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.

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!

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! 

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!

One of the most frequently requested features by our users is the ability to search by location. We have launched the first version of location search. All of the city, state, zip, country on company profiles are now links. By clicking on the link, you will be able to find all companies with the matching city, state, zip, or country. For example, it was interesting for us to find out what other startups are our neighbors in Mountain View, or with our zip code 94041. Also, if we have a street address for a company, then you can click on the Map It link to see the location via Google Maps. We plan on further enhancing location based search in the future, but we hope you like this first step.

Given our focus on gathering our community’s opinion about companies on TradeVibes, we have made a number of enhancements to our opinions functionality. Because we want TradeVibes to be a platform for open discussion about the outlook of startup companies, we are now displaying the authors of bullish and bearish opinions on the Bulls vs. Bears page. Given many of the opinions are given in the context of a particular timeframe, we also added the date of when the opinions are made. In the spirit of encouraging open discussion, we also built the functionality for our users to comment on other users’ opinions. This way, we can hear both sides of the issue being discussed.

Also, you can now see the recent opinions made by our community members on their public profiles. Because we want to respect the privacy of our users, we have built a privacy preference where users can decide not to share opinions they made on their user profile. If you would prefer NOT to have this information available to the public, you can change your privacy preference here. We believe the vast majority of our community will not be using this functionality.

Our belief is that open discussion around these opinions is best for the community. Let the discussions begin!

TradeVibes is driven by our community - who contributes information, news, and opinions about companies. To highlight this fact, we launched the Community page, which show cases some featured users who have been active contributors to the site, as well as some details around their contributions. If you have been an active member of the TradeVibes community (added companies, news, discussions, opinions) and would like to be featured. Please email us at help@tradevibes.com and someone will review your profile.

In addition to Featured User, Recently Featured Users, and Recent Contributors, we also show case the most recent opinions added by our community members, since TradeVibes is also around aggregating our community’s opinions. Hopefully, through these user profiles and opinions, you will discover some other cool startup you haven’t heard of before.

Part of the mission of TradeVibes is to provide a platform to aggregate the wisdom of the crowds to filter the most promising startups from the rest. To this end, we have launched a number of products today: My Bullish 5 and Company Top Bulls (and Bears). We have also announced a special contest where our users can test their VC investing skills to win an iPhone.

My Bullish 5 is a way for every user to show case their opinions about companies on TradeVibes. Users have always been able to vote on whether they are bullish or bearish about certain companies. With My Bullish 5, TradeVibes users can now feature the 5 startups they are the most bullish on. Here’s an example. Companies you vote bullish on will automatically be added to your My Bullish 5 list until you have voted bullish on five companies. If you have voted bullish on more than five companies, you can log into your account and go to your My Account page to edit your list.

The Company Top Bulls list is a way for users to see which companies have received the most bullish votes and opinions of late. The default time window is 7 days, although you can adjust the time period to look at just the last 24 hours, or the last 30 days. The default list shows 5 bullish companies and 5 bearish companies, but you can expand the list to see the top 20 of each list.

Last but not least, in honor of our selection to the Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad and our participation in the Expo (we’ll be at booth 26 in the Long Tail Pavilion), we’re hosting a “Be the VC Contest: Web 2.0 Expo Edition”. Using the My Bullish 5 feature above, conference attendees and all TradeVibes users will be able to play VC by picking their most bullish 5 companies out of the 100 startups we selected (out of ~200 exhibitors at the Web 2.0 Expo). Since you are more likely to win if other people vote for the same companies you voted for, you may want to convince your friends or other community members on why they should vote bullish on your Bullish 5. You can read about the contest overview and official rules at your leisure, but the winner of the contest will win an Apple iPhone!

May the best investor win…

Many users have asked about ways to display some of the company information that TradeVibes offers on their own sites. Now you can! TradeVibes Company Profile Widgets is now live! You can customize the widget to display as much information as we offer, or as little as you’d like. Our widget can also take on the look and feel of your site so it looks more integrated with the rest of your site, by customizing the CSS use by the widget.

Here’s an example of the default Company Profile Widget for Mint.

Here’s an example of the full Company Profile Widget for Mint, where the full description of the company is displayed.

Here’s an example of the light Company Profile Widget for Mint. You can customize the widget to hide any specific field you want.

Please try it out and let us know how you like it!