21
March
2010
|
18:14 PM
America/Los_Angeles

My6Sense Launches Attention API

One of my favorite entrepreneurs is Barak Hachamov, co-founder of My6Sense, the developer of a very interesting iPhone application that manages your content feeds, feeding you only the content that matters to you.

It's a great application, but I don't use my iPhone that much for reading content feeds and I'm always badgering Mr Hachamov to create a desktop version, so that it can surface what's of interest to me, without my having to physically search through tons of content. But My6Sense is firmly focused on the mobile space, and that makes sense, because focus is very important for startups.

Today, My6Sense launched its Attention API at the DEMO conference. With this API, other developers will be able to use the technology in their apps. Hopefully, someone will create a desktop app that I can use.

I've spent many an evening with Mr Hachamov talking about the future of mobile apps, and he is very much a visionary. He clearly understands that the future will not be like the present.

Search, or even what now call "human-powered" search, or curation, will not have much meaning in the near future - we will need what was once called "software agents" but Mr Hachamov calls 'digital intuition,' to help us.

My prediction for 2010 was that a media tsunami is headed our way. There's an unbelievably huge mountain of media -- video, text, images, podcasts, social information, etc, headed our way. We will drown in media, we won't be able to see the forest for the trees.

Simple search can't help us, "human search" won't be much better, because there aren't enough humans to filter everything, so that it represents what we want individually. We will need technologies such as that which My6Sense is working on.

This company has some of the world's top scientists working on the 'digital intuition' technology -- it's not an easy problem.

At the moment, the iPhone application is the best demonstration of its capabilities, but this type of technology will have increasing importance in our future worlds, where limited form factors, and the actual mobility of our selves, places huge challenges on our interaction with the digital worlds around us.

Louis Gray, who does some work for My6Sense, says it well:

Content is coming at us from every direction in the form of streams, from blogs to tweets to social networks. These streams are combining to become information waterfalls of noise from practically every direction -- noise because they are all shouting for our attention and demanding we choose them over updates from somewhere else.

The beauty of My6Sense is that it learns from individuals, and it learns very quickly what to filter.

Now, with the Attention API becoming available to others, Mr Hachamov hopes that developers will start to use the technology in their applications.

The move is an astute one because this type of technology will be needed in so many areas. The media tsunami affects everyone, and every media stream -- everything will be fighting for attention and trying to get on top -- we need something to create order out of the churning chaos.

There are companies offering similar technologies, sometimes called "recommendation engines." But by making its Attention API widely available, this is a way that My6Sense can get its technology into the hands of many developers, and quickly grab market share -- and just as importantly, mindshare.

Over the next several months, the Attention API is in closed beta and will be available to select partners. My6sense is interested in working with a diverse set of mobile application developers and content publishers -- from Twitter app developers to major news providers, vertical content providers, social networks, and more. Sign up at www.my6sense.com to become an Attention API partner and make sure your users find the needles in today's digital haystacks.

You can read more about the Attention API here:

my6sense Unveils Attention API at DEMO Spring 2010