Today I spoke at the Dow Jones Enterprise Ventures conference about Socialtext, but found a couple other Social Software companies. Five Across listed us as a competitor, so I rejigged my slide to list them, and joked about it with Glenn Reid.
Came across Attensa, which was speaking about their RSS Aggregator company in public for about the first time. Here's my quick notes:
Attensa says we are having the same email overload problems we were having with email, using Scoble's consumption of 1400 feeds a day as an example. Offering an RSS Reader Client (for users), RSS Servers (for IT) and RSS Network Infrastructure (for publishers and marketers).
On the client, Outlook versions that range from $20 to $60 per year, free web-based version. Says it's best of class, it's in beta. Has browser toolbars that accelerate subscription. Workgroup server is $600-$5,000k proxy server that lets you manage users, groups, policies, configuration.
Secret sauce is attention metadata (channeling Steve Gillmor). Aggregates, processes and analyzes attention meta data in near real time. Uses attention streams (1M so far) across outlook, offline, mobile, embedded, toolbar clients through their servers and network. Intelligent synch is also a feature of Newsgator. They will support attention.xml (don't yet), today have their goal is having fewer and more relevant articles by leveraging attention streams, triangulation and collaborative filtering of real-time metrics.
Have revenues from something they were doing before, Usoftware, which did digital marketing, happened upon the core and applicable technology for attention aggregation, it's a kind of restart. Total of 3 customers in their beta program at decent scales (in other words, they are doing the traditional enterprise software model of stealth mode development to a handful of customer requirements, rather than releasing early, often and openly).
This is Craig Barnes' fourth company, previously did Now Software, and Extensis. Has worked with his key engineers for a total of 15 years so far. $3.2 M raised to date from Smart Forest, Second Ave, CGI and Capybara. Now looking towards a Series B.
I asked him about the differentiation from the market leader, Newsgator, which isn't particularly clear. Apparently the difference is a network, rather than client-server approach -- tracking what is read, not just what is fetched. Sounds good, but it's both early in the game and they are late to the party in a crowded space.
Also saw Chuck Digate of Convoq at the Dow Jones Enterprise Ventures conference emphasizing how great of a solution they are for sales -- publishing presence and leveraging trusted communications to accelerate the sales cycle. They are embedding their technology within Salesforce and Siebel (I'd assume SugarCRM is next), to enable escalation within workflow. Demos a click in a client email to live presentation to captured record within Salesforce. Click to pitch. But also looking to aggregate all the main IM platforms into unified presence. You will recall that Socialtext integrated to present Convoq presence within wiki pages. Emphasizes openness and media richness as differentiators against other web conferencing plays.
And speaking of sales, my quote of the day via John Roberts of SugarCRM: "Our products are bought, not sold." Who says enterprise software is dead?
