Silicon Valley start-up Trackle.com is launching the public beta of its personalized Google Alerts to track pretty much everything in an internet user’s life. Trackle’s technology and interface is innovative and disarmingly comprehensive. It provides real-time personalized RSS feeds of the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and much more.
The breadth and specificity of Trackle’s information is what differentiates itself from other RSS tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me. Trackle doesn’t just search for keywords, it incorporates change into the keywords and provides up-to-date, highly customized information about ever-fluctuating internet content. For example, if a user is eyeing a camera on sale at Amazon.com but only wants to spend $200, Trackle will monitor the sale and provide you updates of when the camera price reaches $200. Trackle keeps all of this information on the user’s personalized site but the user can also choose to receive the real-time alerts via SMS and e-mail. Imagine if a user is bidding on an Ebay item; Trackle claims to give real-time price updates on an auctioned item. For free.
So who’s behind this nifty idea? Trackle was founded by Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Pavan Nigam and technology executive Naveen Saxea. Nigam was the founder of Healtheon (a health care start-up that merged with WebMD in 1999) and Cendura (a start-up that was acquired by Computer Associates in 2006). Trackle, who has received seed funding by NEA (New Enterprise Associates) and other angel investors, hopes to morph into “the PayPal of tracking systems” by having a “Trackle” button on websites, such as retail sites, to allow a user to track content instantaneously.
Trackle has already started thinking towards the future by incorporating elements of social networking into the interface. For example, a user can Tweet a Trackle update via Twitter to friends and users can also share their Trackle updates with accepted friends.
I see some potential business uses. Specifically, small-cap stocks can keep track of share prices of competing companies in their space, as well as, news and developments.
Will check it out.
Thanks.
“Portfolio” tracking is a whole different beast for which customized and domain specific tools exist. Even My Yahoo! has a comprehensive tracker for a collection of stocks that can do much more justice to this use case. Occasional alerting on competitors is ok – but for the kind of 360 degree information asmall cap companies are interested in – there are more appropriate tools.
I agree with agoracom!!
I like it, but if it is difficult to program the alerts, then is not going to have a widespread appeal.
Looks like a good idea, and appears to be well implemented.
However, I don’t think I’ll be using it for now as it appears to be very US orientated. That’s an understandable market to start with, but its not much use to me in the UK.
Shame.
it looks good.But i hope it improves a lot.i find a bit difficult to customize it to my needs .
Trackle sounds interesting and very effective with sms and e-mail updates. it can give a new shape to couple of businesses including auctions market.
Its basically a consumer version of KnowledgeWatch and not a very good one at that.
Trackle might be good, but the way this article was written made me think it was a paid post to promote the company. This wasn’t an ad, was it?
No.
Now post an intelligent comment criticizing or complimenting some aspect of this startup.
Very neat as long as it can stay simple. They should use zaptxts notification features or something like it.
I don’t see anything innovative here that Yotify.com or Notify.me don’t already do.
“For example, if a user is eyeing a camera on sale at Amazon.com but only wants to spend $200, Trackle will monitor the sale and provide you updates of when the camera price reaches $200.”
Yotify.com does the same thing, with Shopping.com for example.
“For example, a user can Tweet a Trackle update via Twitter to friends and users can also share their Trackle updates with accepted friends.”
Yotify.com does this as well, including sharing with friends on Facebook and Friendfeed.
Did you spend time on these other sites Leena?
True. I like the interface but don’t see anything new. Also having another inbox for alerts may be a tough sell – email inbox is the only one that has sustained usage. I am guessing they do have alerts delivered to user’s email.
I do believe this space is a big one though, but it perhaps needs a fundamental solution that scales – definitely not an easy problem to solve.
Yotify and Notify are both mentioned in the article so I suppose Leena did look at them. Wonder why you are getting all worked up. True that there are other similar services out there but I guess the writer has the right to express his/her point of view.
Alerts.com offers the same functionalities as well. In addition with Alerts.com every site can create their own alerts by “alertifying” their RSS Feeds. Very coold technology with all the details explained at http://corporat...com/?page_id=96 and then you can also create a custom alert for any or a group of RSS feeds not just one. So say you want to track the same camera but on multiple sites which offer RSS then you’ll get the results of all these sites at once. Check http://www.aler...x?alert=RssFeed
Checking out now…but I assume this is similar to Yahoo! Pipes? with more focus on a wider audience being able to use the interface?
A good idea… the ease of use of the alerts and how precise they are will probably drive people to use it…
This is a great aggregator of information for consumers.
They just need to get exposure beyond the virtual soapboxers that are so prevalent on this blog and they will rock.
This is a really great idea – especially the price notification feature.
I don’t really get the “pain” that this solves. If I configure this thing to retrieve all the RSS feeds for the hundreds of interest areas I have, then I’m just going to get buried in too much data retrieved by RSS. I don’t see how that’s better than just continuing to bookmark places I care about and visiting them directly. It just transfers the info-glut problem to my inbox (which already has that problem).
Travis – thats right. The interface reminds me of Bloglines or an RSS reader which suffers from the same problem of too much information to handle.
This seems to be a fast emerging space of alerts of the changing web. Trackle looks great but I wonder if it suffers from the same problems like others you mention where one needs to pre-define alert types for users to add them – which I am not sure is scalable. The service which has the most pre-defined alerts will win?
An interesting company. A one stop shop for all notifications. Helps that they actually work at the data level. Scaling to handle a large number of alerts is always the key challenge. All the best to Trackle and will be “tracking” their progress.
Love it! Site is very easy to use and before I knew it, I had signed up for about a dozen ‘tracklets’. The idea is very simple yet very powerful. I used to use Google alerts but was getting inundated with irrelevant stuff and had to manually sort through them. Trackle brings the right level of intelligence around each category – you can precisely specify what you are interested in.
Very cool.
Jane – thats a bit harsh…why don’t you take a look at why are others are calling it a winner among alert services? http://www.read...ong_alert_s.php
@Bob – I did see the RWW article:
“What makes Trackle unique, though, is the sheer quantity of alerts they’ve made available.” – I guess I don’t agree, Alerts.com has quite a few and Yotify too (once you dig around)
“Although other sites allow this too, what’s different about the way Trackle works is that you can set up one alert but associate it with different keywords.” – Yotify.com does this too, actually their filters are even more powerful.
I do like the UI of Trackle though, I think it’s probably the easiest of all the services TC has profiled.
I think Trackle can be extremely useful, but as a business it suffers from being too targetted towards more technical users.
They should develop a whatchamacallit.. where they apply the concept/technology towards a mainstream problem, like online shopping, instead of marketing it as a personalized RSS feed.
Narrow down the use to 1 single useful thing that can be explained to a grandma. You can still have a version where techies like us can have alerts on anything, but the mainstream audience does not have the patience, and skills to learn what this does. Or if they do, they will not know how powerful it is, unless you market it as something that does 1 incredibly useful thing.
Or.. you can sorta twist this idea upside down and use your technology in-house to develop some compelling content:
set up alerts for something like prices of items, and display recent items whose prices has drop.
Point is, as it is marketed right now, I see this being appealing to only a narrow set of users. But I feel like the idea can be used to attract so many more ppl somehow.
I agree with the assessment, if marketed properly it can be valuable, but marketed to the masses a generic personalized RSS feed that only really appeals to the minority its just not going to fly
Greaaaaaaaaaaat idea.