Competitio.us early, but good idea
Do you ever get overwhelmed by all the Internet Web sites out there, and want to track their features and how popular they are?
Competitio.us has designed a way to do that, if you are an Internet company, and want to track the competition. It started with web 2.0 companies, and is building out from there. It gives you a dashboard so that you can see a company’s profile. It also lets you see their Alexa traffic, and read news and blog posts about them.
It also lets you fill in a list of features that a company has, so you can keep track of its weaknesses and strengths. Finally, it produces a matrix that lets you see on a single page your universe of competitors, letting you contrast their features side-by-side
The Palo Alto start-up of two people is still in its early, testing stages of letting you do all this. Co-founder Andrew Holt, a former product manager at Yahoo said he evaluating ways to develop the service, make its interface more intuitive and build out more offerings — including collaboration on knowledge within a team.
Currently, you have to do most of the work from scratch, building up the feature set of each company you want to track. You can also add your own company, and its features.
Right now, the market lacks appropriate offerings, Holt says. There are various tools, such as news aggregators, and traffic measuring services that track competitors, but nothing that brings these aspects together. Also, corporate strategy officers at big companies often horde such information. Competitio.us is a way to give all employees an explicit tracking device on the competition.
One good way to improve the service may be to offer more data on where a competitors’ traffic increases are coming from, and to provide other data, such as a competitor’s ranking on Google.
The company has no VC funding yet. Below is a partial screenshot of a profile page you could build for Microsoft Live.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
