I'll be showing how Attensa collaborates using Jive Software's Clearspace for cross functional projects. The presentation will be 4:48 (that's specific) on Thursday, September 6 at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I've posted the Attensa presentation on SlideShare
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.
I'm in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today. Got in Monday after taking the redeye from Portland. I sat down yesterday with Alex Dunn who is blogging and podcasting the conference for CMP. I'll post a link when the podcast is up.
Today is focused on connecting with the people who are driving the promise of connection, collaboration and change through Enterprise 2.0 technologies and tools.
It's the 40th anniversary of another big catalyst of connection, collaboration and change...the Summer of Love. In that spirit we are trying a new approach. We are quietly kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Janet Johnson is blogging about it here.
The concept is to start a discussion and create the connections and integration points that will make Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products work together for real people. So customers can pick and choose, mix and match the best of breed products they need to solve their specific communication challenges.
Beneath the promise of Enterprise 2.0 apps things are missing.
Some of the obvious missing pieces are:
We've already started the conversation with Foldera and Jive and this is just the beginning. The are nearly 50 companies exhibiting at the conference.
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.
Configuring Attensa 2.1 to publish using Windows Live Writer is easy, so you can republish to your blog with one click. While still in beta, Live Writer is a flexible and powerful tool for publishing and, so far, has performed well in my tests.
P.S. My boss made me write this, and I also wrote a short and sweet How To on using Attensa with Windows Live Writer to publish to your blog.
The Real Time Matrix's Jon Sofield and I spoke with Dennis Howlett about how precision persistent search can be used in the enterprise to filter signal from noise. Apparently we struck a chord based on his post on his blog AccMan: Solving the broken search problem.
I pulled this over from his blog AccMan
"How often have you searched on a term. only to find that 50-50% of what Google serves up is totally irrelevant? I reckon about 10% of my site traffic turns up by accident, largely because of a Google search...
I spoke with Scott Niesen, director of marketing at Attensa and Jon Sofield of Real Time Matrix the other evening to figure out what this means and how it works. Real Time Matrix, which, according to its blog is tapping into more than a million items per day, delivers only the news you want. This, from RTM’s site:
Conceptually, it’s pretty simple: take millions of live content feeds and correlate millions of preferences for content against them in real time. When an “item” matches within an acceptable coefficient, deliver it to any Internet-connected device.
In practice it isn’t though RTM has solved the riddle. Attensa turns this fine grained information into an enterprise RSS feed allowing the user to effectively mash up the most appropriate information required for the task in hand from any source."
In our conversation Dennis reeled of vertical after vertical where real time information is business critical. His list includes: brokerage house trading floors, pharmaceuticals, telcos, utilities and any business that want meaningful competitive and market intelligence. These businesses would all benefit from precisely honed searches that deliver "fine grained information" while eliminating irrelevant "cruff" ( in Dennis' parlance.)
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.
On Friday I gave the breakfast pitch at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Here's a quick summary from Jason Preston on the Blog Business Summit site and here are the slides: Download file
"Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I've dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:
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."
I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.
OK.
I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...
I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.
Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!
I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.
Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.
P.S. My boss made me write this.
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."
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
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."
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
We met Frank Gruber at Syndicate in New York in May and last week our Director of Product Management, Matthew Bookspan, brought Frank up to date on our RSS server plans. He's posted an overview on Somewhat Frank covering RSS applications, how an appliance approach simplifies installation and how having a central access point for receiving and distributing internal and external feeds uses bandwidth efficiently.
Thank you Frank.
Jupiter Research has a report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS" by Greg Dowling. Currently 29 percent of large companies ($50 million + in annual revenues) publish content via RSS. That number is projected to jump to 63% by the end of 2006. That's just six months away.
The report's recommendation's include, "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."
If you're one of the companies making the move to RSS, talk to us about lowering the barrier for feed management and deployment while helping users control the flow of the inevitable RSS fire hose. It's what Attensa is all about.
Three articles caught my attention this week and together they create a snapshot of the current state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0.
The first is BusinessWeek's CEO's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 written by Rob Hof. It's a terrific overview with examples of how innovative companies are using blogs, wikis, search and RSS to improve customer communications, overcome information overload and streamline collaboration. The article concludes with an observation by Tim O'Reilly that companies who embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies will outperfrom those who don't.
Next I read Enid Burns' piece on Executives Slow to See Value in Corporate Blogging on ClickZ. In a survey with 150 senior executive from Fortune 1000 companies only 5 percent said they see corporate blogging as a communications medium; 3 percent see it as a brand-building technique; and less than 1 percent see it as a sales or lead-generation tool. Many respondents doubt the credibility of blogs as a communications tool (62 percent); brand-building (74 percent) and a sales or lead generation channel (70 percent). Robbin Goodman, EVP and partner at Makovsky & Company, the firm that released the study, said in what may be the understatment of the week, "There is a learning curve that needs to take place." Robbin also points out "The benefits of blogging for a business can significantly outweigh possible risks."
I also listened to David Berlind's podcast Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never Heard of Them. He turns the table on a technology tradeshow by interviewing the attendees instead of the exhibitors. His conclusion, technology executives who are beginning to explore these new technologies and tools are extremely clear on why they need to embrace the newer technologies but they're just not sure what those technologies are.
Taken together, the articles are a clear indication