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.
Now this sounds like an interesting advance in RSS news readers. Like a smart news feed reader that adjusts results based on reading habits. Interesting.
> 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.
This is a cool concept for the end user. However, I wonder where their enterprise Feed Server product is headed… if mgmt or IT is administering everyone’s feed reader, that will invariably impact how it will get used.
If you wnat more users then you have to offer you web apps for free.
Great move by Attensa in making their Outlook plugin free. Apart from the Enterprise Feed Server, there is another rather creepy way in which Attensa can make money. Since they are monitoring the users’ reading habits, they perhaps have the ability to profile their users accurately, based on their interests. And that can, in turn, be used to offer highly targeted ads. I would probably stop using Attensa if that happens. But there may be a lot of people who don’t mind that, as long as they get a good RSS reader for free.
There is one more angle to RSS feeds. There are at least 40 million sources of RSS feeds. There is a need to unite all the information into meaningful way.
I think http://Mintr.com is trying to address this need by using the Social Networking and tagging way. They call it “Social Newsmarking”.
Michael, I will emphasize, you should take a look at the site and put them on a road map so that people will have an option to benefit from the collective wisdom of the masses.
Tracking users’ habits is a multibillion business.
The Attensa guys pissed me off pretty bad when I was using the free 1.0 Beta client and they switched over to charging people for it, because it would constantly shower me with popups and nags to upgrade until I finally gave up and uninstalled that thing. And NOW they are making it free again until some critical mass point is reached and they can charge for it again? No thanks, I’ll rather stick with something that doesn’t change business models like other people change their underwear.
Check out this great trail my friend posted on trailfire.com about Web 2.0 startups! Here is the link –
http://www.trai...st/trails/12251
Mariam
I’m a paid Attensa subscriber. I feel I wasted my money since I’m not interested in premium support – which is all that my money gets me now that version 2.0 is free. I’ve also been trying to upgrade to version 2, but an hour after entering multiple email addresses into the attensa download form, I’ve yet to receive a link to the download.
Shame on you Attensa. I would have expected better treatment of your paid customers. At the least you should have sent them a direct link to the upgrade.
And whatever happened to synchronizing newsfeeds online? The feature never worked for me in version 1.x.
I’ve had the same problem with trying to download the ‘free’ version. Have tried entering a number of my different email addresses and I’ve had no links sent to me.
I also note that in their support forums, the Attensa developers are conspicuous by their absence. Peoples complaints that version 2.0 doesn’t work properly are left unanswered. Either they’ve all packed up and gone home, or they don’t feel it important to respond to peoples problems in the forums. Shame really because it looks like an interesting product.
We haven’t packed up and gone home. We’re still here. We can’t explain why you haven’t received your email. Check your junk mail folder. We have tested our server internally and externally and cannot duplicate your problem. Contact me directly – sniesen@attensa.com and I will send you a download link.
Waqas – Contact me. We’ll gladly give you a refund and still give you access to premium support. We preannounced Attensa for Outlook 2.0 on 9.21 on our blog to let our customers know about the upgrade. This was posted before the announcement was made on TechCrunch. We’re launching an auto-update which will bring users up to date with Attensa for Outlook 2.0.
Our forums are monitored by our support team and issues are logged in our bug tracking system where our engineers address them directly. The forum is a user community support tool.
Scott, thanks for the response. I guess that typically you expect to see the developers answerings problems in the user forums because that way the solutions become instantly available to everyone, and it helps users learn more about the product, plus it saves your guys from having to repeat themselves over and over…
I did finally get the email link, but it came thru over a day after I’d registered. Having installed Attensa I ran into various problems which weren’t answered in the Attensa 1.5 beta manual which is the latest I could find. Then in trying to register in your support forum I was greeted with…
Ran into problems sending Mail. Response: 452 Insufficient system storage
DEBUG MODE
Line : 143
File : smtp.php
…when I hit the submit button.
I’ll send you an email to discuss rather than clogging up the TechCrunch comments column.
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