Competitious – Competitive News Clipping

Posted on January 30, 2007
Filed Under Companies, Innovation, web 2.0 |

One of the most obvious applications for the “wisdom of crowds” treatment has to be competitive news clipping, and it’s a mystery to me why more companies like Competitious are not on the scene. News clipping services like Cogenz and Connectbeam are enjoying usage growth, and both of those have enterprise deployment options, but to be fair they are bookmarking services that depend on someone being disciplined about bookmarking the content.

Techdirt has a great news clipping service, in fact when SAP switched over from their PR provided service not only did they get a much richer service that aggregated a wider variety of content delivered through multiple channels, but they also saved SAP about $500k a year with Techdirt. That’s real value when you provide not only a better service but you do it for less money. I am a huge fan of Techdirt for that reason (and I really like Mike and Grier as well).

There remains a gap for competitive data collection that sits below what someone like Techdirt is doing but above bookmarking and I think Competitious neatly fits right in there. What I like about it is that not only does it provide a place to bookmark competitive news and information, but it also allows some additional sorting based on things like the sentiment of the clipping, and they have an interesting “comparison matrix” that does provide additional analytics capabilities.

The “projects” organization means you can lump competitors together based on what type of competitor they are and then monitor the group as a whole. I use the “projects” to track things like partners as well, or companies I’m just interested in, so in a way the name “Competitious” itself is a limiting in nature, but probably the right place to start.

I really don’t know much about the company, not even where they are located, but I like the service and will be expanding our usage of it. I should also clarify something, I started out this post with a wisdom of crowds reference but in all fairness Competitious does not provide a true representation of that philosophy because you can’t tag or comment on existing clippings, but considering that they seem to have the basic functionality well implemented I am going to speculate that they could move in that direction.

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