We closed an intial round of financing this week, which was a very exciting process for us. The round was raised through private angel investors. One of our primary investors is Paul Colton, CEO and founder of Aptana, which recently took over the RadRails project. We’re very excited about being backed by someone who will be integral to the Ruby on Rails community.
As we’ve mentioned before, Competitious is a beta version of a much more robust system we have planned. This seed round will enable us to develop and launch a really compelling service, as well as some very interesting services to help companies better harness competitive research. Expect another post soon about what we’re planning here at RivalSoft!
Over the last week we received numerous emails and feedback messages pointing out that the traffic graphs no longer work properly. Since the launch of the Competitious beta, we have been using traffic graphs from Statsaholic.com (formerly Alexaholic), but these stopped working due to troubles Statsaholic was having with Alexa. You can read about the issues here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/30/amazons-war-on-statsaholic/
To remedy this situation temporarily, we began using Alexa graphs directly. However, shortly after making this fix, the Alexa graph widgets themselves stopped working everywhere. Alexa still has links on their website to these graph widgets for embedding on other sites so as far as we know this is only temporary. We hope Alexa resolves the issues with these traffic graphs soon. We will have a much more robust traffic analytics system coming with our main release in a few months that is not dependent upon Alexa.
Thanks everyone!