Startup Offers Portal For Sharing Competitive Intelligence

Can social networking technology help businesses beat the competition? An online startup called Competitious thinks so, and it aims to help companies more easily develop better intelligence on their rivals.

Co-founders Kris Rasmussen, a former software engineer on Microsoft's SharePoint development team, and Andrew Holt, a former product manager with the merchant services group at Yahoo shopping, were working on their own startups when they came up with the idea. "We realized we needed to do better competitive intelligence ourselves," Rasmussen says.

Competitious is a portal for tracking a limited set of data about companies and sharing it with internal team members. Think of it as a social networking site that's focused on competition and conquest rather than community and conversation. Most social networking sites aren't sufficiently private or workgroup-oriented to use them to share intelligence on rival businesses, Rasmussen says.

Initially, at least, Competitious plans to target Web 2.0-based startups with its service, which can manage lists of companies and the features they offer, news clippings, comments, and site traffic data. It's free and should remain so, though Rasmussen is planning premium features.

There's not a lot of unique technology in the portal--the site aggregates data though user input, RSS feeds, and Alexa.com's application programming interfaces.

"Our goal is to make organizing, digesting, and sharing competitive intelligence more accessible and common to everyone in a company," Rasmussen says. It's an ambitious goal that should appeal to companies that can't spend a lot of money on developing competitive intelligence