or Windows Vista, will automatically be synchronized for a seamless user experience.

You can see for yourself in June.

We are in New York at the Syndicate Conference. With its focus on RSS and publishing, Syndicate is one of our favorite shows. It also allows us to catch up with a lot of folk we don't see nearly often enough.

We are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which showcases our first use of AttentionStream technology. We are excited for its potential, and judging by the reaction at PC Magazine when we demoed it to them yesterday, they are too.

Speaking of upcoming news, we thought we would let you know where we plan on being for the next couple of months in case you will be at any of these conferences and would like to get together. Don't be shy about saying hi and stopping in for a conversation.

You can find our event schedule here.

Syndicate New York: May 16 -17

Attensa President and CEO, Craig Barnes is on a panel with Seth Goldstein of Root Markets discussing - "Selling Attention: Two Differing Views"

05/17/2006, 1:30 PM - 2:25 PM

Attensa will be sponsoring the SixApart Business Blogging Seminars being held:

New York -  May 25, 2006

Los Angeles - June 22, 2006

Red Herring "Pursuit of Disruption" Conference - Monterey- May 23-25

In his recent Fortune Magazine article, "How I Work", Bill Gates talks up the emergence of what he calls "the digital workstyle."  Mr. Gates is living what most of us can only dream about: the paperless desk. Even with his sophisticated use of hardware and software - he talks about the challenges of information overload and information underload. "Staying focused is one issue; that's the problem with information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people."

Interestingly, there was no mention of enterprise RSS in the Fortune piece. Attensa is working to help companies manage feeds in the same way other technologies manage email, instant messaging, etc. So, while their e-mail is being filtered, flagged and funneled, Attensa's RRS for the enterprise will update and prioritize to get "the right information" from or to "the right people" at "the right time."