If you are looking to do some quick competitive analysis, a new site called BizShark offers a wealth of data about companies. Bizshark is a nifty automated information aggregator. It pulls together the latest business profiles, news, financials, web analytics, social footprint, marketing strategies, and other business information by searching across more than 50 Internet business databases. The site is pretty comprehensive and features a particularly useful tool that compares businesses with their competitors by analytics, traffic and news volume. Using its “CompetitorSort algorithm,” BizShark constantly monitors online discussion threads on related companies, products, and services and then uses a filter to rank the competition by link authority.
BizShark aggregates data from Wikipedia, our own CrunchBase, Technorati, Compete, and Google Search. Secondary sources for information include Yahoo, Quantcast, Alexa, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Indeed, BackType, and other sites. BizShark doesn’t allow users to edit or contribute data to its system, forgoing the Wiki model. Its approach is similar to Quarkbase and KillerStartups’ Dataopedia, an information aggregator that lets users see all the data it can find about a website (Dataopedia also uses Crunchbase data).
BizShark also offers premium services, where uses can pay a monthly fee of $19 to $69 per month to access employee contact information, SEO intelligence and in-depth revenue analysis. Guy Kawasaki, a fan of all things aggregated, is an adviser.
This is undoubtedly a useful tool to find business, analytics and financial information about a company in one centralized place. But without its own human input, particularly on the information that is more difficult to track by an algorithm, such as job moves, funding announcements or product introductions, there is always the possibility of misinformation. We’ve seen other aggregators, such as automated tech news site TechMeme, add a human element to their operations after realizing that algorithms aren’t perfect. But BizShark argues that because it relies solely on aggregation and algorithms for information, it is completely objective. While objectivity is good, accuracy is better.
Regardless, BizShark is definitely worth checking out. Here are a few screenshots:
This is essentially the same service offered by Quarkbase. Bizshark’s design is easier on the eyes but can’t say that it has a competitive advantage over Crunchbase, Quarkbase or KillerStartups.
BizShark’s main differentiator is its CompetitorSort algorithm. BizShark’s entire design revolves around helping you understand not just one business, but the entire competitive landscape.
So the question that BizShark answers is not only “What does this business do?”, but also “How well does this business perform against its competitors?”
NIcely executed, and a great use of using technology instead of human inputs to scale very quickly. They can and should focus their human input on just editing the results instead of collating them.
A little bit like Google vs. Mahalo, although not an exact analogy.
http://www.bizs...?q=snapcasa.com is not working
Does this site works for companies or websites or urls?
BizShark just opened up on Monday, got indexed by Google around Tuesday, and got TechCrunched today. There are still a lot of websites and companies that we need to index and analyze, so please be patient for our system to discover your site.
Nice look, but it is also crazy wrong for a number of the companies I looked up.
@Leena, I just saw Quarkbase also uses crunchbase data
[Reference: http://groups.g...i/web/sightings
It looks nice – design wise, but actually using the site leaves a lot to be desired. The only one of these services I ever really use is Crunchbase – it’s organized perfectly in “wiki-ish” form. Other sites should take notes from Crunchbase.
Thanks Leena, for your objective review. The debate between automatic, algorithmic data collection and human input has been raging for ages, and a good example is Google News vs traditional newspapers. Personally I think these two approaches can coexist in total package. Automatic algorithms are limited by the data they collect and the accuracy of the algorithm – both limited by humans. As a result, a completely automated approach will never be the panacea of all problems, and we don’t claim that it ever will be, as Memeorandum.com once did.
The main advantage of an automated approach is the ability to gather multiple sources, figure out which one is better, and then show the best data available. A very successful example of such is Digg, which leverages algorithms to harness the wisdom of the crowd. We’ve noticed that there has been a wealth of business information all over the Web, pioneered by CrunchBase. And we realized that there is an opportunity now to apply an algorithm to organize and analyze this information. We don’t know how far an automatic approach can push the boundary of business analytics, but we would like to test it out with BizShark.
This is definitely a nice tool for competitive analysis.
Very well designed! I like it a lot, and it aggregates a lot of great information that I often need multiple browsers opened to review. I am sure I will be using this a lot.
Extracting data from the best of the best and putting it in one place for further analysis is a great strategy. Biz Shark will be very useful consider the current state of the economy.
Did a search on twidox and http://www.twidox.com, which has been featured on Centernetworks, Techcrunch, TechCrunch UK, etc and is listed on CrunchBase, but still didn’t find anything. How comes?
Funny, I actually owned that domain (BizShark.Com) back in 2006.
Somebody found something useful for it!
menu design showcase: very useful stuff.
http://www.cssh...com/menudesign/
Thanks
I like it too. I typed some companies and found information to all of them. Wish you guys a big success.
Looks like a ‘cool’ version of cubestat.com to me
)
Interesting approach and some good data sources being used there – plus obviously great, clean look.
On some of the News feeds though (eg for Microsoft) there is a heavy overload of seemingly unfiltered content which makes it less useful for time-poor business users who want to instantly know the actual commercial activity etc.
We (StrategyEye.com – which is a different, hosted enterprise intelligence service for likes of Nokia etc) we use a combination of approaches but upfront do a lot of human definitions of an industry and companies to ensure that it extracts business-related information. Once that heavy legwork is done for any industry (currently digital media / cleantech) the system starts to become self-feeding under workflow process with a very low analyst touch.
This “Human IP + Filtering Technology + Workflow + Human Confirmation” gives us a base of both proprietary content (deal summaries, data extraction by analysts) as well as building up links to the long-tail of related online commentary.
Advantage of maybe doing upfront tighter definitions on the BizShark companies and refining feeds or algorithms to focus on commercial activity (as one option maybe) is that it will be much more useful for the adhoc exec who really wants to sift the information overload quickly – with still very low human costs.
Bizshark has a good platform to work off of. There is a demand out there and if the information is good, the people will come (with their wallets). I like their algorithm structure and caution in letting too many parties influence their provided results. I would however double check the security/reputation with another security site like justaskgemalto.
Lame.
Hello! You can also find information about a website, using http://www.estimix.com . – it seems to provide competitive analysis for free.