RivalMap, the collaboration tool designed to help businesses keep tabs on their competitors, has introduced News Feed updates. Through a partnership with Newsgator, the site will monitor RSS feeds around the web for mentions of specific company names and keywords.
Companies can choose to either monitor specific news feeds, or they can have NewsGator report a keyword’s mention on any blog. While the site supports tagging to help weed out noise, all tags must be manually assigned to feeds (RivalMap plans to integrate automatic tagging in the future).
The news updates will be a welcome addition to the site, but they aren’t exactly unique. Similar “Tweetscan for RSS” functionality can be found on Google Alerts, but the integration alongside RivalMap’s other collaboration tools should make them more effective.
As part of the site upgrade RivalMap is also slightly changing its interface to facilitate the sharing of information that isn’t necessarily directly related to competitors - it wants to be a source of market intelligence, not just competitor intelligence. Users will notice a number of subtle changes around the site, including improved tagging and social bookmarking features.
LinkedIn also offers a newsfeed of competitor information, though it obviously doesn’t have the same collaboration tools.
Great tool for collection of data and monitoring of competition. Slight nit in the post above, but competitive intelligence is hardly the practice of collecting a lot of data on your competition. It’s the synthesis and the answer to “so what?” that is really competitive intelligence. Anything else is just data waiting to be used.
Still a good tool, especially for the price.
nice, we’ve been waiting for some type of news aggregation feature to come out for a while
Great news. I’ve been exploring rivalmap a bit but had found it to be too manual. This should help alleviate that problem.
On a slightly related topic, are there any plans to put an API on crunchbase?
Thanks for the writeup Jason.
Just to add a bit more detail, the new News feature has all the functionality of a private collaborative news reader, but organized with tags and integrated with our Clippings feature. In addition to keyword monitoring (from our partnership with NewsGator) and feed aggregation, RivalMap also helps users discover feeds, such as a competitor’s company blog, when profiles are added to an account. The addition of the news engine makes it easy to get information into an account, and we’ve found even in our large enterprise customers it facilitates the discovery and discussion of a lot more information.
RivalMap was built to help companies easily leverage as much information as possible to keep their teams informed and make the best strategic decisions. We’re really excited about the news feature’s role in helping companies stay up-to-date and share/discuss updates.
As a side note, we’ve also introduced a $24/month price point, as a lot of small companies and consultants requested something in between our free and Small Team plan.
Thanks again!
Andrew
RivalSoft Inc.
finally some common sense and automation cheers!
Good news! A hot debate related to rivalmap is taking place at Richromances.com now among hollywood celebrities and beaitiful people. Many guys said they were super-excited about it~
@ Andrew Holt nicely explained and well done on your newest enhancements.
I am going to go out on a lim here and infer that the Brightridge Group provides a one-to-one, B2B service, whose business may be, atleast slightly. affected by this, wht seems a great tool.
Looks like RivalMap has great data collection tools which is the easy, yet time consuming, activity of the in-bound marketing group.
A few companies I know and have worked for would certainly be interested.
@Ed Tuttle, sorry if that’s the impression. No connection whatsoever. Just a long time coming for the CI community to start seeing these types of tools/services. It’s arguably specialized and niche as a community, hence the TechCrunch post showing up quickly in my search agents.
No commercial interest (in RivalSoft or otherwise), I promise. Hate to say your lim[sic] is thin. But no offense taken.
We are really excited to be working with Andrew and Kris on this new feature set in RivalMap. We use RivalMap for marketplace monitoring and the integration of the news engine, which we have been running for about a month now, really streamlines the process of collecting information. As Andrew pointed out, the collaboration tools, such as the ability to have a comment thread on a clipping, means that you can actually do something with news clippings and that’s really useful.
“lim [sic]” Yes, I have lots of typos (I’m sitting 6 ft from the monitor with my glasses off). Of course, petty corrections do demonstrate that offense was taken.
I was previously too lazy to actually check if my intuition was correct, but your reply forced my hand. From the homepage of your website:
“Brightridge Group provides competitive intelligence services designed to convert competitive intelligence into actionable intelligence. ”
I think you believed that I thought you had an investment of sorts. I was saying that I believed your organization provided similar services, but in the traditional sense (like marketing agencies with contracts, etc.).
These guys reduce your ability to capture market share. Most companies in their target market already have atleast one MBA from a top ten school that doesn’t need anything more than the data aggregated.
Your first comment demonstrated your need to state the one differentiator your organization has, beside a most probable cost of 10x.
@Ed Tuttle Nothing’s reduced by RivalMap being on the scene. In fact, it’s highly complementary. Secondly, if being in the industry somehow precludes one from participating in a conversation about a product that’s of service to that industry, it doesn’t seem like there’d be much conversation going on here beyond passive and casual observers.
BTW, there wasn’t a petty correction made at all. I was being true to your quote and, as such, did not correct it.
If I had any motivation in commenting on RivalSoft it’s in hoping a little industry buzz will continue to help these types of organizations get funded. We need them desperately. I wish them and any other competitors that may come on the scene the best of luck. As an industry CI will certainly benefit by their service.
Again, no offense taken if none was meant.
@ed tuttle - research is just research, research is not intelligence. as a CI guy myself - and somebody who knows andrew holt and what he’s doing - i can only tell you that “collection and processing” are 2 steps in a larger competitive intelligence cycle. you may want to spend some time at scip.org learning about the industry or alternatively, feel free to visit my corporate site to read up on primary research, something which no ‘web services’ are able to offer (at http://www.clewllc.com)
I have come to realize trolling works better when you make typos because the target is so eager to correct *you*, and no offense was intended
However, You came *out of nowhere* (how many articles have you commented on?) and had some very opinionated statements that seemed self-serving. It struck a chord, my bad.
I agree that “a rising ship floats all boats”; and, I believe your points are valid. Many organizations do not even know that they need this tyke of information.
@Ed Tuttle Thanks. You give me hope that the Dems *can* actually get along with one another now!
As for comments on TechCrunch, I follow almost all of TechCrunch via Twitter, so my comments are usually over there. If you’ll have me, I’ll stick around on the full meal deal here.
Cheers!
The real quotation is actually: “a rising TIDE floats all boats”; you did not correct that glaring error, which is odd…
You have lots to learn about the latest online trends (or as u probably call it, the “social web”).
Twitter? What’s that? You “web teo point oh” guru you.
/wishes Ed and Brightridge would shut the fuck up already.
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As Jeff said earlier, we’re very excited about this new integration with RivalMap and have found this newest version robust, useful and easy-to-use. If you’d like to know more about this partnership from NewsGator’s point of view: http://blogs.newsgator.com/newsgator_widget_blog/
This could be a great time saver for the R&D and Marketing department to get a heads-up in an efficient manner as to what the “other guys” are doing.
Jon
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