Datatracker selected as Best Enterprise Startup!

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Datatracker was just now selected as the Best Enterprise Startup for this years Arctic15 conference held in Helsinki on the 16th of October.

Arctic15 is the premier industry event for Nordic and Baltic startup and growth companies. The conference was organised for the first time last year with some 400 people attending it.

A big part of the conference is also the startup competition. Last year Arctic15 had 15 companies on stage pitching themselves. However, what’s more interesting is the fact that these 15 companies raised $12.85 million in funding in just 10 months since the last conference.

This is a fantastic opportunity for us to present our company to potential investors, customers and partners.

Thanks to everyone who supported us in the semi-finals.

Datatracker are Arctic15 Semi-Finalists for Best Enterprise Startup

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Datatracker have made it through to the semi-finals of Arctic15, the Nordic & Baltic growth entrepreneurship conference which is held annually in Helsinki, Finland. Datatracker is nominated in the Best Enterprise Startup category.

Arctic15 annually attracts some 400 of the most networked people in the Northern European startup scene. Well over a 100 companies applied to pitch at this year’s startup competition in 13 different categories.

There is currently a public vote where you can vote for your favorite startups and also get the chance to win two free tickets to the conference. You have time until the 9th of September to do so, after which we will announce the winners of each category that will get to pitch on stage. The 15 finalists on stage will compete for more than €20 000 in prizes.

Click here and vote for Datatracker today.

The Cloud Channel

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Its been 5 weeks now since we started in StartupReykjavik. Our fundamental technology has remained the same. What has changed is our strategy and our understanding of the opportunities around us.

Before we started our company in January 2012 we often talked about the “cloud wave”. The generic core goal for us as founders was to simply to leverage the cloud to create something awesome. We were obviously also driven to do something relevant to us and our background (as discussed in the data extraction need blog I wrote a while back).

But in the past few weeks through a lot of research and talking with mentors we realized that the cloud wave was not just about technological leverage. The cloud wave is also generating a lucrative and accessible sales channel through product integration and cloud computing app marketplaces. The entrepreneurial opportunities within the cloud channel are huge.

A fruitful sales channel allows buyers and sellers to communicate and acquire products more easily and in the long run allows businesses such as ours to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. The Salesforce AppExchange is an excellent example of such a channel. All the basic channel functions are there: you can promote, package, distribute and sell your product. In addition, you are partnering with a powerful cloud player who has already managed to convince more than 100,000 companies that the cloud is not too risky.

But why stop there. PaaS and APIs allows us as SaaS providers to offer our solution on multiple platforms, including SugarCRM, GoodData, Jaspersoft, Birst, indicee, PivotLink and other up and coming cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) providers. These providers have a growing community of over 250,000 companies who are embracing the cloud wave and can easily deploy 3rd party services such as ours to their initial core SaaS/PaaS investment and create more value out of external data.

Product integration is nothing new here. Some of the most successful web companies of my generation have seen tremendous growth from integrating with other platforms, such as Paypal and eBay, Zynga and Facebook, Marketo and Salesforce.

The bottom line is that the cloud channel offers us as software providers to reach a growing market of technically and strategically aware buyers. In addition to nurturing traditional SaaS channels such as Search Engines and Social Media, we really believe that we can find the right customer who can maximize the value of the external data they are tracking online.

ABOUT DATATRACKER
Datatracker allows ANY user to collect, track and structure online web data. Datatracker empowers the real time enterprise by extracting information from unstructured online sources to support business activity monitoring, competitive intelligence and business intelligence.

Automate & extend Salesforce with datatracker.

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The last two weeks we have spent some time on envisioning how we can create more value out of the data our users are collecting via our application.

A good example is the opportunity for data migration – allowing our users to “push” the data to their Salesforce org. Once the data is accessible within Salesforce, companies can create business logic, workflow and processes which are dependent on that data. Just imagine how powerful that is. It takes to “automate and extend” vision of Salesforce to amazing heights.

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datatracker.io – the web extraction need

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I love reading about startups that develop solutions which solve their own needs. This is the typical „scratching an own itch“ scenario. During the past couple of years all three founders of datatracker had an „itch“ which was usually solved by scrappy code or manual labor.

Hrafn, our CTO, has been scraping websites since he was 14 years old for various purposes, mostly for some sort of data mashup scenario. A good example is when me and Hrafn decided to create a daily deal aggregator similar to yipit.com. One of the daily deal sites threatened to sue us only 2 days later and we wussed out.

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Needlebase

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On June 9th 2012 we stumbled upon Needlebase, a discontinued product as of June 1st 2012 which was developed by ITA software. ITA had been acquired by Google in October 2011 and as it tends to happen for Google acquired businesses, some part of their operation will get shut down and/or incorporated elsewhere.

We kept finding these reviews and comments on various blogs and social networks which described Needlebase as the type of product which provided value for so many different types of users. Consumers, journalists, developers, yield managers, pricing managers, data nerds, government agencies, analysts and so on had become dependent on the product. Once it had been discontinued they had no idea where to turn.

This is where we will come in. We really think our product will be an instant alternative to Needlebase, and even offer a better user experience, a different and more intuitive approach towards creating the data model, and better access and migration options with the data you scrape and schedule to scrape.

Are you a former Needlebase user? What feature did you feel was missing from the Needlebase product? Let us know in the comment section below.

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datatracker – the product

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Here comes our bullet point value proposition.

  • We are confident that data extraction should be an enjoyable process.
  • We think ScraperWiki is an excellent product, but we feel sorry for all those non-developers who can’t use their service.
  • We are developing web-based data extraction software which will be fun to use.
  • We are getting some great guidance from a new accelerator called StartupReykjavik (a part of theGlobal Accelerator Network).
  • We will launch a beta later this year.

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Cloud Engineering in StartupReykjavik

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Cloud Engineering will participate in StartupReykjavik, an business accelerator founded by Arion-Bank, Innovit Entrepreneurship Center and Klak.

StartupReykjavik is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. Participating companies or ideas get $16,000 in seed funding in addition to great perks such as free hosting and services, a nice place to work, ten weeks of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

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