April Spoke-A-Thon in Full Swing!

The 3rd ever SPOKE-A-THON is Officially Live:  another round of our users' favorite contest to build great pages on Spoke.com for chances to win Apple products and personal exposure across our site!

Click Here for the Official Entry Form

To Enter:

Sign up on Spoke.com (or Login), and create a new page on a topic / company / person of your chosing (hint, we really like topics).

Judging Criteria:

(1)  Completeness: Use the flexibility of the page. Fill as many fields as you can to improve your chances -- this means adding videos, links, detailed descriptions, etc.

(2)  Usefulness: Does your page contain boring everyday information; or is there unique and actionable insight that isn't common to most of the Spoke audience?

(3)  Creativity: A contest wouldn't be complete without a little flair, so feel free to post the unexpected -- links that give unique context, videos that tell a story -- it can only help!

(4)  Social Sharing: vote for your page using the Facebook 'Like', Google +1, and Tweet buttons, and encourage others to do so. The more your entry is shared, the more likely you are to win.

The previous contests have been intense to watch, check out some of the winning submissions and their authors:

Spoke-A-Thon Winners widget provided by Spoke

You Can't Lose!

In both prior Spoke-a-thon's, users emailed us after to tell us what a huge traffic boost their personal and company brands received because they participated--even those who didn't win!  This is because while winning pages may get homepage exposure AND a custom-engraved iPod (and if you submit 3 winning entries, an iPad 3), we also promote other pages all over our site, and on facebook & twitter.  And finally, our entire community will gain access to the page(s) you build.

We've seen over 64,000 edits since we launched in January and wanted to use this contest as a way to give our users even more benefit for their efforts.  There are multiple ways to win an iPod shuffle or an iPad 3 -- including periodic drawings !!

Best of luck, Click here to get started!

Our new search is here:

In our commitment to make things better, we are releasing today a new version of our search engine. You will notice several changes:

The most obvious one is the new User Interface which gives far more information directly into the search results for you to make an informaed decision on whether to click on any given links. We have also made a bigger place for pictures and logos as they were far too small in our prior implementation.

We are also extending our search ability to search stock tickers so if you search for INTU, Intuit will come back as a search result.

More importantly, you can now search for featured employees, board members and advisors. So if you perform a search for a person, not only the profile for the person is going to appear but also all the companies that this person could be associated with either as an advisor/board member or an employee. Pretty soon, you will see also the topics for which this person is considered a Maven coming on the search results page as well.  

This is a major enhancement of our search results but we also know that we have a lot of work ahead of us on this topic as well.

Let us know what you think.

Philippe Cases

Good news coming from the data 2.0 conference:

Spoke software has been chosen by the Data 2.0 summit as one of their Top 100 innovators in the cloud data space. I have to say that I was surprised as I was pointed to this announcement by a friend who had called to congratulate me.

The Data 2.0 Summit brings together participants to discuss the new online data ecosystem of APSs, social data, geo data, data-as-a-service and big data. This year’s conference, which takes place April 3 in San Francisco, will explore thought leadership discussions on cloud data and how companies are building on top of and investing in a long-term foundation of social data, open government data, business intelligence data and customer data.

As part of their conference, Data 2.0 summit has asked their advisory board to identify 100 innovative companies and classified them into 20 categories from infrastructure to platforms such as Big Data or APIs and up the stack to vertical services such as advertising and targeting, personal data, consumer intelligence…. Of course, those types of lists are never complete but this one covers at least 90% of the space.

Spoke has been selected in the Business intelligence data space alongside 4 companies: Dun&Bradstreet, Experian, Domo and Cortera. All of them are very established players with significant amount of funding by reputable Venture Capitalists such as Benchmark and Battery Ventures for the other start-ups:

1. Two market leaders that Industry consultants would put in the upper right corner as industry leaders: Dun&Bradstreet and Experian. Both companies have developed their technologies and processes for a long time and offer a complete set of features;
2. Three interesting start-ups: Domo is one of Forbes 100 America’s most promising companies, which is all about visualization, Cortera is all about aggregation of data about companies while Spoke is all about curation.

If the 2000s, where aggregation, wikis and vertical apps have flourished all at the same time, are a proxy to what is going to happen in the 2010s, the industry incumbents will expand while the start-ups are going to thrive finding their business models. 

We are delighted to be recognized among such recognized companies and to have been identified so early in the process.

Philippe Cases, CEO