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”.

I’ve been talking with Steve Gillmor on and off for a few months about doing podcasts with him in various formats. Last week he invited me to participate in the Gillmor Gang along with the usual crowd, and I had a terrific time.

Steve and I also recorded a two part podcast for his Gillmor Daily. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. I consider it a terrific compliment that Steve and his gang has asked me to participate, and I genuinely look forward to these discussions.

The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage.

Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first.

The Online Storage Gang
We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive.

Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering.

Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices.

The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here.

Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well.

Web 2.0 Features
Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files are stored in the cloud instead of your hard drive.

And OmniDrive has one key feature that no one else matches: full read/write functionality on the file, in the cloud. Open a file from your Omnidrive, edit it and write it back to Omnidrive without ever downloading a local copy. Once they release their API, I imagine many, many services will mash the Omnidrive storage service into their applications. It is just too compelling not to.

AllMyData, unique among the group, is a full peer-to-peer solution with “grid storage”. This means you give up storage on your hard drive for other users, and you get theirs in return. Putting aside the fact that giving up storage is exactly what users don’t want when looking for a solution, the fact that others’ computers must be powerd up and online for you to be able to access your files is a serious service limitation.

Pricing
Pricing is all over the place, although I expect it to settle down as competition drives some of these companies out of the market.

Streamload is the most aggresive on pricing – offering a full 25 GB free to every user.

The obvious way to market these products, in my opinion, is to boldly offer unlimited storage for a nominal sum. Costs can be covered via a one-time sign up fee and through charges on download bandwidth (once I need the files, I’m willing to pay to get them).

I firmly believe that online storage should, and will, be packaged with new computers and applications like Windows. The amount of unprotected but hugely important media content out there on hard drives (music, movies, home movies, pictures), is growing every day. People need somewhere to back this data up for a reasonable fee, and it seems to me that Dell and others should package this service with the PC. All initial software would be auto stored, and users would have the option to continuously syncronize their hard drive with the virtual drive.

And while this business has thin margins, this is a multi-billion dollar per year revenue opportunity.

The Chart
The information above simply highlights the much more detailed information in the table linked to the left.

We were not able to speak to every company directly and the information available on websites is usually incomplete or hard to find. Therefore, we’ll be updating this table as more and better data comes in. Also, I’m sure I’ve left out any number of competitors in this space, so I will be updating the list of companies as well.

For the full feature comparison table, see here.

Research by Adam Bouskila
Research for this post was conducted by Adam Bouskila, a 17 year old genius who lives in Vancouver, Canada. I cannot thank Adam enough for his hard work, and I hope to work with him again on future posts.

Update: It’s clear to me from comments and emails that this space is exploding, and that I missed a lot of companies and features. I also hadn’t realized Fred Wilson posted on this subject last December, but he has an excellent post here.

ZoomTags, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a professional implementation of the commericial tagcloud idea introduced by 1000Tags, which I wrote about earlier this month.

ZoomTags is an API-based solution and allows blogs and other websites to place a commercial tagcloud on their sites. Like 1000Tags, Zoomtags allows advertisers to bid on tags or keywords in a tag cloud. When someone clicks on a tag, they see a set of advertiser results. This are Adsense type ads in a tagcloud.

Website owners will have a variety of tagclouds to choose from.

ZoomTags, which is part of ZoomGroups, already has a fairly established advertiser network that has been in place since 1999.

Nothing, of course, stops Yahoo and Google from implementing a similar interface if this proves to be a better way for some sites to serve ads.

SpongeCell is a new Ajax calendar built on the Ruby on Rails platform. In addition to the now-ubiquitous drag and drop interface, Spongecell is adding artificial intelligence aspects to turn natural language into structured calendar entries, and has a nice mobile interface. More information is here. Spongecell is having an open launch party on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 in San Francisco.

Ajax calendars are faily commonplace now (they are kissing cousins to Ajax home pages as far as I’m concerned) and seem to be breeding just as prolifically. My list now includes:

• 30 Boxes
• Airset
• CalendarHub
• Hula
• Joyent
• Kiko (and here) (service may be broken or discontinued)
• Planzo
• SpongeCell
• Trumba

Renkoo, Skobee and Zimbra also touch this space.

Google added bookmarks to version 4 of its Internet Explorer Toolbar (note that this is not available for their Firefox Toolbar). Google Bookmarks have been available since October on the Google site, but were not integrated into the toolbar until now.

Bookmarking is done via a popup from the toolbar that allows naming of the bookmark and any number of tags. A bookmark can be edited as well.

Google Bookmarks have no “social” or sharing feature. And while it is disappointing that bookmarks are not available yet for Firefox, I will say that the interface in IE is excellent. In addition to setting tags, users can access bookmarks directly from the toolbar via a drop down menu containing chosen tags.

I’ve been very hard on Google products recently (and their product strategy). And while I could criticize them for releasing this only in IE, I won’t. This is a great bookmarking product, interesting features can be added down the road, and many users will find it useful.

More from Nik Cubrilovic and Niall Kennedy.

I’ve been testing NewsAlloy, a free, feature rich and very fast Ajax reader (zero page refreshes). All power-user features are included – tagging, pinning, river of news and folder-based viewing, easy digg and del.icio.us submission, and good search capabilities. I also like the keyboard shortcuts.

If the speed holds during user ramp up (a big if as the site has only been up since around December 1, 2005), this could become a cult favorite. However, this is not for RSS newbies.

Pete Cashmore wrote about them right after launch in December.

I attended the E27 Technology Conference today at Stanford University. Startups founded by entrepreneurs who are less than 27 years old were eligible to present. With a couple of exceptions these companies were all new to me, and a few have the potential to be real winners. The E27 founders did a great job of picking quality attendees (lots of venture capitalists, big company representatives and bloggers in the audience), and promising companies.

The invite-only event was created by Noah Kagan, Shivani Sopory, and Nancy Gong.

Below are my notes on each of the nine startups that presented. See Robert Scoble and Emily Chang for additional commentary, and Max Kiesler has a podcast recording of the entire event here.

BillMonk

I wrote about BillMonk last week. The company, founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, have created an excellent tool for managing social debts and IOUs. It’s easy to see this catching on. IOweYou is a competitor.

411 Metro

411Metro, is an advertiser-supported free 411 service. Derek Merrill presented the company. His co-founders are Alec Andronikov and Alexey Bulavin. 411Metro joins Free411 and 411 Save in this space, with a nearly identical business model of playing a short advertisment from a competitor to the requested business. The company is seed funded from Hummer Winblad and launched in November 2005

Standpoint

Standpoint, which launched today, is a “wikipedia of opinions”. At its core it is a simple blog for users to post their opinions and links to websites that help them form or support those opinions. Topics are grouped and the aggregate opinion of the community on any topic can be gauged. Co-founder Justin Smith presented. Gentry Underwood is Standpoint’s other founder.

LicketyShip

Robert Pazornik’s LicketyShip has the potential to be a big winner. It is an ecommerce service that can deliver purchased goods within two hours of placing the order. The magic? They combing local retail shops with the apparent over-capacity in the local courier market. Couriers pick items up at retail shops and deliver them immediately.

Lickety Ship hopes to tap into the must-have-now crowd (Robert claims theat 30% of Amazon orders pay for overnight shipping, often paying more for shipping than for the item itself). The company is beta testing now in a few select cities.

This reminds me of the good old days when we had kozmo to deliver a packet of skittles. The difference here is that customers will pay for this added convenience.

Flagr

Flagr was founded by Matt Colyer, David Wurtz adn Cole Poelker – all college dropouts from Boston. They are collecting emails on their site for a private beta…but the company promises to allow people to send tips on real world stuff in via a text message on a cell phone. Type in the title, address and comments, send it to Flagr and broadcast it to your friends or everyone. Their tagline is “sharewhere”.

PlaceSite

PlaceSite is another of my favorites from the event. They add their software to a standard wifi router and distribute them to cafe’s, events, etc. The result is a portal that all users of the network see that shows them current users of the network, allows instant messaging, etc. Their idea is to build more online community in these real world settings.

Placesite is up and running at one location now – Cafe Couleur in San Francisco (16th and De Haro). The revenue model is super-local advertising, customized versions for venues (this is great for conferences), and permission based licensing of user data.

I like it, and I want it on my home wifi.

Given the focus on instant messaging, PlaceSite seems to be trying to address the same market at Meetro – giving people who are local to eachother a way to meet online.

Box.Net

Box.Net is an online storage provider that launched in early 2005. They boast 4,300 paying users and funding by Mark Cuban. The founders, aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, were demonstrating the new functionality that they’ll be releasing in a couple of weeks. I’ll be writing more about Box.net and other companies in this space next week. This is a quickly evolving space.

Skobee

Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo. The site is currently collecting emails for the beta.

Both Skobee and Renkoo are focused on event planning (as opposed to an evite which looks at organizing people once the event specifics have been finalized). One thing I really like about Skobee is that users just email back and forth, cc’ing a unique skobee email address. Based on the live demo the service seems to be quite good at turning natural language into structured text. For instance, saying “Let’s do this on Monday instead” is understood by Skobee as a request for a date change and noted.

NeuroSky

Johnny Liu’s NeuroSky claims to have created “the world’s first consumer-minded nural device”.

A longer description from their website is “Neurosky has developed a non-invasive neural sensor and signal processing technology that converts brainwaves and eye movements into useful electronic signals to communicate with a wide range of electronic devices, consoles, and computers”. Applications include controlling video games. Sort of scary and really cool.

At least two Del.icio.us competitors, Simpy and RawSugar (profiles) have begun paying users to use and promote their services. While the companies have different payment models, both pay based on traffic generated at a particular users page containing the user’s bookmarks.

Simpy

Otis Gospodnetic’s Simpy is allowing users to enter their Google Adsense account number and ads will be shown on their bookmark page. See Otis’ Simpy page for an example.

Simpy is paying 100% of the proceeds from Google to the user for any ads on the page (in fact Google pays the user directly).

Raw Sugar

Raw Sugar is taking a more direct approach – they are paying the top twenty “directories” (user bookmark pages) between $25 and $500 per month. Directories are ranked on raw traffic, and the first payouts were made earlier this month.

RawSugar also plans to pay users a percentage of advertising revenue in a similar way as Simpy.

Is this a gimick to generate attention or is it a viable long term strategy to generate user adoption? Pete Cashmore thinks these promotions should make Yahoo (now owner of del.icio.us) take notice (see his further thoughts in the comments below). Maybe he’s right. And the markets for these products are still in the very early adopter stage.

But it is going to be hard for anyone to overcome the del.icio.us network effect (not to mention Yahoo’s marketing muscle) with relatively small direct economic incentives. I am, however, looking forward to seeing how these promotions drive new user registrations and site traffic. At the end of the day, these companies have nothing to lose with experiments like these.

I start to get nervous if another ajax home page doesn’t launch every two weeks or so. Well, today my long wait of over three weeks finally ended when I heard about Wrickr from Steve Rubel. See the Wrickr blog for more information.

The blog says “It looks like Google Personalized but it’s going to be much better.” Ok, so let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it will be extensible. Is it also going to integrate directly with the desktop operating system? Of course not. I am the champion of the small startup but I just can’t condone this kind of irresponsible behavior anymore. Yes, I will continue to write about new ajax homepages, but I guarantee I will become more vitriolic with each one.

Here’s my list of current Ajax or Flash Homepages:

• Eskobo
• favoor
• Google
• Goowy (Flash, not Ajax)
• HomePortals
• Microsoft Live
• Netvibes
• Pageflakes
• Protopage
• Wrickr
• Zoozio

UPDATE: Kevin Rose has directly denied these rumors.

Is Yahoo acquiring Digg? Jeremy Botter and Kevin Burton say yes, but Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, says “Rumors… we are focused on features, not selling the company.” in a comment (#64) to the story on Digg.

I have no direct information on this, but Kevin certainly did not deny it in his comment. Of course, it could just be bloggers stirring up trouble again.

Rumored price is the $30 million range.

I am visiting Microsoft HQ in Redmond this week for their SearchChamps event. Attendance requires the signing of an nondisclosure agreement, and most of what is discussed is non-bloggable. However, the trade off is that we see stuff that is still being developed in the labs (some of it isn’t even at the demo-stage yet).

A few of the services, however, are close to launch and are not covered by NDA. They include a new suite of Live.com services.

Live.com/Windows Gadget Integration

This one excites me the most. Live.com is a fully extensible ajax homepage (see my review here) – there are a ton of third party “gadgets” that can be added to the site and are available at microsoftgadgets.com.

Google has a similarly extensible home page.

However, unlike Microsoft, Google does not control the operating system for the large majority of worldwide personal computers. Sanaz Ahari, the program manager for Live.com, announced that Microsoft will allow gadgets to be dragged and dropped back and forth between live.com and the desktop (operating system). And they aren’t waiting for Vista – an update to Windows XP will be coming soon that will allow this drag and drop functionality.

The result will be a Yahoo-Widgets like experience, and users will have the further ability to syncronize gadgets between the operating system and the live.com site.

Remote Media Center Control

Sanaz Ahari also showed some new Live.com/Media Center integration. Anyone using Windows Media Center to record television (I do) will also be able to remotely control their media center to add/remove/edit recordings from any computer, via their passport account and a live.com gadget. We saw a demo of this today and its going to be pretty cool.

Note that this is not an annoucement for “remote viewing”, although there are heavy rumors that this is the next step, and it seems pretty obvious. That, of course, will be bad news for Slingbox.

Kris Barton at Microsoft also provided the following screenshot:

Expo

Samir Lakhani gave a brief presentation and demo of the new classifieds product called Expo (formerly Fremont) (my posts are here). No real new information was released, although the product is clearly ready to launch.

RSS Enhancements

Live.com RSS feeds will soon also include images as well. Screenshot from the presentation is here.

There are only a few details emerging about Israel-based Yedda, which will be launching in the next month or so (the current home page is taking email registrations).

My understanding is that the service will be somewhat similar to Yahoo Answers, Wondir, Google Answers and Oyogi, with some key differences that the founders hope will result in significantly more user participation, and better answers.

FireAnt released some impressive and beautiful software earlier today.

The company first launched in January 2005 with a downloadable Mac client that allowed users to aggregate video blog content and watch and/or download it to a device. A Windows client was relased in May 2005, which includes the ability to transcode video from the original source into the specific formats needed for different devices.

Until now, the FireAnt site was basically where you went to download the client.

Today FireAnt released new versions of the clients. But they also released a website service that is totally awesome.

The FireAnt site is now a full videoblogging directory that allows users to tag and rate videoblogs, subscribe to feeds and queue them up for watching or downloading. You can also watch any videoblog directly on the website in its original file format (this last point is important).

The website and clients fully syncronize, so any videoblogs added or removed from your que on the site will automatically sync up with the client (users may use the website at work, and have the client installed at home along with their PSP, video iPod or other device).

The result is an extremely versatile, file-type-agnostic videoblogging ecosystem. A tool like this was needed to allow videoblogging to expand to more users.

FireAnt works closely with other videoblogging services like Mefeedia (a directory and aggregator) and Blip.tv (a service which, among other things, provides a great platform for videobloggers to host their content) to ensure that they are all launching compatible platform and application services. This coopetition is good for the industry. Let’s see how long it can last.

FireAnt has relocated from New York to San Francisco. Joshua Kinberg and Jay Dedman are the founders (there are seven or so employees now).

Jay also worked with Mefeedia founder Peter Van Dijk to form the first video blogging email list before either company was founded. They are now tracking nearly 5,000 legitimate video blogs…up from only a handful a year ago.

Tello has been all over the news since last night. It hasn’t launched yet, but the promise is to allow people within your company and at trusted other companies to see your “presence”.

This means you can tell if they are using a landline, cell phone or IM application. You can use the Tello application to communicate with them and share applications. The system will work with traditional phones, blackberries and IM clients, and looks to be a killer productivity tool.

Tello raised $5.5 million from Eagle River, Evercore Partners, Rho Ventures and Intel Capital. The founders include John Sculley, Jeff PUlver, Craig McCaw and Michael Price.

I’m looking forward to testing this out, and maybe using it for my business. But Tello has made some odd choices in the weeks before launch.

First they clearly orchestrated a news blitz even though they are pre-launch. Ok, they got some great coverage. But why did they organize this way before launch? There won’t be as much hype on the day this goes live, when people can actually use the service.

Second, they’ve obviously decided that the bloggers don’t matter much. Om Malik and Alec Saunders took the time to write about them. Even though they each command a large and very relevant audience, Tello didn’t bother to list either of them on the news page. Lots of other bloggers wrote about Tello too (including our own MobileCrunch), but were not mentioned. Companies that don’t embrace bloggers tend to become attacked by bloggers. Companies that embrace bloggers, and thank them, get lots and lots of love.

Third, and this is minor – what’s up with the circa 1995 stock photography on the home page?

And no blog? Does Tello intend to communicate with us via press releases?

Of course, I will forget all of this (stock photography and all) if Tello is as cool as it looks like it might be.

Update: I have never been ripped into as aggresively as I have in the comments to this post.

Update: Tello has added blog posts to their news page. Good for them.

Ether, a division of pay-per-call Ingenio, is taking email addresses for a new beta. One of the people behind it says to read this and this to get an idea of what it is. Seems like it would be easier to just write a sentence of two on the site or the blog. But if you are in the mood for a scavenger hunt and a bit of speculation, throw out your best guess.

Ether says they’ll launch in three weeks.

Fred Wilson has a good post today comparing the Last.fm and Pandora music services. He’s strongly in favor of Last.fm.

I use and have written about both services. Each allows you to find new music that you are likely to enjoy. Last.fm does this through analysis of what you listen to and like (and what others listen to and like). Pandora encodes different aspects of music and determines what you might like based on those factors.

Pandora is easier to use because it takes absolutely no setup and streams music on the site itself. Last.fm uses tagging and has social network aspects, but you have to download the player to listen to music.

I find Last.fm to be better at playing music I’ve heard before and like, whereas Pandora tends to introduce me to entirely new bands.

Both are excellent. Tonight, in honor of Fred, I’ll be listening to Last.fm.

Car Harbor, which is still being developed and is far from launch (the link is to the blog), is going to solve a very common and frustrating real world problem – finding a parking space in a crowded city.

CarHarbor’s Mission

CarHarbor wants to tap into the everyday frustrations we all face when it comes to parking our cars. We are developing an online tool that can resolve those frustrations. CarHarbor should demonstrate that reasonable people can cooperate to benefit their community and themselves.

We want to engage you in this process so that our solutions can be highly responsive to the diverse set of parking problems people face. Our initial focus is on San Francisco, where we’re based, but our interests are national if not global in nature too.

Here’s how it will work: If you have a parking spot that you know you don’t need (like a driveway, during the working hours when you know you will be away from home), you can enter it into the network along with a price. People looking for a spot in a neighborhood can use their mobile phones to find local spots, and pay straight for it from their account.

Simple.

Car Harbor will launch first in San Francisco, and then roll out fast to other cities before the idea can be “borrowed”. I am looking forward to using this the next time I am up in the city for a baseball game.

Advisors include Craig Newmark, Jim Lazarus and Scott Rafer.

San Fransico-based medical search engine Healthline (launched in October 2005) just raised $14 million in a recapitalized Series A round of financing. They also are written up by Bob Tedeschi in tomorrow’s New York Times.

The round was led by Vantage Point. Reed Elsevier and Mitsui (Mitsui recently invested in Feedster as well) also participated in the round.

This was a recap round for Healthline, which has raised a total of around $30 million since its founding in 1999. It is an absolutely wonderful search engine.

Top 10 Sources, a human-edited blog index, announced a management team today.

Halley Suitt is CEO, Wendy Koslow is Editor in Chief and Indigo Tabor is Technical Editor in Chief.

From the site:

Top 10 Sources is a directory of sites that bring you the freshest, most relevant content on the Web. We know it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of the 20 million+ online sources of information. So our editors search Web 2.0 — blogs, podcasts, wikis, news sites, and every kind of syndicated sources online — by hand. Our Top 10 lists are updated frequently as great new sources come online.

The service has been heavily criticized by Mike Rundle and Om Malik (and subsequently defended by Dave Winer and John Palfrey) for copying blog posts. Adam Green argues both sides (see comments below for his further thoughts).

MY opinion: Top 10 Sources properly attributes and links to the original blog content, and they allow blogs to opt out. No problem.

And it is an excellent site for finding news. Combine this with Memeorandum’s or Tailrank’s ability to group conversations and we’ve got a real winner.