Introducing Similar Companies

I hope you had a great Thankgiving.

The team at Spoke Network is very excited to release Similar Companies,  a feature you will find on company profiles.

With this feature, you can now very quickly and easily identify which companies are competing with each other. They are the first ones on the Similar Company list and as you are moving down, you can also surface companies that are competing on part of somebody’s offering or similar companies that are part of the same ecosystem. 

Taking Cloudera as an example, you can identify the first two direct competitors as Hortonworks and MapR who appears on 10 lists together (hold your thoughts we will come back to that) and then Qubole, which provides a managed solution for Hadoop and then companies such as DataStax, Pivotal and IBM BigInsights who are providing analytics to the enterprise. As you are clicking on more, more companies are appearing which are less similar but still relevant.

Coming back to the question that is now burning your tongue: how are you ranking the companies? This comes straight from our scalable Semantic Web Platform. As our team and partners are creating lists where they assemble relevant companies together, we basically count how many lists a specific pair of companies are together and use the number of lists as our ranking mechanism. If two companies appear the exact same amount of time together with another company then we are using the number of employees and then amount of funding to finish the ranking.

Few points to note:

1. Our classification is stronger where we have coverage. At this point, we feel very really strongly about our classification for Big Data, Marketing Technology and Mobile.
2. Our classification favors the bigger companies. They are covered more by analysts and therefore appear in more lists together so they should appear first in any classification. That said, we have been surprised that the true competitors seem to be appearing on a consistent basis first despite their size.
3. Clicking more to see the entire list makes sense: As the bigger companies appear first, the eventual disruptors of a particular company will appear later down the list.
4. Clicking on the similar company is very important in your analysis as it could give you hints of particular clusters of companies. In our Cloudera case, if you click on DataStax, you will see surfacing companies like MongoDB, Couchbase and Marklogic before Hortonworks and MapR Technologies.
5. The more you go down the list, the more a notion of ecosystem appear. Companies become more similar or are playing in the same space rather than being direct competitors…

We consider this approach as a first draft so we are relying on you to give us feedback. Easiest is to do it directly on the site using Intercom.io.  Based on those feedbacks, we will make adjustments.

One final note: talking to experts in the industry about our approach, we realize that the notion of similarity is very vague and that we are tackling only one notion of similarity at this point: are two companies competing or part of the same ecosystem? But there are many others and a list of other similarities could include: same founding groups, same past company employees, same location, and same investors among others. 

We will wish all of you happy holidays.

Philippe Cases

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

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

Welcoming MedCity Capsules and what it means for you

This is with great pleasure that I am announcing that the Spoke Intelligence Network has a new member. As of today, MedCity News is launching MedCity Capsules, the first Healthcare Business Intelligence Website powered by the Spoke Intelligence Network technology and content.

 We are very proud to partner with MedCity News as MedCity News is one of the most (if not the most) thoughtful and interesting blogs in the Healthcare Industry. Entrepreneurial at its core with a great leader at its helm, MedCity News is the type of companies we strive to partner with. MedCityNews is also very complementary to VentureBeat in term of Industy and Geographical coverage. It covers the Healthcare Industry in depth and given its location, it has a strong following in the MidWest and the East Coast.

 This partnership has several dimensions:
1) As already mentioned, MedCity News is launching MedCity Capsules, a website dedicated to Healthcare Business Intelligence based on the Spoke Intelligence Network content and Technology;
2) MedCity News will actively promote MedCity Capsules to its community and will link their articles to our content;
3) MedCity News will start populating the Spoke Intelligence Network automatically with their thoughtful content
4) MedCity News is contributing content beyond news by creating lists and Industry Trackers for the Healthcare Industry. Of course those lists and industry trackers will be available on all sites of Spoke Intelligence Network;
5) Lastly, MedCity Capsules will promote the lists created in the other part of the network as well.

 For the Spoke Intel community, this is the best of both worlds as you get more content and more reach without any work. If you have content on one of our existing sites, this content will now reach more and different type of users through MedCity Capsules. And it is not going to be another site to maintain either, as the content you have created on one site will automatically update the others. Same if you are monitoring your pages or lists of pages on one of the SpokeIntel sites, any time that there are updates from any other sites, you will be alerted as well directly within the site you are a part of.

 For Spoke Software, this is of course a major evolution, as MedCity Capsules will cover HealtchcareIT, Medical Devices and Biotechnology. With VB Profiles, Spoke Intel and MedCity Capsules, we are now covering 5 of the 6 most important verticals in term of Business Intelligence and now addressing a potential market of more than 100,000 companies.

 We look forward to hearing from you….