Anyone familiar with the caricature of VCs scrolling down their Blackberry while half listening to an entrepreneur struggling through a pitch will be pleased to know that the Harvard Business Review has given this condition a name all of its own. An HBR article on Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 declares "Continual Partial Attention" as an emerging idea for the year. The concept is attributed to veteran high tech executive Linda Stone who coined the term almost ten years ago, but the renewed attention seems topical.

To summarise, the condition results from the challenge individuals face trying to scale personal bandwidth to match the endless bandwidth of technology. In short, the "always-on" mentality can lead to overload in humans and reduces the chances of meaningful thinking. Although Stone claims the affliction is benign, excess causes harm. She cites a scary statistic to support this:

TNS Research, in a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard, found that people who attempted to deal with a barrage of messages while working experienced a temporary ten-point drop in IQ over a day.

So how does Continual Partial Attention relate to the venture-backed ecosystem? Well, there's an opportunity for companies to simplify and filter the information they want us to process. One example that comes to mind is Skinkers, which raised more than E3m last month. It claims to increase the effectiveness of communication by evaluating the relevance of messages and pushing content to you only when appropriate.

There's also a connection here with Friday's news that Powerset (which raised $12.5m in Series A funding last November) has licensed natural language processing technology from PARC. Many people identified this as an important battle in the war with Google about who will be the next leader in search. Algorithms that help computers to interpret data like humans will allow individuals to "switch off" and computers to provide continuous concentrated attention. Unfortunately, European venture-backed companies involved with natural language technology are focused on the enterprise rather than the individual. Examples include call center technology (Infinity Comunicaciones SA), online self-service support (Q-go.com BV), knowledge management (Transversal Corporation Ltd), and media mining (SAIL LABS Technology AG).

I'd be curious to hear about other companies that are addressing the opportunity created by Continuous Partial Attention. Will improved artificial intelligence reduce people's need to be "always on"? Are there other tools to address this challenge? Actually, are you still paying attention? Even your partial attention is welcome.