Attensa announced this morning a new round of financing led by RSSI. This weekend, I interviewed Jim Moore of Attensa on the forth-coming announcement.
Randy Charles Morin: Congratulations on your first investment announcement. Tell my readers more about RSSI and what it does?
Jim Moore: RSS Investors is a venture capital fund dedicated to promoting RSS Web 2.0 businesses that are being made possible by the widespread adoption of syndication and interconnected networks of web services.
We are interested in companies ranging from enterprise technology platform providers, like Attensa, to consumer media and social networking companies.
Randy Charles Morin: What were the one or two reason why you chose to invest in Attensa? Great management? Great product? Great strategy? Current business?
Jim Moore: All of the above. The core team has been together for over a decade, and has delivered excellent software again and again. I personally used Now Contact, one of their early products. It was blindingly fast, with a great user interface, and totally reliable.
Attensa already has three best-in-class RSS products in the market, and a full pipeline moving from lab to customers. We are excited to have been invited to help them create what we believe will become a central player in enterprise computing.
Attensa is dedicated to serving enterprise customers who want a robust, secure, effective platform for RSS-based applications. We believe this market has enormous potential.
Randy Charles Morin: What would you advise other startups do, who would like to be funded by RSSI?
Jim Moore: Work within the Web 2.0/RSS community. You cannot make a revolution alone. Many new ideas are being born, and these are early days. Embrace cooperation and co-evolution. Give as well as take. Develop friends and networks in this new world. Someday you will look back and realize that you were a pioneer.
The RSS-enabled revolution is bigger than you or I can grasp. Within the past 18 months every major newspaper in the world, with few exceptions, has adopted RSS. Many newspapers have well over a hundred feeds. And this is just the beginning. Within the next 18 months more than 110 million desktops will be fully RSS-oriented, simply through the distribution of Microsoft Vista.
Ideas are moving just as fast as the adoption numbers, but are more difficult to quantify. Believe it that todayâs most extreme Web 2.0 ideas will seem like childâs play next year.
Randy Charles Morin: Since RSS is an enabling technology, how do you decide if the investment qualifies for RSS funding? For instance, would an RSS publisher like a blogging network be considered an RSS investment?
Jim Moore: We are interested in media companies, such as a blogging networkâand we are interested in technology platform companies, such as Attensa. Our use of the term RSS is intended to be inclusive. We hope to attract and stimulate ideas. We chose RSS as our name in order to say to the world that we believe in RSS as a revolution. RSS is a very broad termânot just at our fund, but for more and more professionals in information and communication technology.
Really Simple Syndicationâthe syndication ideaâis a fundamental architectural âpatternâ for developing vast networks of interacting web services. RSS is a way of talking about web services that can be created by anyone anywhere in the world, that can be lashed together with other services, and that in total represent a new kind of openness and democratization on the web. RSS is one of several terms that people use to name the new revolution--others include Web 2.0, interconnected web services, and web superservices.
How would I speak with Mr. Moore about an investment opportunity?
Darren