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Startupindex.ca - Free our data, free the community

startupnorth.ca

16 pointsjmacd15 comments

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.

So TechCrunch should stfu? And CrunchBase and TradeVibes should be razed? =)

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 work on getting the filters right in our next iteration. They even confuse me ;)

It might have been smarter to leave them off alltogether, but we didn't.. we'll get to it quickly.

Pretty cool and great for Canada. Good work guys

The idea is neat! Do you think you would eventually extend it and create a listing with relevant startup jobs?

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.

Your 'Regions' list ends at Montreal.

You're missing out on an odd 750-1000 miles of geography (and a lot of Canadian startups).

I am from the East Coast,. Atlantic Canada wasn't left out, there just aren't any entries in that region yet. It is available to be added to however.

Out of curiosity (as an East Coaster and StartupNorth reader), where on the East Coast are you originally from?

Charlottetown -- Grew up and started my first startups there.

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.

This is a great idea! We'll be adding our startup on there soon enough too :)

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