Getting up to date with all the tech news can be time consuming for techies, journalists and investors. Enter Index.co, a ‘Bloomberg for private tech companies’.
Index.co launched today under the wings of parent company The Next Web. Both are based in Amsterdam.
On the homepage you’ll find a filtered feed of the biggest stories on the web from today, yesterday, last week – or any time. Creating an account is free. You can customize your feed to contain stories, funding rounds, and acquisition events about the companies and locations you like to track. (Be sure to follow StartupJuncture on Index.co)
The startup has been tested for over four months, in closed beta, by over seven thousand people. It’s interesting to see how different kinds of groups use the tool: according to the release, journalists and bloggers use it for research and discovering new stories. Investors use it for deal prospecting, entrepreneurs to track competitors and to get noticed by investors and by press, and corporates to find startups for potential partnerships or M&A targets.
Index.co is the third active subsidiary company developed by TNW, next to Twittercounter and pr.co.
Index businessmodel
The tool is free to use, and it will have a working businessmodel in the near future. “We’re not really working on it right now, but we expect to have a freemium businessmodel by the end of the year”, says Patrick de Laive from TNW.
The biggest challenge right now is to match public data to the platform, De Laive said. Companies like Human or Silk have an ambiguous name for the algorithm, so results like ‘human rights’ or ‘silk road’ pop up, he explained. That’s why Index works with human curators who approve a story or not. That way, the algorithm learns. “About 85 percent of the stories picked by the algorithm are a fit, and it’s only getting better.”