Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa released a new iteration of its attention-data focused RSS service this morning.  The race to see which enterprise RSS vendor can figure out how to drag the business world kicking and screaming into using a technology (RSS) that seems undeniably good for it continues.   New in version 1.1 of Attensa’s enterprise feed server are the following capabilities, all of which are logical, smart additions to an RSS suite.  Whereas the product previously shipped as a server with software already installed, the company now offers a full installation pack that can be installed on hardware purchased otherwise – as well as a fully hosted solution.  The “virtual server” is intended to alleviate security concerns and the hosted solution is aimed at small businesses. Also new is the ability for department or project heads to determine their own teams’ selection of subscribed feeds.  This was previously administered on one level, from the top down.  A body of persistent search options has also been added to the feed server product.  Both of these steps might seem strange to consumer level RSS users, but in some highly controlled enterprises, a free hand at subscribing to any and every feed they find is not what many companies seek for their employees.  Attensa told me that one customer, a large bank, has bank tellers using their product just to receive promotional updates – whereas another customer, a pharmaceutical company, wants their research librarians to be able to subscribe to anything. Other changes to the service include increased sophistication in reporting, with reading habits reported and searchable down to the level of the individual, and a new administrative capability to allow or block particular kinds of RSS enclosures. Attensa faces competition in the enterprise RSS market from Newsgator and KnowNow.  All three are very different services; Attensa focuses on automatic customization of reading lists and reporting attention data or user behavior. Any of these three companies’ products have the capability to revolutionize an organization’s relationship with information, yet it seems that none of them are selling a whole lot of product.    Older companies are either going to start using RSS or they will soon have their lunch eaten by upstarts for whom feed reading is an important part of the work flow. → Read More

Enterprise RSS and Attention company Attensa has released version 2.0 of their plug-in for Outlook and there are a number of notable changes that have been made. Most important, Attensa 2.0 is free. The company has moved to a strategy to sell customer support subscriptions and seed organizations with their product until a critical mass is met to offer their Enterprise Feed Server. I think that’s a very good idea. The basic premise of Attensa is that it’s a feed reader that tracks users’ reading habits and adjusts its display to offer the most important feeds at the right time for each reader. The Feed Server product allows businesses to manage a large number of desktop clients with varying default feeds and permission levels behind a firewall. Other changes that have been made in the 2.0 release include the ability to play audio and video files inside Outlook, a desktop toast alert tool for high priority items and a number of stability and deployment improvements. Attensa has now rolled out its product in a number of high profile enterprise contexts and says that the 2.0 product is far more battle tested than previous releases. They’ve got quite a few interesting projects in the works that I hope I’ll be able to post on here at a later date. The company has received $12 million in two rounds of funding, from Portland’s Smart Forrest Ventures and Cambridge, Mass. based RSS Investors. Their primary competitors in the enterprise RSS space are KnowNow, who specialize in transforming a wide variety of information into RSS format, and Newsgator, who have acquired some of the best desktop RSS readers on the market and focus on synching between multiple platforms. See also our recent reviews of Monitor110, a forthcoming web based reader for financial proffesionals; SystemOne, a wiki CMS that leverages RSS and semantic annalysis and TouchStone, a Windows desktop tool that utilizes RSS and attention data to offer multiple forms of prioritized alerts. → Read More

Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa has released two new products this summer and I was able to take a look at both last week. The company now offers Attensa for Outlook version 1.5 beta and an Attensa Feedserver. Attensa Online, a consumer product we’ve written about in the past, has been deprioritized in favor of an enterprise focus. Attensa was one of the 12 highlighted innovators at the TechCrunch sponsored session at SuperNova this summer. While RSS for individual news reading is invaluable, leveraging it for organizational communication is undoubtedly going to become a common practice in the near future. 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. Portland, Oregon based Attensa is based on technology that was originally intended to track consumer interaction with advertisements: clicks, duration of interaction, context, etc. That technology could and likely will be applied to consumer interaction with any type of information artifact – but RSS is a very timely area to focus on. The company has received $12 million in two rounds of funding, from Portland’s Smart Forrest Ventures and Cambridge, Mass. based RSS Investors. Despite the many advantages of RSS over email for many information needs, the medium threatens information overload on a scale that dwarfs email. While in the consumer news space, time of publication and popularity with other readers may be the most useful criteria for cutting through that overload – there are other priorities that come into play when your whole organization places RSS at the center of its communication practice. Content from the boss, popularity of items or sources amongst your department in particular and the time of day relative to your workflow are just a few examples of factors in the dynamic prioritization that most of us perform manually when interacting with our many sources of incoming information. Attensa automates much of this prioritization by moving high priority feeds to the top of your feed reader. It’s a rich and changing algorithm, but the company has a free 60 day trial of its Attensa for Outlook beta with easy import of your OPML file, so I can’t think → Read More

Attensa (previous profiles here) is announcing a bunch of product upgrades and releases tomorrow. The most important are the removal of the beta status from their Outlook and Online RSS readers. Both products are at 1.0 status as of tomorrow morning. Both readers have fairly advanced features. Attensa Online 1.0, which is Ajax driven, has been criticized during its beta period for not having enough features. Many of those features are now included, and some, like tagging, are on the way. And both readers are fast, at least under current loads. One feature that I like on both products is the ability to review posts on a folder/feed basis, or “river of news” where posts are shown in a more traditional email format as they come in. The big win with RSS readers, though, is in synchronization across applications. There are two aspects to this – synchronization of the feed (OPML) list, and synchronization of the status (read/unread/tagged/pinned) of individual posts. Both are important, although the difficult problem is synchronizing posts. Attensa is doing both. NewsGator does attempt to synchronize posts from both its FeedDemon desktop product and its Outlook product to its online product, but you cannot directly syncronize between FeedDemon and Newsgator. Also, synchronization often breaks. Attensa claims their architecture is robust enough to handle the difficult sync problem. Further testing will show if this is accurate. Note that the Attensa readers are all free; however the synchronization feature is $20 per year after a 30 day free trial. Attensa also has a third reader, for mobile devices, coming within “four weeks”. → Read More

Attensa will announce its second round of financing today (Monday). The round is being financed by RSS Investors, the venture capital fund announced in June 2005 by Jim Moore, John Palfrey and Richard Fishman. Attensa has previously raised capital from Craig Barnes (co-founder and CEO) SmartForest Ventures of Portland, Oregon, 2nd Avenue Partners of Seattle and angel investors. This is RSS Investors’ first investment. Attensa, which first launched in June, has a popular Outlook-based RSS reader and has additional products in development.Previous profiles here and here. → Read More

Attensa, which we profiled on August 29, 2005, has released v. 99 of its feed reader for Outlook. The main new feature in the release is support for tagging of feeds, blogs and posts: We’ve integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online. The new tagging feature can be used in Attensa to keep feeds and articles organized but it also works with Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed, you can also subscribe to feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag. It’s a pure attention stream that you can explore. You can add tags to articles and access them using a pull down list using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. With the addition of tagging, Attensa gives you a set of tools for organizing your feeds and articles. Categories let you create a hierarchal structure using folders to keep feeds organized. Tags give you a more free form tool for keeping articles organized and they connect you with the del.icio.us social network. Attensa is aggresively adding features to compete with other readers and has an excellent product suite. However, some (including Jeff Nolan) have stopped using Attensa’s Outlook product because of reported difficulties in making these third party applications work with Outlook properly. Attensa also has a new logo. I liked the old one better. → Read More

Company: Attensa Launched: June 2005 Employees: 8 Status: Funded by SmartForest Ventures and 2nd Avenue Partners Location: Portland, OR Overview Attensa is a world class RSS reader that is attacking the multi-platform syncronization problem (I’ll explain that) and is also looking very seriously at the attention issue from a unique perspective (a good thing). Attensa launched their first product at Gnomedex in June – an Outlook based reader that is lightning fast and has been getting rave reviews (Jeff Nolan). It’s also free, for now. Attensa for Outlook Attensa for Outlook supports enclosures, and so will automatically download things like podcasts and videocasts. Since it syncs with outlook, all content will be available for you to read when you are offline. This is a key feature for people who travel and aren’t online constantly, but want to be able to catch up on their feeds. Attensa for Outlook is just the beginning, however. I spoke with Scott Niesen, Attensa’s Marketing Director, this evening and heard about their future product plans. Web-Based and Mobile Readers In a “couple of weeks” Attensa will be launching a private beta of their web-based RSS reader. It will fully syncronize your feeds with their outlook product. It will also fully syncronize at the post level, meaning if you’ve read a post on one product, it will not show up as unread in the other product. This is a key product feature and possible because Attensa’s engine runs at the server level for both products. Duplicate posts are a huge problem for power RSS users, and Attensa is making a serious attempt to solve this. I’ll be included in the beta testing and Scott tells me that I can blog freely on the product, including screen shots. More on this when the product is soft-launched. Later this year Attensa will roll out a mobile reader as well, rounding out the product set nicely. Pricing For now, all products are free. Attensa has been polling users to create an appropriate long-term pricing plan. Their current plan is to keep the web product free, and eventually charge a one time fee of $20 for the Outlook client. If a user want to use both products and syncronize feeds, Attensa will charge a yearly subscription fee of about $20 (but you won’t be charged for the Outlook client). $20 a year for this kind of high end product seems → Read More