Competitious News

We launched a significant release just a few moments ago that is packed full of new features and improvements. Our free service introduces some new best practices for collaboratively managing competitive knowledge in an organization - every company should have a comprehensive overview and analysis of their competition, and Competitious is designed to solve several problems associated with that ongoing process. We have a lot more coming in the near future.

As we mentioned in our last post, the most significant improvements are to the comparison matrix and the clipping system. We cover some of the new changes below:

An Improved Comparison Matrix

The comparison matrix can now be created and edited directly from the comparison matrix view like an AJAX spreadsheet. For example, you can click in a cell to add a feature to a competitor, or click on an existing feature/category to rename it or delete it. You can even reorder features within a category or the entire matrix itself.

We also made some major improvements to the way the comparison matrix is displayed. This includes rendering your competitor names at an angle so that the columns of the matrix are all of equal width and always keeping the competitor names on the page by having them scroll with the browser window.

All-New Clippings System

Clippings are now a powerful and integral part of Competitious. Use clippings to enable your entire company to easily save and share news from anywhere on the Web about your company, products, competitors, or industry. You can now view all of the clippings for a project in a single place, with new clippings from other team members highlighted each time you visit the service. Clippings can be filtered in a number of ways, and can be easily edited at anytime, from anywhere they are viewed on the service.

The most exciting change we made to clippings is the ability to assign sentiment to a clipping for multiple competitors. This enables you to record the opinion expressed by a news article or page about you or your competitors, allowing you and your team members to more easily parse and analyze competitive news or information. You can also go back and edit your current clippings and assign sentiment.

Easily Specify Your Own Company

Setting your own company or product in each project is now very straightforward. Doing so gives you the ability to clip news about your organization or product, directly compare yourself against competitors in the comparison matrix to help you visualize your value proposition, and create notes to discuss with other project members.

Better Competitor Lists

You can now add anything as a competitor, whether it be a specific product from a large company or a service offered by a small one. When you add a new competitor, we automatically suggest the name of the competitor for you as you type. For example, if you were to enter a competitor url of http://pages.google.com we would name the competitor Google Pages by default, though you are free to edit it as you please. We also no longer tamper with website urls so you can now list sites like http://www.apple.com/iphone, whereas before we stripped this down to Apple.com automatically.

Improved Project Invites

You can now easily invite people from your other Competitious projects or project invites with a single click from the People page.

And More…

Along with these more significant new features, we also added a lot of improvements for which users have been asking. For instance, a lot of users requested that clippings no longer require a comment/description, so we are happy to have finally removed this restriction. We have also added a Help Center, which will help guide you through the new features, and each competitor page has been changed slightly and made more intuitive.

We’re excited about this next set of improvements for Competitious. We’re also thrilled to be moving forward with our vision and working on innovative paid services that will make Competitious much more than a collaborative way to track your competition.

We look forward to your feedback and suggestions!

Soon we will be pushing out a new release that accounts for much of the feedback that our users have reported to us since August. This release was heavily influenced by hundreds of suggestions and dozens of talks with companies already using our service. It is the first major release we will have made since launching, although we have deployed many smaller improvements since then.

The feature matrix is going to now be called a comparison matrix and has gone through a complete rewrite making it easier to read, manage, and start. This includes some advanced in place editing and dynamic effects!

Our clippings, which are shared bookmarks about your competition, have gone through some exciting changes that will begin to demonstrate the unique advantages of our specialized implementation of social bookmarking for your organization.

We have made many other improvements throughout the service that we will cover after the release. We are looking forward to your feedback!