NEW: Among 50 candidates, Attentio was awarded best business case at Benelux Venture Forum

Brussels, March 19 2008. Attentio was yesterday awarded as the most promising business case of Europe’s investment community at the Benelux Venture Forum. Sponsored by Ernst & Young, this 7th edition of the event was held in Brussels on March 18. Leading venture capital firms from all of Europe was present.

>> Benelux Venture Forum web site

NEW: Attentio is co-hosting social media marketing event with Emakina

Brussels, March 10 2008. Attentio is co-hosting an event with Emakina, the well-know Belgian web 2.0 agency. The subject of the event is Social Media in Marketing: what is the added value for companies. The event will be held on

March 21 2008, Place Flagey in Brussels
(A second session is scheduled on April 17 2008 in Ghent.)

The academies are aimed to share knowledge with the agency's clients on a panel of broad competences and hot topics. Attentio, as the European social media monitoring and measurement leader, has been invited to demonstrate how the (pro)active "listening" in on online conversations can add value to businesses and how it impacts marketing strategy.

During this one half-day event (followed by a lunch) you'll also learn through concrete business cases the basics of Social Media, the best practices to efficiently monitor and measure real-time buzz and identify threats, opportunities, influencers and detractors along with concrete business applications.

We'd be happy to meet you there. The event is free. All you need to do is pre-register here:

>> Register for the "Social Media in Marketing" event, March 21 2008

Presentations:
>> Attentio at Emakina  |  Automative case  |  Mobile phone case

If you have any questions or issues please do not hesitate to contact us at attentiocontact AT attentio DOT com or call us at + 32 211 34 70.

NEW: Attentio nominated for Benelux Venture 50

Brussels, March 7 2008. As one of the most promising Benelux-based start-up companies in high-tech sectors, Attentio has been identified to showcase itself to Europe’s investment community at the Benelux Venture Forum. This 7th edition of the event is sponsored by Ernst & Young and will be held in Brussels on March 18. Leading venture capital firms from all of Europe will be present.

>> Benelux Venture Forum web site

NEW: Dr. Frizo Janssens to join the text analytics team

Brussels, February 11 2008. Attentio has hired Dr. Frizo Janssens to join the R&D team of Attentio. Frizo is a Doctor of Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U.Leuven) in Belgium and has written and developed extensively around natural language processing and AI technologies. His PhD thesis was “clustering of scientific fields by integrating text mining and bibliometrics”. He also recently was involved with the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Mining Massive Data Sets held in Italy last September. Attentio is delighted to have Frizo on the team. It’s really exciting that we are attracting some great talent from the world of advanced text analytics, ground breaking technology that is increasingly relevant to business and government.

Attentio sponsors the I-COM conference

Brussels, January 15 2008. Attentio will be sponsoring a panel at the second I-COM conference event to be held in Barcelona on Feb 5-8 2008. Attentio is sponsoring the panel social media measurement along side Gemius, TNS and Nielsen. “Social media is much more relevant now to communications and marketing people and we look forward to sharing our views on how it can be measured and the value brands can generate by understanding how these influential sources discuss products and services” said Simon McDermott. The i-com group includes as its patrons the IAB and EIAA and amongst its objectives aims “to provide an overview of international online media measurement standards & systems”.

>> I-COM Conference Web site

Attentio hires Amaia Lasa as COO

Brussels, September 3 2007. Amaia Lasa has recently joined Attentio's management as Chief Operating Officer (COO). Coming from Toyota, FedEx in Belgium and Solideal in Sri Lanka, she has extensive international experience in operations and marketing.  “I am thrilled to be working with Attentio, having come from a company like Toyota it’s a real change but I am looking forward to the challenge” said Amaia. “What really attracted me to Attentio was the international environment and the real belief that as social media grows, companies need to get engaged more. This is right in line with Attentio’s mission.” Amaia joins recent hires such as Monika Mrowiec (Sales team, Belgium) and Jon McLennan (senior software engineer).

Bloggers beat polls in predicting elections: Yves Leterme most popular politician in the Blogosphere

Brussels, July 7 2007. A combined research by Attentio and Hill & Knowlton reveals that buzz on Belgian blogs was more accurate in predicting last months federal elections than most opinion polls. Attentio monitored how many times Belgian politicians and parties were mentioned on Belgian blogs two months ahead of the elections until day of elections, June 10th. By monitoring blogs before the elections the success of Jean-Marie Dedecker, Yves Leterme and Didier Reynders could have been predicted.

>> Read more about the tracking of the Belgian election in our blog
>> Joint Attentio and Hill & Knowlton collaboration on election monitoring
>> Le politique show: Les blogs avaient vu juste (French)
>> "Bloggers voorspelden uitslag 10 juni beter dan peilingen" (Dutch)

Attentio received great press coverage from this project, incuding articles in La Libre, Le Soir, De Standaard, Het Laatste Nieuws, 7sur7.be, Sudpresse, Le Vif, De Morgen, Gazet Van Antwerpen, and Het Belang Van Limburg.

Attentio technology and the French election

Brussels, April 22 2007. The Norwegian blogger and advisor Anders Gjøen has used Attentio technology to aid his continuous analysis of the French election. His blog Fr2007 presents popularity and opinions statistics about the different French presidential candidates gathered automatically from what people write online.

Mr. Gjøen spotted candidate Ségolène Royal's popularity climb two weeks before the numbers were confirmed in the polls. This has again led to Mr. Gjøen participating in the news TV channel French 24's live election coverage.

>> Fr2007.com - Anders Gjøen's political blog
>> Monitoring political issues, from Observer France 24
>> Attentio measuring political buzz for LExpress.fr

Further, Norwegian national TV and press media has picked up the story. Norway will have its forthcoming election this autumn.

>> Norwegian TV NRK's headline TV news April 21 2007 (Windows Media Player)
>> Mr. Anders Gjøen early to spot Ségolène Royal's popularity climb (Norwegian)

Figure: Buzz trends for French presidential elections candidates based on
monitoring of candidate mentions from online bloggers using
Attentio technology. April 22 2007. Source: Attentio SA

Attentio named as finalist for Red Herring 100 Europe

Brussels, February 26 2007. Red Herring announced that Attentio was named a Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region. "This year’s impressive list, and unprecedented number of submissions from companies demonstrates Europe’s emergence as a major player in the global technology sector," said Red Herring Editor-in-Chief, Joel Dreyfuss. "The exceptional accomplishments of European technology companies and entrepreneurs are a testament to the rapid advancements being made in building the European innovation ecosystem."

Red Herring’s lists of top private companies are an important part of the company’s tradition of identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Companies like Google, eBay and Skype were spotted in their early days by Red Herring editors, and touted as leaders that would change the way we live and work. "We are very proud to be selected as a finalist for the Red Herring 100", said Attentio CEO Simon McDermott. "We see this as a reflection of the hard work of our team and the growing need for companies to understand how their brands are perceived in social media".

Attentio SA is nominated for the
2007 European ICT Prize

Brussels, February 12 2007. Attentio has been named along with 70 of Europe’s most innovative companies as a nominee for the European ICT prize. The award is organised by Euro-CASE with the sponsorship and support of the European Commission. We are delighted that our technology and solutions have been recognized by Euro-CASE. We have a great team and are really proud to be nominated for the award, especially given that this year’s contest is so competitive with more than 450 participants.

>> Full text of press release
>> Press release from Euro-CASE

Attentio SA launches version 2 of Brand Dashboard™ for real-time monitoring of social media

Brussels, February 9 2006. Attentio SA, an emerging European provider of online market intelligence, today launched version 2 of Attentio® Brand Dashboard™ for selected clients. By continuously monitoring what is written in online news press, blogs, discussion forums and other Web-based social media, Attentio aids customers in executing successful marketing campaigns, launch new products, gain consumer insight and maintain brand reputation.

With Brand Dashboard™, customers will benefit from automated daily reporting of buzz and demographics in relation to their own and competitor’s brands and products. This new online service uses charts to visualize buzz trends, share of buzz, brand benchmarking, detection of bursting events, and breakdown by source, topic and country.

>> Full text of press release

Hiring of Ms. Kalina Lipinska as
Social Media Analyst

Brussels, December 1 2006. Addressing growing opportunities in online brand monitoring, Attentio today announced the hiring of Kalina Lipinska as social media analyst.

With a degree in Social Sciences, and her knowledge of market research and consumer studies, she will be in the best position to support our clients in their application of Attentio's Brand Dashboard and Buzz Report products.

Attentio signs agreement with leading market research
company GfK Benelux

Brussels, July 9 2006. Attentio SA/NV and GfK Benelux Marketing Services BV (GfK MS) have agreed to work together to deliver market research information based on Attentio's online market intelligence services cross-linked with the GfK retail panel information for the Benelux market. Attentio will provide real-time social media monitoring tools while GfK will provide its retail panel data and its client network.

The goal is to offer new and current GfK Benelux clients in industries such as consumer electronics, information technology and telecoms the opportunity to track online buzz (word-of-mouth) surrounding their brands and investigate the predictive and explicative power of early buzz in blogs and forums by comparing this data with point-of-sales data in a single interactive dashboard.

Attentio announces new Fortune 50 clients

Brussels, June 5 2006. Attentio SA, a provider of real-time market intelligence, announces the addition of new Fortune 50 clients to their customer portfolio. "Due to the increased awareness of social media such as blogs and discussion forums, more companies want to understand what impact these forums have on their brands," said Simon McDermott, co-founder and CEO of Attentio. These new clients come from different industries including pharmaceuticals and information technology. Both the Attentio Brand Dashboard™ and Buzz Report™ products will be applied in these cases. "We feel that Attentio is well positioned to capture a part of this emerging market as our tools and methodology take into account the language and country differences across Europe, said Mr. McDermott.

>> For further information, please contact: