TradeVibes Blog

Thank you to our many members and supporters for all the milestones we saw in 2008!  In just one year, we saw: the TradeVibes Beta go live, ourselves honored to be selected as a Web 2.0 Launchpad Participant, a mountain of features constantly added to the site, the Startup Exchange launched, and the 10,000 company profiles mark hit - and that’s not even a complete list!

None of this would have been possible without our steadfast TradeVibes community.  We say it a lot and we’ll say it again - “Thank you!”

We can’t wait to see the hot new startups you find (or start) this year and the latest buzz in the discussion forums, opinions, and votes.  From the TradeVibes family to yours, we hope you have a wonderful, productive year ahead.

Three weeks ago, the team rolled out the newest TradeVibes feature, the Startup Exchange, and so far the reaction has been positive and enthusiastic. We’re impressed with how well everyone is doing — keep up the great work, TradeVibes users!

In case you’re not yet in the know, the Startup Exchange is our virtual stock market for 53 privately held startups. Every user starts with T$100,000 in virtual cash they can use to buy and sell startup stock. Think a company’s stock is under-priced? Then buy their stock! Think it’s over-priced? Sell, sell, sell!

A big thank you to everyone who has made the Startup Exchange a huge success so far. If you haven’t joined in on the fun yet, then sign up for a TradeVibes account, and start trading today!

TradeVibes is proud to announce that we have compiled over 10,000 company profiles on the site. Wow! Since TradeVibes’ inception, we’ve depended on our users contributing to the success of the site. Thanks to everyone who has added and edited company profiles. We really appreciate it, and so do the rest of our users!

Know an awesome startup that isn’t on the site yet and want to add a company profile? Simply sign up for a TradeVibes account, head over to the “companies” page, and click on “add a company”. Happy adding!

Many users have requested a better way to navigate through a set of companies, so we’re happy to announce the launch of company “Lists” on TradeVibes. Currently, the lists are created by TradeVibes. We’ll look into allowing all users to create their own lists if there is sufficient demand. You can currently access our lists from the main Companies tab, then find the Top Lists section. We will be adding new lists over time and keeping the most popular lists. For example, you can look through the Y Combinator Summer 2008 startups, or the Top Job Search 2.0 Sites. For a much longer list, you can check out all of the companies currently on the Startup Exchange.

Each list allows you to read the high level descriptions of all of the companies on one page. You can also browse through the list by clicking on the “Browse This List” link, or simply click on any of the logos of the companies that interest you. You can browse the Y Combinator list here as an example. You will then be able to look at the profiles in detail, go forward or back in the list, or return to the list view to see the full list. Please let us know how you like this new functionality!

After working feverishly the past few weeks, the TradeVibes team is proud to announce the alpha launch of the TradeVibes Startup Exchange!

There are 50 companies currently listed on the Exchange with more to come as startups IPO and are added. Participants start with T$100,000 in play money to buy or short-sell startup stocks depending on if they think companies are over or under-valued. Stock prices fluctuate based on the TradeVibes community’s perceptions and actions regarding company valuations.

The Exchange is another exciting feature we hope will leverage the wisdom of the crowds to determine the valuation of startups. We welcome all feedback from our users so let us know what you think.

Try your luck out today as a startup investor! Learn more or get started.

You may have noticed the Startup Battle module on our home page. Given the number of companies on TradeVibes that compete with others, we thought it would be fun to pit them against each other and let the community vote on which is more likely to succeed. Depending on how well you are able to guess the community’s favorite of the two, you get a score at the end of the game when you’ve voted on ten pairs of companies. You can also challenge your friends and other users at the end of the game to see if they can beat your score.

Hopefully you will enjoy playing Startup Battle. You will probably also learn about a couple of interesting startups you’ve never heard of along the way. Let the battles begin! 

TradeVibes RSS feeds are here!

You can now pick from the following to keep up-to-date on the latest happenings in the startup world: Recently Updated Companies, Newly Added Companies, and Recently Funded Companies.

Subscribe and enjoy today!

Based on popular demand, we’ve enabled our Top Bullish Movers and Top Bearish Movers lists by industry category. As you browse through companies by looking through industries and sub-industries, we now show you the top movers for each industry. You can check out an example here for the Top Movers in Consumer Internet.

Also, our users have been asking for an easier way to navigate from one company profile to other similar companies. We’ve launched a Similar Companies widget on the Company profile page, which includes the top competitors and related companies based on our algorithm. You can now easily go from one company profile to the next.

Enjoy!

We have offer an embeddable company profile widget for a couple of months. Now, instead of just the ability to embed widgets inline (like the Twitter one at the end of this post), we offer a special pop up version of our widget. You can see an example of this widget of our Yelp company profile by hovering your mouse over the word Yelp. You will need to contact us to get access to this improved version of the widget. Please email us at help@tradevibes.com if you’re interested.

Here’s an example of our inline version of the widget.

Twitter

Based on your feedback, we continued to improve the ability to search for companies by location. You can now search for companies and filter by location in our “advanced search”.  You can use location (country, city, state, zip) as a search filter while looking for specific companies in one geographic region that match certain key words, or directly without using any key words.

Another enhancement we made was to improve the ease of navigating from one company profile to another. We have created a new “Related Companies” module on the right hand panel so it’s easier for you to find companies related to the one you are looking at. These companies could be competitors or just ones similar in other ways. We hope that this makes it easier for you to discover interesting new startups. Happy exploring!