Eric Hayes, ehayes, -e

Attensa + RSS Investors = Series B!!!

Finally...  I can talk about this...  We closed our Series B!

I find this phase of the entrepreneurial cycle exhilarating!

Nearly 5 years ago we started quietly working on attention based (we didn't call it attention) metrics and analytics, and then spent the bulk of the last 2 years focused on RSS.  We reached (and passed) the point where we needed to take that next step and find an enthusiastic partner to help us reach our goals.

In the course of looking for a Series B, we met RSS Investors.  It was obvious, in the first few minutes of that initial meeting, we fit together very well.  I am not sure any company could be more in sync with its lead investor.  We both believe subscribable information plays an immense role in the future of communication -- both for the enterprise and the individual.

Back to the exhilarating part…

In the beginnings of a startup, you usually have a modest amount of working capital. (Thanks to SmartForest, Capybara, and a few others for drinking the RSS Kool-Aid with us!) Now with our Series B round, led by RSS Investors, we are going to be able to put the pedal to the metal (Think: “How many miles can you go on 1 gallon?” vs. “What will this HEMI do, if you stomp on the gas?”).  We have already been able to add amazingly talented people to our team, and have a renewed buzz of productivity our offices.

I can’t wait until we can show you what's under the hood of this great new machine!

-e

You can read more of the details in an interview with Jim Moore & Attensa, or our press release.  Additionally, Jim explains a few of their reasons for investing in Attensa here.

Tagging: a pure expression of our attention

My neighbor thinks I’m crazy! Last year it was my relentless discussion on the wonders of RSS. He’s a smart guy, a savvy senior sales manager for a technology company. I got through and now he’s a big RSS believer (meaning he is over-subscribed). So I started in on tagging, and he said; “What the hell happened to RSS?”

“It’s all connected,” I explained. Connected and driven by our constant struggle to deal with our busy, time compressed lives, the high pressure fire hose of incoming information, our natural curiosity and the countless demands on our attention.

Tagging is a pure expression of our attention. When you add keywords (tags) to put web pages, blog posts and news in context in a social network like del.icio.us you not only create an organization structure that works for you on a personal level, you overtly join into affinity groups. This simple act opens new doors to discovery.

To encourage the adoption of tagging, the newest version of Attensa for Outlook includes tagging toolbars for Outlook and Internet Explorer that make tagging & use of your tags more user friendly.  The goal, moving forward, is to make tagging an effortless byproduct of surfing or reading news.

At the moment, tagging networks like del.icio.us work because they are small and limited to the earliest of adopters. As the community grows and the power of tagging is realized by spammers and unscrupulous marketers, spamming tagging social network sites will become a new playground for insidious marketing schemes that overwhelm our attention filters.

One way to solve this problem is to set up personal privacy filters on tags. Tags don’t have to be public to work. Tags can be kept private, shared with a closed network of friends. Privacy protected tag networks can provide the collaborative benefits of a pure attention stream while making it very difficult for tag spammers to muck things up.

Another approach might combine attention stream analytics with tags to separate meaningful tags from spam tags. This could contain both a combination of the tagger’s and community’s attention streams.

In the future, I assume I will be thinking and writing about attention and tag spam often.

-e