It isn’t often that a startup can raise nearly $12 million dollars and work in stealth for a year and a half without anyone noticing. But that’s exactly what Tracked has done – and today they’re launching a massive structured database for tracking people and businesses. Imagine LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids.
Tracked was founded in April 2008 by Michael Yavonditte, formerly the CEO of AOL-acquired Quigo. The service launches publicly today (right now, actually).
“This is a new kind of business service,” Yavonditte said in an interview yesterday. He has “begged, borrowed and stolen” (I don’t think he meant that stolen part literally) data from other structured data sources and has mashed it together into a highly usable format.
You can, for example, view public company financial statements, compensation data and insider trading for public company executives, or just overviews (and news items) for countless business people and other notable individuals. You can also create watchlists of people, companies or industries, and the service will create a customized feed of news relevant to the items on your watchlist.
If there is something in the business world you want to keep an eye one, Tracked will likely do that for you.
Once you start clicking you’ll find you can spend hours viewing pages and data, and setting up watch lists of interesting people and companies. It’s also fascinating to see related people, and click through various relationships.
We only had a few minutes to chat with Yavonditte and test the service prior to launch. We’ll be posting a much more in depth look of the service shortly.
Tracked has raised $11.5 million from Union Square Ventures and a number of angel investors.
Screenshots:
I’m loving the macro-views and the amount of data that is being put out. Any word one if an API will be out for this? I can see a lot of people wanting to develop using the data presented in Tracked.
There will always be a need an market for Stock Prices and Company information if executed properly. But with so much information exposed, can it make employees vulnerable to privacy.
Or embed it in blogs and/or bona fide news sites. It’s easy to see how useful it could be, especially for those among us who write about specific companies.
yes very interesting site definitely want the api
http://kaching-kaching.info
http://kachingkaching.com/buy
factual is the open data that will be very interested with this api
just took a look, it’s really not that interesting…
feels like google or yahoo finance.
Fuck the api’s, I want Larry Ellison’s compensation.
Or just Edward Shapiro’s ability to sell shares before they crash, he sold over $600m worth of shares in US Airways in 2007 at $57.80 and $35.90. Now worth $3 something.
I can see this site being useful for me, but then I’m an accountant. Dunno how they’ll make money out of it, I’m not interested enough to pay for it unless it’s a cheap subscription.
Why is the website down already? Too much traffic caused by the Crunch story?? They need some more robustness
@tracked. I like your really complex home page, but it means you risk DDOS whenever one of the larger news organizations mentions you. Suggest you immediately replace it by something dead simple, and have interested visitors click-through from there to the real page. Then e.g. think about content delivery, or just get the caching right in your load balancer.
twacked
Sites ok, but nothing overly exciting. It also appears to be using data that is months old in several of my searches. But it is new, so maybe in time it will get up to speed.
Agreed. Some of the data is stale. Google’s market cap today is 176B, but they’re showing it at 135B.
And as mentioned, the page load times are dragging – likely due to the new publicity and the amount of data on each page.
I can’t believe Tracked raised $12 million for this project. Google Alerts meets Wikipedia? I suppose it’s useful for business professionals in need of news and stats.
When and if they add tracking of macro national/global trends/parameters and a rule based alert system it could become a very useful tool for triggering trades (if X moved to company Y and consumer sentiment is above Z, buy A)
This is what I got “An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.” Not bad for 12 million bucks!
At first, I thought it was kind of useless. Maybe a web 2.0 hoovers.com. However, the compensation and insider trades tab is pretty cool.
Servers seem a little shakey this morning.
Interesting to see it develop, but I’m not sure who a real customer would be. Feels like a solution searching for a problem.
http://www.traderbots.com
Factual is the open data that will be very interested with this api
They really need to do a better job positioning and differentiating themselves on the home page. On first glance, it looks like Google or Yahoo Finance with a little bit of Bloomberg.com thrown in. Not sure why I would spend the time there.
honestly, feels useless. i use bloomberg, capital iq, yahoo and google finance and this offers nothing in the way of simplicity, ease of use, or depth vs breadth that would makes it jump out at me
Great real word domain name. Its not key word because it doesnt define or limit business but it definitely sets the tone and explains it a bit.
Well, SEO-wise this has a lot of potential if they manage to do it right.
This could be addicting if you’re into tracking companies. The page listing Inside Trades sorted by date, name, and amount is awesome.
That’s hilarious haw they “borrowed” google’s design. As if google won’t even need to redesign after acquisition.
I think they would redesign; it’s too messy for Google IMHO.
That’s hillarious how they “borrowed” google’s design. As if google won’t even need to redesign after acquisition.
Tracked.com social search results are out of date and limited. They need to beef up the social search like get Samepoint API (www.samepoint.com) on top of Tracked.com.
Make 567000$ a year …It so easy,even one child can do it