I'm not quite sure why stuff like this bothers me, but it does. Why would I, as a startup, want to attract this much attention for something that offers so little in return? Part of the competitive advantage of being a startup is that you're only known to the people that really matter: your customers. By the time any competitors figure out who you are, you are a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, and a lot wiser.
If you want media exposure, you're much better off picking up the telephone and calling up a newspaper. But this; this is just an easy way for VCs and competitors to keep a close eye on you. That makes me a bit paranoid.
One thing we (CrunchBase) offer is search engine rankings. We rank pretty high on startup keywords (try 'facebook' or 'scribd'), and so we find it's worth 5 minutes a month to keep the data relevant.
StartupIndex has some good stuff going on, particularly the geography features.
We want to create really useful regional pages. That is one of the things about Canada. People don't just pick up and move to one particular city (ie: the valley for tech) -- we tend to stay in our own towns and cities and make a go of it from there., so we want to support that in some cool ways.
I really like the idea, but you have some work to do.
Your filter to lookup by region is not working correctly. If I select Calgary and Edmonton company comes up. Also Cambrian house that is located in Calgary and is in the Database, does not show up.
Also the filter usability is a bit strange. You add a filter and you can see all the pretty AJAX do it's thing, but the fucking thing does not change the results until you click filter...
Yeah,. We are going to add some form of job postings. At a minimum, we will let startups add an RSS feed of their job listings. What we don't want is job listings from big companies that are just aimed to pick people out of the startup community.
Thanks! I see an "Atlantic Canada" option has been entered.
You might want to add in a few other population centres (Quebec City springs to mind) and break "Atlantic Canada" out into separate cities (Halifax folks aren't likely to meet up with those in St. John's any time soon).
Even if a region doesn't have any entries, a new visitor is likely to check their current location first. Seeing "No listings yet!" is much better than the "This isn't for you!" impression given by leaving a region out.
If you want media exposure, you're much better off picking up the telephone and calling up a newspaper. But this; this is just an easy way for VCs and competitors to keep a close eye on you. That makes me a bit paranoid.