Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.
The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.
Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.
The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.
Interesting business model… looking forward to seeing how it grows in the future… will it experience the same exponential growth as wikipedia? Time will tell.
Jon
It’s a good idea and may be a useful web toll if they can keep a high quality of submitted documents
If they can get people to contribute geographically focused information on management to help on cultural differences, this one is a winner on my books.
I hope the full site is not like the the chapter about promoting: a fairy tale.
To promote you have not to excel in your current role (otherwise there is no reason to remove you from there), to show the boss you think like him and to be at the right place at the right time.
Comparing a alpha website light Insightory to a mainstream website like Wikipedia is hard but like Jon said, only time will tell.
In my opinion, if this is targeted to the top execs, professionals, professors, and graduate students, how much credibility can be given to random documents found online? Sure they said they would check and moderate everything carefully but there is still that whim that these were created by people and my managing job is on the line, can I really trust what I read online? (hehe on the line, online, punny)
They want me to me on the board of directors!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
You nailed it Kevin, online nobody knows you’re a dog, as they say.
Help me out here … maybe I am missing something.
Most of the contest winners concern themselves with topics regarding India. It seems like a narrow focus.
Is there a way to edit the documents on the site or do you download them, edit them and then resubmit?
What about the copyrights on the articles? If I edit a document do I retain copyright on the changes or the new document?
How is this different than Bitpipe or Information Week’s white paper site?
They say this site is for professionals, academicians and graduate students. The last two all have free access to http://www.jstor.org/ if they want to search for a paper. Maybe this will work as a networking site. But I don’t think it will be the place to look for a serious academic paper on some managerial topic.
Hmm… they’re nothing like wikipedia. They’re more like: upload your docs to us so we can sell ads.
This service is very much needed indeed.
Comments like “you only get promoted if you act like your boss and aren’t good at your current job” illustrate the potential & pitfalls of a socially-powered information site.
Potential, because you can not only attract a wide variety of information, but use social filtering (voting, ratings, edits, etc) to bring the best ideas to the top and/or provide the caveats and context necessary to flesh out information.
Pitfalls, because without significant filtering you run the risk of bad ideas and/or inexperienced people being given too much credibility, as Kevin X pointed out.
@8 it looks like a lot of the articles are written by Indians, too. Are they gaining initial market share in India, or are they paying for cheap initial content? I know you need to start somewhere for a startup, but right now it’s kindof apparent.
Tech-wise, search results only return matches on document title and extract — not the actual document contents. E.g. this document
http://www.insightory.com/view.....k_in_india
has the word “jamshedpur” on the first page, yet doesn’t come back in a search on “jamshedpur.” I assume that’ll change down the road.
Oops forgot to say that “you only get promoted if you act like your boss and aren’t good at your current job” is true at some organizations, but not all.
That’s why social filters can amend the above statement so that people have a better chance at identifying when the above might be true and/or applied.
People interested in ‘management knowledge’ might also be interested in a site I created to promote “open source” business book summaries, Squeezed Books: http://www.squeezedbooks.com
There are several decent summary sites out there, but most of them require you to pay a lot to sign up, and don’t seem to provide much of a ‘community’, which could make the book and/or summary more valuable, by letting people debate and discuss it.
Thanks to the TechCrunch editors for covering us. I was amazed at the quick response. I uploaded a brief “profile” around 2 am Central Time and went to bed. When I checked this morning, I found that TechCrunch had posted this article a few minutes after we sent in our profile, and the comments started coming in a few minutes thereafter.
Thanks also to all those who sent comments. Rest assured all positive feedback is gratefully accepted, and any negative feedback will be reviewed very carefully to ensure we improve.
There are a few specific points I’d like to touch upon:
1. We will certainly try to keep the quality high. Since we are running a Contest right now, we look at all documents before posting them. Often times, we are faced with a dilemma : a particular document may be poorly written and have some comments that show bias or inexperience, and yet it may have a couple of good ideas which would benefit our readers. Do we post it or let it go? Right now, we’re just using our judgment, but soon we will be able to have something more powerful: the community’s opinion.
2. We did a soft-launch of our site in leading Business Schools in India, hence a large number of contributions are from there. That is changing rapidly - partly due to the “TechCrunch” effect! Our goal is to have a global site, with content that is globally relevant (most management principles, tools etc.) as well as content that is specific to certain locations.
3. Comparisons to Wikipedia are made for “ease of understanding” only. We want to embody the spirit of Wikipedia i.e. knowledge and wisdom are not “closely held assets” . . . they grow with sharing, not with “hoarding”. We hold Wikipedia in very high regard and try to learn from their model, especially as they strive for the right balance between “experts” and “lay people”.
There was a time when we seriously thought of creating Insightory as a non-profit. But that would have limited the ways we can recognize and reward our users, so we went the for-profit route.
4. What you see right now is a small fraction of the functionality we will roll out in the next 4-6 months. (I know, that is 2 lifetimes - but we’re bootstrapping so we can’t do it all!) The next priority is to improve various user features (including our very crude search - thanks for pointing that out, Ben), and then move on to collaboration (much more wikipedia-ish than what you see right now) and finally networking. We will enable global corporations to connect with management professionals, academicians and graduate students around their areas of expertise, and thus enhance the revenue stream for the latter.
Thanks again for checking out Insightory and for taking the time to write in comments.
I don’t see the point with this site - why not just search the web for your topic? Also, the quality of content on this site is very poor.
What about confidentiality? are you expecting people to share some company ppt with you?
OMG, this can totally replace experience. What a winning idea.
I still don’t understand:
“We hold Wikipedia in very high regard and try to learn from their model, especially as they strive for the right balance between “experts” and “lay people”.”
Can you explain how people are supposed to edit the documents on the site? Looking it over now, it appears to be a collection of white papers. There are plenty of sites that have that, so I am not sure how your service is different.
What is unique about your site?
Thanks for the additional comments and questions.
Rather than posting another lengthy response here, I posted them on Insightory’s blog (http://blog.insightory.com/).
It is good to note that you still continue to “own” the content even after submitting it to Insightory.
also http://www.edocr.com
Avneet … you could have told me to go suck a lemon, but you answered the questions … and very well.
Thanks for taking the time to explain the answers. Good luck!
Nice to see another company entering into a similar field, but as I said before, everyone seems to be having different targets/audience in mind, yet with similar functionality. David, thanks for the mentioning but TC keep forgetting us over and over. Perhaps its because Mike Butcher does not live in the US!
It would be interesting to see how the team will decide which document to let in, without that users cannot start the interaction process. Perhaps, a two stage process. Soft area where moderators interact and decides on the validity before posting to the public area. This allows you to create a pro community, but I personally do not like what these moderators have done to Wikipedia.
Avneet, feel free to contact me through ranaweeram on skype. It’s always good to speak to like minded individuals. Wish you all the best to a successful launch. We got few months before we move to Beta!