Wikinvest Closes $2.5 Million For Investment Wiki
Nick Gonzalez
16 comments »
Wikinvest has closed a $2.5 million series A led by DCM and including angels. Wikinvest is just as the name suggests, a wiki for investors.
Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia.
Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data.
They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example).
All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization.
Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts.
This is in theory a good idea, but one question begs:
what would be the motivation for someone to contribute?
Unlike college students, these investors are probably adult professionals with careers and families.
Retirees are still not very Web savvy as a group.
The only people who might be motivated to post would be stockholders, corporate executives or knowledgeable Journalist and Stockbrokers who want more exposure.
With the exception of the latter two, there would probably be a limited number of people who are that savy about many companies.
Interesting and good looking.
But what do they need these $2.5 million for?
looks slick for a wiki but i’m started to get wiki’d out.
anyway, no one’s going to be investing much when the credit market bursts. subprime was just the beginning.
great idea but a lot of competition—we still have the ONLY totally free commodity futures paper trading site on the entire internet. We are independent non-broker owned so there are NO TIME LIMITS —free quotes, charts, news and paper trading with multiple portfolios—-we’re the only guys doing this and we’re also the only guys with a futures trading app on FACEBOOK — only reason i mention it is if i was a VC or a growing company in the financial info/services space PTrades is a chance to completely dominate an entire category and its a category that is now the fastest growing one in financial services –we’re seeking alliances, deals etc—-pk pk@ptrades.com
Interesting, yet i prefer the new p2p investment tools: vestopia (my favorite) and cakefinancial.
I wonder if this concept will catch up - sure interesting though.
I assume most of the content will end up being written by a small % of users –rather than millions of contributors creating an environment of perfect financial market information. If that’s the case, I’d rather be reading professional editors.
And it’s basic wiki technology (powered by MediaWiki), so what’s the $2.5 mil for, except to pay staff to contribute entries? (are they sharing headcount with Yelp?)
Pretty solid site. I’ve been dabbling in Wikinvest for a little while now, although it’s admittedly tough to find time to keep up with it. I have actually found myself perusing it as a pastime as much as blogs like this… I also used it to cross reference information I heard from other sources before making an investment (up 13% in 4 weeks, FWIW).
Anyway, I think these guys are going to do well. The $2.5 million is only going to go so far. I bet the founders are rich Ivy League guys anyway, though, so …
Re: WEB’s comments
Can’t you say the same things about the people who would contribute to wikipedia? No one has to be savvy about many companies, only the companies or ideas they write about.
Besides, I use sites like wikipedia and wikinvest as launching points for my own inquiries. They’re not supposed to represent the totality of all information, just like whatever news source you read shouldn’t be your only and absolute source of information.
Oh, and those wiki charts are a technical trader’s wet dream
I’d like to see a simpler version of this site for value investors like myself, or maybe a way to customize wikinvest to show just the indicators I care about.
Wikinvest looks fantastic! People say they are tired of Wikis, but that’s a tech-savvy perspective. The average person has barely discovered the power of Wikipedia, much less contributed to it. Mass-collaboration is just getting started.
I’m really looking forward to using Wikinvest as a tool to be a more informed investor.
Goog luck guys!
If there are enough contributors, I would be very excited that a wiki for investors actually exists. This would really help me be an well informed investor with all the helpful information on the site.
So I just graduated from business school - which isn’t all that important, except that during the last few months of school, our MBA email accounts were bombarded with messages asking us to add to the wikinvest site about the companies we worked for previously. I thought this was incredibly tacky and I decided at that point that if a company is garnering data from spamming users, then it wasn’t a site for me. What’s the motivation for posting anyway - as someone suggested?
what gets me is, how did they close the series A round? how did they get their foot in the door cuz i saw them spamming on google finance a while ago so i thought this was a 2 man operation kinda thing…looks like it at least…and then next thing i know i read about them getting 2.5mil. how
I think this is a good idea but with limited (some might say targetted) audience. Diffen (www.diffen.com) is another new wiki - an encyclopedia of differences - that might have a wider reach.