Stealthy Tracked.com leaps out almost fully formed
Jinfo Blog

28th October 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Founded in April 2008, Tracked.com been quietly working away in the background gathering and structuring its data, and raising $12 million in the process. Now – 18 months later – it has finally burst on the scene to be greeted with expressions of some enthusiasm. Mashed together from a whole range of sources, Tracked (http://www.tracked.com/) is a huge database that follows the fortunes not only of public and private companies but also of the people associated with them and the relationships they enjoy. Its customers can create their own watchlists of people, companies and industries and a feed offers a steady stream of news on your chosen mark. ‘Imagine LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids,’ says the internet product blog TechCrunch. It also comments on how fascinating it is to see related people and to click through various relationships (http://digbig.com/5bancy). For private companies, Tracked might be the most extensive publicly available database in existence aside from Wikipedia, comments web services blogger Harrison Hoffman. But Tracked is not a wiki; its team checks the accuracy of everything that comes in, although this inevitably means that it can’t include as much information as a user-driven site (http://digbig.com/5banda). Much of Tracked.com’s initial funding has come from the venture capitalist Union Square Ventures. It says that it seldom invests in a company before it launches publicly – the exception being when it has the opportunity to back an experienced entrepreneur with a strong team and product vision. Tracked’s individual offerings adapt continuously to a user’s behaviour on the site, rendering the results ever more relevant, Union Square explains – and it commends company founder Mike Yavonditte for bringing that idea from his previous work in ad optimisation. It also likes the social media layer, allowing users to share insights and – in due course – to link out to all the popular social media sites (http://digbig.com/5bandb). ‘I like to say that Tracked.com is what sits in the triangle that you can form with Yahoo! Finance on one point, LinkedIn on another point, and Twitter on the third point,’ adds Union Square principal Fred Wilson (http://digbig.com/5bandc). But it doesn’t compete with these services, he emphasises; ‘it is designed to complement them and extend their usage models’.

« Blog