Today we launched the public version of RivalMap, our new product that evolved from the valuable feedback we received over the last year from Competitious users and our enterprise pilot customers. Competitous is a great way to quickly list your competition and start finding news and traffic stats about them, but RivalMap is focussed on what happens next. It provides a much more powerful way of organizing and collaborating around the information you record. Some of the new features that you will find include:
-Account subdomains with SSL for paid accounts
-Full account and user management with individual user permissions
-Manage competitors and their products, sort and filter in many ways (including a collective threat rating)
-Competitor profiles with a “mini-wiki” (soon to be a full-fledged wiki with multiple pages per competitor/product)
-Social bookmarking with tagging
-Notes system with tagging and file attachments
-The tag system allows free-form labels, and also associated content with competitor, products, or customer segments
-Full-text search of content and text-based file attachments
-Track and address concerns
-Comment system for discussing almost everything on the system
-Smart and attractive email digests that show threaded activity sorted and grouped by the threat of associated competitors
-Email in notes and attachments, email alerts when you subscribe or comment on any content
-Organize information on customer segments and actual customers
-Fully robust comparison matrix tool - multiple comparison, text in cells, reorder completely, export to Excel, etc.
-Users can save and promote content by starring it - almost like a Digg system internally
In essence, it’s an entirely new system with far more capability. All of our current customers use it daily to share news, files and notes on competitors and their industry. They also really love the new comparison matrix tool that allows them to share comparisons on things like vertical market integration or interest rates of competing financial institutions.
We’re focusing on building specialized collaborative features in the first revision so there is not any traffic information or news feeds, but we’ll be introducing features in the future like a collaborative RSS news dashboard, and possibly integration with third-party information services.
Please give our new service a try there are free and paid plans available!
http://www.rivalmap.com
Yahoo got our domain back faster than they said it would take. However, all the DNS settings were lost so it may take a little time before the DNS settings propagate and the domain points to our servers again. We appreciate everyone’s patience in this matter and will continue to talk with Yahoo about what happened so that we can be sure it won’t ever happen again.
Please read our previous blog post for more details:
http://blog.competitio.us/2007/09/09/yahoo-lost-our-domain-use-httpcompetitious-for-now/
Our primary domain is usually http://www.competitious.com, however that address no longer resolves to our servers because Yahoo lost our domain. You can access our service at http://competitio.us until Yahoo gets our domain back. Our servers have not had any problems and the service itself is running smoothly at competitio.us. Unless you update your Competitious bookmarklet, it may not work until Yahoo gets our competitious.com domain back.
After many hours on the phone with Yahoo, a supervisor finally came to the conclusion that the problem was not on our end (as we already knew), but that they had some how lost our domain on a list of domains that they control. I don’t think there is much we could do to prepare for this type of situation, but we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We have always kept the domain up to date, and renewed it on time.
Yahoo is working to regain control of our domain and says it will take 2-3 days. The supervisor we spoke with at Yahoo says there is nothing they can do to speed this up. Fortunately, we didn’t move our blog over to the competitious.com domain so we are still able to communicate with our users.
I have heard of similar problems with less reputable domain registrars but I did not expect this from Yahoo. We are looking for a new registrar unless Yahoo can provide us with a better explanation of why this happened and how they will prevent it from happening again.
This does not effect the pilot customers of our new service, those users are on a different domain.
As we’ve stated in several blog posts, interviews, and responses to user feedback, Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft. We have been concentrating on raising a seed round over the last few months, and now that we’ve wrapped that up, we have hunkered down to develop our main product. Whereas before we were doing consulting work and only working on Competitious part-time, the seed round will allow us to make RivalSoft our full-time endeavor.
The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we’ve received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months.
Many people have asked us if our services will remain free. The new service will have both free and premium versions, with functionality going well beyond what Competitious currently provides, even on the free plan. The premium versions will be affordable, making the service accessible to all types of companies, including early-stage startups.
We are very excited, and can’t wait to launch our main product. Some great companies have offered to work with us during development to ensure the service exceeds the needs of organizations in a variety of industries and sizes, ranging from very early stage web startups, to international enterprises. Judging from the feedback we’ve already received about what we’re now building, we anticipate this new release will become an essential tool for most businesses.
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!
On Thursday we presented at the SD Forum Ruby SIG, which is hosted at Google, about our experience as a startup using Ruby on Rails. We covered the important technical aspects of Competitious, the decision process we went through when choosing Ruby on Rails, and went over some specific interesting aspects of our code. It was well received and we fielded a lot of great questions. We provided a link below to the PowerPoint slides for those interested in the slides, and will be separately posting about our acts_as_loggable plugin, in which we took an interesting approach to solving several problems associated with logging all actions on a service for the purpose of displaying to users.
We want to thank Greg Coladonato for inviting us to present and hosting the forum.
You can find the slides from our presentation here.
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!
We added site thumbnails to the competitor overview pages today. For those of you with a long list of competitors this should help you visualize who each of your competitors are more quickly.
Here is a screen shot of what the new competitor pages look like:
We have received terrific feedback and lots of traffic from outside of the US. As a result, we have switched over to UTF-8 as our default character set and made the necessary changes to display international characters properly.
New users can now take advantage of our help icons to get instant assistance with our interface and the various features it supports. You can click on any of the question marks to the right of the headers to view the help content.
Comment Alerts and Invites are now emailed with the sender’s username in the from address. This should help your team members recognize who the email is from more and not perceive it as spam. The reply-to address is now set to be your email address so that team members can reply directly to comment alerts and invites as well.