Tracked.com

Comments (Archived):

1. love the name change! much better than rakedin.

   1. Ditto 🙂 Looking forward to testing the new features, I’d seen a few cryptic references to communication, now it makes sense.

      1. Phillip,After you poke around, feel free to shoot us your thoughts, comments and/or suggestions either here or on the Tracked.com feedback form.Enjoy!

         1. Will do, thanks Miles.

      2. Wait a few weeks for the web service (and the objects in it) to become optimized for social messaging and for the social messaging to open up to the social web. Those are to big features I am waiting for

2. I use Yahoo Finance almost every day. I’m going to Tracked to check it out.

   1. I use Yahoo! Finance everyday too. Tracked looks like it’s a little slow right now from the surge of users, but I will play around with it later when the dust settles. One quick question in the meantime: how does Tracked know from where to import relevant blog posts? Presumably ince Google owns Blogger, I find that the blog posts I write about companies on my Blogger blog automatically end up on Google Finance (but not on Yahoo! Finance). I just checked one of the obscure stocks I blog about on Tracked and didn’t see one of my blog posts. What blog platforms does Tracked search?

      1. Dave,Good question. We are completely source agnostic and platform agnostic. We crawl thousands of news sources, press releases, blogs and other sites to find information about the people and companies in our database.We’re always taking new submissions for blogs/news sources via the feedback/contact us form on Tracked.com, so feel free to send us your blog name, URL and RSS feed.

         1. OK, I’ll enter my blog’s name and URL via your feedback form (not sure if I have an RSS feed at this point).

      2. I don’t know the answer but I think ‘suggest a blog’ is a good feature request

   2. Let me know what you think rob

3. Sounds fantastic. This is actually a big pain point for me. I spend a lot of time researching companies (public and private) and it’s often very hard to find *strategic* (as opposed to financial) information on the companies. Also finding out about the people involved is hard.

4. Perhaps the large readership here is overloading the servers as it’s producing a fail whale:”An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.”

   1. First Oprah, then Stephen Fry, now Fred

   2. That was techcrunch’s fault, not mine :)But seriously, it is not great for a brand new service to struggle under the loadI think it is back to normal

5. Makes a lot of sense. In this world where fewer and fewer companies IPO, I need a place to find out more about the private companies of the world. I’ve been a heavy user of Crunchbase and i like how they tend to include more and be cluttered rather than include less and be polished. I’m hoping Tracked.com goes the same way. Regardess, i’m checking it out now….

   1. I’m with you on this. Will be able to submit our company to Tracked.com? Does anyone know if this is possible now?

      1. Spencer,If you want to submit your company to Tracked.com now please contact us via the feedback form, giving us your company name, description, industry, executives & titles, full HQ address, website, and any other information you think is important.Soon we’ll have a template that users can autonomously fill out to add companies to our growing taxonomy.

         1. Neat. I’ve submitted Carbonmade.

   2. What do you think?

6. Cool. It’s definitely got that Yahoo! Finance feeling. The layout needs some polishing but I’m thinking that’s something that’s coming in the pipeline anyways. I see how you want to give the site a full, hit the ground running, and see data feeling… I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel a little overwhelmed by the information. Hmm… will play around with it more. All the AVC readers are slowing the server =P

   1. I’m with you here…my first reaction to the homepage was “WHOA! What am I supposed to do now/first?”…it def. feels like the kitchen sink is in there…but it’s gonna take me some time just to figure out how to get a drink of water, let alone fill up a whole pitcher… (good thing I’m not dying of thirst right now)

      1. “Good thing I’m not dying of thirst right now”Kevin – great analogy!

      2. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t only me.

   2. Glenn,In regards to the layout, please send us your feedback if any thoughts or suggestions come to mind. We deal with a lot of data and functionality so UI is one of our favorite challenges :)We’re glad to hear you enjoy the site.

      1. Definitely.

      2. I agree with Samuel Rosen about the UI and OCD business users needing a really strong framework to look at the information presented to them.If I were a power user- how do I make the top 5 things I need to do accessible in 5 seconds or less. (that’s all you have, usually you have even less than that)I would suggest talking to the hardest of the hard core traders/investment bankers/people who desperately need something like this, and monitor their usage with a camera. One of the things I suspect is that my original Landing page has way too much going on, and the important stuff is not highlighted. All the news stories are the exact same size- and which ones relate to what I am interested in? Why is the only chart on the page tiny, and why does it feel like it is missing information? Can I get charts early on that relate to me? Where are my lists? Why are they hidden away? How quickly can I add/subtract from my lists right now?Name your character who is most likely to use this, then name what he is going to do with it, then name his top 5 priorities. Now design around those priorities. Then do the secondary, then the tertiary.Hope this helps.

   3. It’s got more of a Google Finance look to me.I happen to like Yahoo! Finance, particularly the portfolio feature. I go right there and skip the other stuff.

7. is it possible to add stories? i looked up a company in which i am interested, but there was only two stories. maybe it’d be better to have a suggest-an-rss-feed feature for tracked to track?

   1. Yup. That feature request has already been made and its a really good one. Thanks!

8. I like it. Great depth of info available. I agree it complements the other three services you mentioned. I believe it’s in beta, so I guess the design can be worked on as well.

9. Seems more like “Hoovers”, but free and social?

   1. Oh, both you and I know this will have a freemium model eventually. There are secret goodies somewhere hidden inside under development.Also, I could see huge amounts of syngery with Covestor (I never thought I thought I would say that word). Could someone plug in Covestor’s trading module into Tracked so that someone can execute based on what s/he finds? Two pieces of the same puzzle here working very nicely, if someone can figure out how to make then fit….

      1. I also see synergies with Covestor. One thing that seemed unpolished to me was the UI, though I’m sure over time it will get better. Looking forward to where this is going.

      2. Covestor.com is just a front end. Go to http://cv.im to see the transactional/business model for covestor

         1. I still think that’s a good match. For some people, it’s going to be a good move to have a place they can immediately socially trade stocks with from information they find via Tracked- Pass from one place to another.

   2. And much deeper way more ambitious

10. This is exactly what I needed. Now I just need to figure out what I am supposed to track. Suggestions? (This is largely due to the fact that I have given up on items like Google reader and rely on aggregators like Techmeme..which are good for short terms looks sees, but really can’t help you track anything long term. So Now I have no idea what I should look for…*sigh*)

    1. The commenters on this blog

       1. Who says we’re not all secretly talking 😉

11. Fred,What is their target market? If it’s the hardcore investors / analysts, my experience at a bulge bracket bank leads me to believe that tracked would have a difficult time grabbing attention away from Bloomberg, Institutional Equity Research, and GOOG Finance.The thought of mentioning twitter as a source is akin to using wikipedia as a reference for a term paper.

    1. I could totally see a hyper-premium version for bulge-bracket firms, especially if they cleaned up the UI. And I could see reasons why one would want twitter. Not necessarily for pure content reasons: You could plug in the amount of talk on twitter about a company/person/commodity/etc into some sort of data representations (say a chart that looks like a stock chart) to track rumor patterns. I would imagine that someone doing some sort of arbitrage wants a lead on information- knowing that there are patterns of how people talk on Twitter would be useful.It’s not just what people are saying as when and how many people are saying it- I made a similar point about twitter to a high frequency trader at a career fair and made him more than slightly uncomfortable about the firms’ trading practices and how I was getting my information- clearly something we all know is that information is the end all be all, and getting the freshest source is extremely difficult.That’s why I think Covestor and/or something similar needs to be built in, especially at the premium levels. Trading platforms today are horrible. Someone would be all over this if they could have a premium walled or partially walled garden with the ability to trade, especially at the bulge bracket level. Data gathering and sorting is a waste of time-which is why if the UI can be improved upon, they’ll have struck while the iron is hot.

    2. My kids use wikipedia as a source for term papers all the time. Those who deride it are making a huge mistake. Perfect is the enemy of the very very goodThe target is the every day business person. Anyone who reads the WSJ, uses LinkedIn, Yahoo Finance.

12. Cool, congrats on the launch, looks like a well done product. Looks like Tracked envisions to offer real time data feeds beyond just news like “Insider Trades”, “Compensation”, and “Investments” – I also notice these tabs are grayed out (at least on the stock I’m tracking in Tracked – RIMM). Is the business model going to be a freemium one where users can pay for incremental premium data feeds? Would make sense to me. Perhaps adding real time stock chatter and data feeds from someone like StockTwits could be one such partnership. In general, Tracked does a nice job of addressing the problem of “help me make a decision” that I outline in my blog post about Real Time. Found here if anyone is interested: http://irongiving.com/2009/10/13/real-time-over…

    1. I intro’d howard to mike months ago. I hope they can find some ways to work together

13. First impressions – looks good. Very apt timing, now that we are – finally – beginning to realise that there is a lot more to a company’s validity than just what the ticker spews out or official PR blurb ….

    1. Coming from you carl, that is high praise. Do you think there’s a need for this in the UK?

14. Rocking, I’m tracked as the CEO of victus media a vapor ware company. I hope to remedy that.Looking forward to their information stream filtering, thanks for pointing it to us Fred.

    1. That’s funny

15. this is a great website with lots of useful information, Boys have done a great job man…….Congratulation to all the member of Traked.com

16. I am using Yahoo finance from last 3 years, But that was not sufficient for my work , I just saw this website, and found it very interesting, keep it up…

17. Let me preface by saying I might not be the ideal target of Tracked, I’m an investment blogger and I at least spend a little time every day analyzing companies for possible investments.That being said, I think for a site like Tracked to really thrive they need to bring something to the table that Yahoo Finance / Google Finance does not have while also offering most of the same features.The financial information is often pretty limited when compared to Google or Yahoo and there’s no stock screener. I think that these would be pretty key, I’d rather see these types of metrics than see overlapping board relationships.

    1. Dont worry , this is just a beginning…. they will consider your suggestion in future….

18. I agree with a few others here that I’m a little overwhelmed by the UI at first glance (especially compared with some of USV’s other portfolio companies like Meetup, Twitter, Tumblr), but that will be refined in time I’m sure.Twitter and Facebook integration are going to speed up adoption I’m sure… what about Stocktwits or Covestor? Any plans there?

    1. Twitter integration is coming very soon. If you have any thoughts or comments that immediately come to mind regarding refining the UI please send it our way by either posting here or contacting us via our feedback form.Enjoy!

       1. Will do. Thanks for reaching out Miles.

    2. I’ve made the intros to stocktwits and covestor. Now its up to the business people to determine a fit

19. looks like a great SEO-play as well. they have a unique page of content for every company, every person part of that company, every slice of data, etc…

    1. Yup

20. too bad the information is severly out of date. i work for a $5B company and the information on here is over a year old when its partially accuarte, and some information is down right wrong.

    1. I’m with Dan, I’m afraidLooking at my own firm, the info is all over the place. Wish we’d made 58bn USD in interest income last year, or any year!! I’d have retired…But even basic things, like the sign saying we haven’t filed with the SEC in 6 months – our last filings were August… Or the names of current execs (hey in banking it changes fast at the moment, but)Nice idea, but garbage in garbage out!

    2. They’ll get better. This is day one. If you can, please tell them what’s wrong it will accelerate them getting it right

21. Love that you can get some info on private companies as well.

    1. but will you love it when it’s your company…..

22. Wow. This made up for the EXACT reason why I stopped using Google Finance — Yahoo! Finance is so old school 😉 — personalization. Love it. Love it. Love it. Site seems a bit labored; more traffic than expected?

    1. Yes. They got hit hard yesterday. Should be snappier today

23. I love it. About to write a blog post about it for my Career Transition candidates. I used a combo of OneSource/InfoUSA and Yahoo Finance – am thrilled to see this.A note to users: As for record accuracy, ALL research databases are only as good as the information that is confirmed by principals in the company. You can’t modify data based upon anything other than a company authorized principal confirming the modification. All databases – Hoovers, OneSource, D&B, etc. will have inaccuracies even in their premium pay subscriptions – it’s the nature of the beast.

    1. Opcgal,We’re glad to hear you’re enjoying the site. Please continue to send us your feedback either here or on Tracked.com.Your insight into record accuracy is dead on. We spend many cycles on creating new ways to curate data both algorithmically and manually. Although we’re striving for near-perfect accuracy, we understand that sometimes incorrectly reported data will hit the site. That is the nature of the beast, but it’s one of the many reasons this project is so intellectually stimulating.

       1. Thanks Miles, very nice to meet you. As the former director of global technology for a major outplacement firm, I know that proprietary contracts for this data, and CRM integration for sales teams, can exceed 600k annually. I’m an instant fan because I KNOW the value. My best, Karen MasulloMy blog post about you: http://bit.ly/14C9Bx

25. What would be pretty awesome if Tracked became a good place to talk about stocks. Yahoo Finance is absolutely infected by spammers / promoters that it really drives down the kind of community value there. I don’t know if that is something Tracked is angling to take on, but it would be pretty valuable.

    1. What do you think of stocktwits for that?

    2. What do you think of stocktwits for that?

       1. The problem with stock twits is the conversation is more fragmented. I like message boards because the discussion is very centralized and can build on itself. Also, when you’re doing fundamental analysis being able to break the 140 character limit is pretty good.Stocktwits is good at getting a lead on companies to look into. If I see a guy talking about the ship leasing industry, an analyst who I think is good, I can send him a tweet asking for what else is worth looking at.But for the actual sharing and discussing research, twitter’s pretty limited.

26. I must confess that it took me a bit (and a visit to the site) to better understand what this service is about, so my understanding might be wrong: it’s a Yahoo!/Google Finance with a social twist. Anyways, my comment was more related to the blog post than to the service itself, so back to the topic.”Yahoo!/Google are ticker driven.”I think an important consequence of this “ticker driven” is that it makes these services (close to) real-time services.”LinkedIn and CrunchBase are company and people centric services.”I do think that both LinkedIn and Crunchbase are still far from being real services, both being human edited with almost no real-time aspect. And I’d speculate that the value would be in having these transformed in real (close to) real time services.Imagine Crunchbase being able to present you with real time data about the company: latest news, latest press coverage. Add to that news related to the market/product/resources and competitors. Combine that with ticker driven data and Tracked.com social aspects and you’d probably have a good tool to operate in the financial market.As long as any of these aspects is separated or available only to a limited number of people, understanding or acting on the financial market will continue to involve a lot of guessing.

27. Great site, look forward to start using it as Yahoo Finance has become unusable for me. Small tip, Tracked suggsted me to follow Bruce Wasserstein so someone at Tracked may want to correct this..

28. how is this different from wikinvest?

    1. tracked has a business intelligence component and an investing component. wikivest does not really have the same type of business intelligence component, in my opinion. but they are certainly quite similar in concept and strategy. but i think there is the potential that they will filter the web in different ways and thus attract different audiences, i think.

       1. also reminds me of this sitehttp://www.form4oracle.com/…

    2. Wikinvest is a wiki. People powered and peer produces. This is more of a data aggregation/filtering service with a social later

29. “The opportunity is simply to redefine what a business information service should be on the open internet. “agreed. but i think the following is also true:The opportunity is simply to redefine what a [INSERT NICHE] information service should be on the open internet.what i mean is that i think we will see a lot of businesses like tracked, all built around the notion of filtering and remixing the web for a given niche, and using this as the foundation to create a niche community. i love the strategy in many ways and employ it myself. however i think all of us working on such ventures would benefit from identifying the standards that enable you to build this type of web service. standardizing how data is transferred from app to app (i.e. RSS, microformats, standardization of APIs), and the standardization of social networking features these types of services utilize would help us build these types of niche communities at a lower cost. i suppose it could be argued that these web services can’t be standardized like that, but i think the economic advantages of standardization will prove to be too good to ignore.but, i can see how tracked could make a lot of money, and of course this fits into standard USV logic, which is where it’s at. so it’s all good.

    1. Insightful comments. Thanks kidmercury.

30. This is a great idea. One summer I worked at an independent research company that focused on IPOs (back when there actually were IPOs) and the difficulty finding information on private companies was very frustrating. I agree that this is a much needed service.

31. Fred:Played around with Tracked.com and I totally agree that its an awesome product. I felt the same about ZoomInfo when I first saw it but I think it didn’t evolve to fulfill its real potential. Having said that, I really believe that the success of such data services lie in how their data can be leveraged by other applications via an API. I was surprised to see no information of API on the tracked.com website. I hope it is coming soon because developers would truly be able to make the most use of the Tracked.com data by pulling and putting it in context for users across a wide range of applications. ZoomInfo, Hoovers, LinkedIn all are really limiting their potential by not opening up their data and I hope Tracked.com doesn’t do the same.

    1. Those sites have limited their “potential” but also most likely maximized their profitability. I don’t think unlimited distribution is a good thing unless you can monetize it. Look at the big tiff between news organizations and Google, for example. Twitter is sort of a different case because there’s such a strong network effect that they can find other revenue streams.As far as Tracked.com, I’m not sure what to make of it. The site’s very well-executed for such an early stage and kind of feels like Hoover’s or Google Finance with a better news feed and better info on people. What’s the primary use case? Is it supposed to essentially replace my Google Alerts? That’s what I get from the name, anyway.

       1. There will be an api too

    2. Its coming. I can assure you of that

32. I’m thinking lately about “people centered politics” (as in user centered design) and how that could improve political information and transparency as a required stadium to people’s participation in public affairs.I doubt if that makes sense, but seeing services like this, that as you say are “company and people driven”, makes me think that all the social thing trend makes sense in the long term and that we have to experiment…

33. I can see a lot of potential in tracked.com, it’s an evolution of Yahoo Finance and Google Finance, but it integrates with everything.

34. Umm, its nice and everything, but innovative it is not. All the data they have is available on GF and YF, the interface is lacking any polish and looks like an uglier YF… Communication features are non-existent. Overall, I’ll stick to YF for the time being, and when I need something prettier and more useful, I head to http://www.sanebull.com or http://www.kapitall.com

    1. I don’t see this as exclusive to the investment community at all. Companies like OneSource Global (owned by InfoUSA), Hoover’s and D&B have been compiling and buying data from thousands of sources specifically to re-sell and integrate that data with enterprise level CRMs for years.If a company has 1000 or 10,000 sales people in the field, those folks need fast access to data to prospect and manage. Integrate this into Salesforce.com or a like CRM for a premium offering, and given the social aspect of it, it’s a winner. The closest I’ve seen is http://www.salesfuel.com/ and it has no free version, and buys its data (I believe) from a limited number of sources.Buying good data is expensive. For us small business owners out here, this is a much needed tool, and gives me dashboard flexibility Yahoo Finance and OneSource do not.

    2. I don’t think you looked very hard. There are a bunch of social and communications features after you sign up. get with the program!

       1. Really? I think i’ll stick to my gmail for “social and comminication” thats currently allowed…

35. This has huge potential. Will they go only B2B against the likes of Hoover’s, D&B, DJ and other players like Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance. There is a real compelling possibility where they could integrate the likes of Gist capability. I’m still not a believer in “enterprise” tracking and “personal” tracking. I want one universal dashboard that I can segment.

36. Fred, hate to be a downer, but they need a succinct “about” section on their homepage. I clicked through and stared at a lot of information without any real idea what value it provides me. You could argue that I should know after reading your post, but new traffic may have the same issue. I’d get a value proposition either on the front or one click away prominently displayed.

37. Fred – You might hand this comment off to your usability team (and then wait for a high five from them). Tracked.com made it’s way around my building yesterday. Someone (it wasnt me) found Tracked and immediately dove into our executive team’s compensation break downs and stock sales. The site spread over email and before lunch there were clusters of people huddled around screens and talking (IMO – when you see 5 people clustered around 1 computer, it’s a good sign) . I asked around – the social features were a hit. “associated people” was a mentioned many times as what drew people in and kept them digging and talking.

    1. That’s great to hear. Thanks

38. This also might be a nice platform from which to build and sell business information apps. Bloomberg is, among many other things, a collection of different applications: data applications, valuation applications, communication applications etc. Many of these applications Bloomberg has just recreated from those widely available on the “open” Internet (email, IM, don’t think there is a Bloomberg version of Twitter) but many of the rest don’t exist in a useful way yet. It is likely too much work for Tracked to build out this universe of functionality, but creating a easy place for someone to sell and publish small financial/business applications in an integrated way is certainly valuable.

    1. right. they need to get their API out and then this will be a great platform

39. I have never commented on this blog…but when is someone going to come up with an internet service that is customizable…to the likes of creating a bloomberg type dashboard. yes, the interface on tracked is messy…but if you could customize the screen to your choosing, could be wonderful….thoughts?

    1. when you say customizable, do you mean re-ordering where the stuff is on thescreen or personalizing the data you want to seeif it is the latter, then that is exactly what Tracked.com is working ondelivering to the market

40. Hi everyone. I am the founder of Tracked.com. We very much appreciate the discussion here and are listening carefully. A few things about what we’re trying to do:(1) Building a massive database of Private and Public Company Data — we already have much much more than Google Finance and are on par with Yahoo in many areas. Here’s a prime example of data we have but they do not — http://www.tracked.com/comp…We already have more than 5 million pages already!(2) We’ve built a communications platform called Messages — we support groups (public or private) and a host of other types of filters. We will soon give people a way to communicate business information across the site and all over the web. We think this will be useful.(3) A connections layer — think Linkedin but again with more controls/pirvacy if that’s what you require.We think the big idea is to bring all of these concepts together into one site and it isn’t easy but we’re trying hard. Let me say one thing about our Data. We are only as good as the original data source is. We’re here to tell you that a lot, too much, public and privately-available data is *dirty*, which means that it needs to be fixed. We are doing a lot of the cleaning but will eventually ask the citizens of the web to assist. With a little bit of effort from all of you our database can be the most accurate and useful out there.Please keep the ideas coming. We have a good team and we will be very responsive.Sincerely,Michael Yavonditte