-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

Please read our previous blog post for more details:

http://blog.competitio.us/2007/09/09/yahoo-lost-our-domain-use-httpcompetitious-for-now/ 

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.

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.

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!

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!

We want to thank Greg Coladonato for inviting us to present and hosting the forum.

You can find the slides from our presentation here.

http://jeffnolan.com/wp/?p=849

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!

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!