Start-up introduces email management currency

Corporate managers concerned about the amount of time employees spend sifting though mountains of unwanted email may soon have World of Warcraft to thank for providing a solution.

That's because a Palo Alto, California-based start-up called Seriosity has come up with an email management system that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in World of Warcraft (WoW) and other large-scale online games.

Known as Attent, Seriosity's system is essentially a new currency — called the Serio — that corporate email users spend to indicate a message's importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they believe it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn't valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message, or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.

But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.

And while the system, strictly speaking, is enterprise software, it was directly inspired by the virtual economies of online games like WoW. There, players accumulate gold or platinum pieces or some other form of currency and can spend them on weapons, armour, dwellings and the like that have real monetary value as demonstrated by what people will pay for them on auction and third-party sites.

Ultimately, the point of Serios is to help large enterprises manage their employees' attention.

"The real value of the 21st century organisation is in its people, and the organisation only does what the people put their attention on," said Edward Castronova, a leading expert on virtual economies who is consulting for Seriosity. "Yet in the age of email, pagers, IMs and [mobile] phones, our attention is like roadkill. My argument was that if a synthetic currency gets people to trade gold pieces for [virtual items), it could get them to trade Serios for attention. When you pay for a [virtual item], you're just asking for attention: 'Cast this spell on me' is the same thing as 'Read my email'."

According to a study by Basex, the total cost to the US economy of attention-management problems caused by email and other online tools is $588bn a year. Seriosity says it has a corporate client — which it would not name — for whom the problem costs about $1bn a year.

And while Seriosity doesn't believe it can solve that entire problem, it is hopeful businesses that purchase Attent and have significant numbers of employees using Serios can see substantial decreases in time and money wasted by email and attention mismanagement.

"Let's pretend that we can solve 10 percent [of the problem]", said Seriosity chief executive Ken Ross of his company's major client with the $1bn email management problem. "That's still a huge saving."

Under Attent, people would receive weekly allowances of Serios, most likely 100. That number would be the same for everyone, no matter who they are. But the idea is that managers and higher-level executives would accumulate more of the currency because they receive more messages. That means, in turn, that they have more Serios to spend on responses.

Further, people can sort messages by numbers of Serios attached, allowing them to sift through the hundreds of emails they may get every day and see which ones that senders have deemed the most important.

And while people cannot tell how many Serios someone else has, they can see the average number of Serios the person to whom they're sending receives. That, Ross said, allows a sender to get a sense of how many Serios to send to be sure to get the recipient's attention.

"If I see that Jonathan is getting an average of five Serios," Ross said, "and I send 20 [he will understand the importance]".

Ross and Leighton Read, a Seriosity co-founder and board member, said they intend for Serios to be a single currency, regardless of which company uses them. That's partly because they…