Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Welcome market summaries and ChiefMartec.com


We have been pretty quiet since we announced our partnership with MedCityNews but we have not seat idle in the meantime and have been working on solving tough problems.

The first problem we worked on is one that I have been faced with during my career as a Venture Capitalist and it goes something like this:  You are doing a due diligence and one of your partners asks you a question like this: who are the players in this Space? How much has been invested? Do we know anybody that we can talk to about this investment? Sounds familiar, you may have faced variants of this problem if you are a headhunter sourcing candidates, a business developer trying to make sense of a market, a consultant trying to categorize a market or simply an entrepreneur looking for information about who the investors, the journalists, the consultants, he should be talking are.

At this point, you have two options: one is to call the company and ask for the information, the other more common is to do it yourself because you want to make sure that the work has been done thoroughly. So you crawl the web and after an hour, you find a landscape of companies organized in categories and lists. It is usually a 2D graphic filled with logos. Once you have seen this list, you have to understand who the companies are and then for each companies figure out  the information you are looking for and then aggregate it to make sense of it. If you are lucky or not controlling, you will find an analyst or an associate to do it for you. But either you or him will take forever to do it. And, at some point, there will be a point where you will regret to have found this landscape.

This doesn’t have to be this way and we think we have found a solution that bridges the gap between the landscape graphic and the information you are looking for. As John Koetsier puts it, landscape on VBProfiles becomes alive. This has been possible because of two major milestones:


1)    Introduction of the Market Summary: for each markets or public lists you are tracking, you have now access to the summary of that public list. We let you know:
a.    how the specific lists you are tracking are related to other public lists in our portfolio;
b.    who the companies are and how they stack against one another;
c.    how much funds has been raised in that specific market or public lists;
d.    who the players are: executives, investors, journalists, consultants,…
This is free for now and for at least a couple of month so you should try it.
2)    Partnership with ChiefMartec.com: We have done one partnership with ChiefMartec.com who published the famous ChiefMartec.com Marketing Technology Landscape. ChiefMartec.com edits every year a marketing technology landscape of 1,000 companies organized in 43 different categories of product. We have ported this landscape on our platform so that everybody can start tracking the lists, categories as well as the entire landscape.

The combination of those two announcements is now extremely powerful for the Marketing Technology Industry. You can now have access to all data about this landscape, follow specific categories, know who funds what, who is covering those spaces as journalists and consultants. And with one click, you get now information that it would have taken days to get.

We hope you’ll enjoy those new features.


Philippe Cases

Monday, September 22, 2014

New Guidelines for content on the Spoke guidelines

I am writing just to inform you that we have been obliged to remove 4,600 companies from the SpokeIntel/ VBProfiles/Capsules database. I would like to explaim why we do this as well as give some guidelines for profiles we are going to accept moving forward on the Spoke Network.

About a month ago, Google put our network in a penalty box to the point that we were not seeing any traffic coming from the search engine. This forced us to review our policies and ask the very hard questions including which content needed to be on our current network of sites. We decided to move on a certain number of fronts, the main decision being to focus Spoke.com on local directory listings and the Spoke network on competitive intelligence.

What does that mean for the content on Spoke Intelligence Network? A profile will need to be:
1)    At least 65% complete;
2)    Updated on a regular basis at least every 6 months;
3)    In an Industry that we are currently tracking: Technology and Healthcare Technologies (including Bio Tech).
We will be very proactive in letting you know if your profile doesn’t match the criteria to remain on the Spoke Network or if the profile has not been updated.

If you are not in Technology and Healthcare related field, we suggest you register your company on Spoke.com. There the criteria are not going to be as stringent but it is important to keep the profiles updated.

For the people who had created a profile on the Spoke Network (VBProfiles, SpokeIntel, MedCity Capsules) that were removed, I would like to express my sincere apologies for having been obliged to do this. You should let us know if you want us to port your data on Spoke.com and we will do it for you.


Philippe Cases
CEO