Company: AttensaLaunched: 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 pretty reasonable to me.
No word from Attensa yet on their pricing plans for the mobile product, but I assume it would be rolled in with the subscription plan.
Attention
Attensa is looking at the Attention issue very carefully. About half of my call with Scott was spent discussing their plans in this area.
They have a unique perspective on the opportunity. For a full discussion, see co-founder Eric Hayes post on his personal blog. Basically, Attensa will (with your opt-in permission) aggregate information about your reading habits to make your feed reading more efficient (something needs to be done to make it possible to mow through hundreds and hundreds of feeds every day) .
Their idea? Watch what you read, what you click on, how long you spend reading something, what you ignore (just as important), and prioritze feeds and posts according to what they think you’ll want to read first. They’ll also suggest new feeds based on what you seem to be liking. I, for one, am more than happy to give up a little privacy if I get efficiency and good recommendations in return.
Team
Craig Barnes: Co-Founder, CEO
Eric Hayes: Co-Founder, Vice President of Research and Development
Tim Brown: Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer
Guy Field - CFO
Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing
Link
See all
Post
Great to see Attensa working on this, but I’m not sure Attensa has a “unique perspective on the opportunity.”
Findory has been watching what you read and what you click on and then prioritizing feeds and posts according to the reader’s interests since we launched in Jan 2004.
The hard part is the personalization. Generating high quality, relevant recommendations in real-time at scale is a real challenge. Most of the work on scalable personalization algorithms is still in the research stage.
Attention is a huge problem and only going to get worse. We are overwhelmed with information flooding at us in our daily lives. We need a way to filter, prioritize, and focus. Personalization can help. In the future, all information streams will be personalized.
Could you combine this with Skylook? That would be the perfect marriage….
T.
The foundation of our system (client through server) is based on attention streams. We use it on the client to synchronize (and soon client side prioritize) articles among the multiple views (IE, Outlook, more…) we provide. We use it on the server side to synchronize client to server (to mobile).
Greg - Good thoughts, and thank you for clarifying that others are working on this too. It’s important.
Exactly! Greg, you have hit the issue dead on!
In late 2000, my team started working on an internet marketing technology designed to efficiently collect, organize, analyze, and pull metrics off of hundreds of thousands (to millions) of meta-data transactions per minute. That system was up, fast, scaled nicely, and proved its point by providing marketing lift and supplying outstanding real-time metrics without harassing the user! But… right technology, wrong time…
Today, that system (and its dozen man years of head start) is what we have based our attention streams on. The foundation of our system (client through server) is based on attention streams. We use it on the client to synchronize (and soon client side prioritize) articles among the multiple views (IE, Outlook, more…) we provide. We use it on the server side to synchronize client to server (to mobile). These efficient attention streams are what we will use (with permission and privacy protected) to aggregate users to make relevant recommendations (at the feed and article level), and add community based prioritization of your existing articles, and both timely enough to support today’s requirements.
I agree with first comment. Google Desktop Search sidebar prioritises feeds (with your permission of course). But, nice product. Not sure I understand pricing yet. If I’ve downloaded plugin, I will be asked to pay at a later date?
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