Makers of the desktop RSS reader, NewsGator, have raised a $12 million led by a new investor, Vista Ventures, and supported by existing investors Mobius, Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. This brings the total raised by NewsGator to $30 million over three rounds.

Their RSS reader has been a personal favorite of the TechCrunch team. I use it over Google reader, which can lag behind in keeping my feeds up to date. They also have a mobile version.

Although we know the company best for the reader, NewsGator has also developed several other RSS related products. They have enterprise servers for syndicating information from the web to your employees, their own widget framework, and a host of personal products. Readers considering enterprise syndication services should check out our coverage of Attensa too.

Update: NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston adds:

Over 1 million folks rely on NewsGator daily – whether through FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our mobile applications, our enterprise server at 12 of the Fortune 100 (and many more companies), or readers of over 50 sites who work with our content and widgets (USA Today, CBS News, etc etc).

He confirms that NewsGator’s main sources of revenues come from licensing its software to enterprises and monthly service fees from media and consumer-products companies. The new investment will go towards strengthening its position “in the enterprise RSS space,” and he expects this will get the company to a breakeven point on profits.

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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.

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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.

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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 of any reason not to give it a try if you’re an Outlook user. The interface is familiar and clean, it’s just a question of whether the way it enables you to interact with your feeds proves useful to you. As you can see in the image here, the program lets you put some feeds manually at the top of your list, some at the bottom and then prioritizes the bulk of your subscriptions in the middle field.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Over 100 startups applied to present their companies at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference last week. Twelve were selected and had a chance to launch their new products to an audience of hundreds.

I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below.

Attensa	Ether	lifeio
Netvibes	PostApp	PROTOMOBL
Sharpcast	SoonR	StumbleUpon
Vpod.tv	Webaroo	ZiXXo

Sharpcast

Palo Alto-based Sharpcast (TechCrunch posts here) has developed a platform to sync application data across your computers and mobile devices. Their first showcase application is Sharpcast Photos, which not only pushes photos from one device/computer to others, it also keeps them synced. Make a change on one and it pushes the changes to the other copies as well. There are lots of new applicaitions coming as well (documents, calendar, contacts). The company, which has raised $16.5 million in capital, will be application-agnostic so you don’t have to switch to using new software. Windows only today, Mac coming soon.

Webaroo

Webaroo, headquartered in Santa Clara is a new service that launched in April that allows PC users (no Mac support yet) users to access cached web content when they are offline. Webaroo offers pre-selected content, called “web packs”, and users can also cache whatever websites they would like to have access to. For more, see the TechCrunch Webaroo review here.

PostApp

PostApp is a new company that allows users to pull web services directly into their blog or other website without having the technical skills to use the API supplied by the service provider. With the explosion of widgets, PostApp may be the right application at the right time. They also secured $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. See the full profile here.

Vpod.tv

Vpod.tv was one of my favorite companies presenting at a conference in Spain last month. It is a video sharing site, similar to YouTube, but that focuses on transcoding to most video devices (ipod, PSP, etc.) and allowing users to download video to those devices. They also have an innovative approach to monetization. See the full TechCrunch post here, which also discusses their $5.1 million funding.

Ether

Ether officially launched at Supernova. They’ve created an “ebay for services” that allows people who wish to sell their time on the phone to do so. Place an Ether logo on your site - when someone clicks on it they can set up a time to speak with you according to the terms you’ve set (price, time of call, etc.). When your phone rings, there is a person on the other end who has already given their credit card information and is looking for your advice. Ether went into beta in March, and we covered the official launch here.

Lifeio

Bruce Spector from attap gave the Supernova audience a very early look at Lifeio, “the new life organizer”. Lifeio will combine instant messaging, email, calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, etc in a multipage Ajax site (from what I saw it looks like Lifeio is competing with Goowy, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.). Lifeio is also opensourcing the platform framework, called jitsu. Look for more details as the September launch date approaches, and sign up for the beta on the Lifeio homepage.

Other attap companies include Riffs, Buzzvote and personal DNA.

GearON

GearON, a mobile service launching this month from ProtoMobl, centers on your phone’s contact list and creates a social network around it to share photos, music, events and venue information. See the flash demo of GearON here to get a better idea of what it’s all about. Their launch will be covered on MobileCrunch as well as here at TechCrunch.

Soonr

Soonr is a new mobile platform that we’ve previously covered at TechCrunch. One of the most useful applications they’ve launched so far is the ability to use Skype on a normal cell phone (all you pay for are the Skype-out charges from Skype to your own cell, and you can then use Skype to call anyone on your Skype list). The Mac version of Soonr was announced at Supernova.

Zixxo

There are a few ways to look at Zixxo. For users they will deliver highly targeted local and national coupons to you based on whatever personal and demographic information you choose to share with them. For businesses, they are a very cost-effective way of reaching consumers who actually want to receive these coupons. For third parties there is a revenue share opportunity for bringing users and/or businesses to the network. Zixxo is still very young, but the core idea is strong. Look for a potential quick acquisition of this company if they start to get traction.

Attensa

Craig Barnes, the CEO of Attensa, talked about how his suite of RSS reader applications (mobile, outlook, online) analyze user behaviors to recommend specific content and help people deal with information overload. They’ve also just released a new version of Attensa for outlook. TechCrunch posts on Attensa are here.

Netvibes

Founder and Co-CEO Tariq Krim gave the audience an overview of London and Paris-based Netvibes, the Ajax home page that has seen tremendous growth and now has millions of passionate users. Netvibes now has an active community of independent developers creating modules for the site. Netvibes is on a roll. TechCrunch posts are here.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.

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Syndication is undoubtedly the heartbeat of the web 2.0 movement. A feed reader, the most common solution to consuming synidcated content, saves the user time by monitoring countless sites and sources and providing near real-time updates to one location.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart - there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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 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

Additional Reading

Craig’s Lemonade, Mike McBride, RJ Martino, Michael Fraase,

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