Attentio takes 600k Euro investment

Brussels-based social media tracking startup Attentio, has received a 600,00 Euro investment from five new private shareholders well known in Norwegian business circles, along with further investment from existing shareholders. The round takes Attentio’s pot to a total of 1.5 million Euros raised since 2006. Attentio’s goal is to monitor blogs, forums, networks, YouTube and building tools that can analyse the content.

The new board now includes Ole Jorgen Fredriksen (ex. Co-Chairman of NASDAQ-listed InFocus and ex. CEO of ASK/Proxima) and Bjorn Haugland (founder of Confirmit, the stock listed provider of market research software). Other board members are chairman Per Siljubergsasen (founder of Attentio and one of the founders of Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo), Jarl Fronth a Norwegian Lawyer and professional Board member, Benoit DeBecker marketing director of Cytec and Simon McDermott (ex. Cisco and Intel and founder of Attentio).

Clients include Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Lexus and a number of agencies. Recently, similar US service Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony.

The Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is mainly sold through advertising and PR agencies, but I’ve been trying out the impressive blog trend search engine Trendpedia and been pleasantly suprised at its power to map key words and phrases. It has the makings of an interesting web app. Here’s a search for TechCrunch – the results allow you to roll-over the graph and see what highs and lows the search term hit at that time. Very cool.