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