Startup Offers Portal For Sharing Competitive Intelligence

Competitious is a portal for tracking a limited set of data about companies and sharing that information with team members.

Thomas Claburn, Editor at Large, Enterprise Mobility

October 13, 2006

2 Min Read
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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.

(click image for larger view)Competitious tracks the social networking competition

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

About the Author

Thomas Claburn

Editor at Large, Enterprise Mobility

Thomas Claburn has been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications such as New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and television, having earned a not particularly useful master's degree in film production. He wrote the original treatment for 3DO's Killing Time, a short story that appeared in On Spec, and the screenplay for an independent film called The Hanged Man, which he would later direct. He's the author of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and a sadly neglected blog, Lot 49. His iPhone game, Blocfall, is available through the iTunes App Store. His wife is a talented jazz singer; he does not sing, which is for the best.

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