This guest blog was written by Anurag Agrawal, CEO of Techaisle, a market research and consulting company focused on Emerging Markets, Emerging Technologies, Global SMBs and Consumers. Anurag is a veteran Market Research executive with over 25 years proven track record in market research, data analytics and offshore call-centers. He was the Chief Operating Officer at AMI-Partners, Senior Vice President of Operations at Knowledge Networks, Vice President of Worldwide Research at Gartner, and Worldwide Research Director at IDC. He most recently became a board member at GageIn.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut and many others have successfully transformed us into a world where persons seen and unseen, heard and unheard, known and unknown, close and distant get connected instantly. They may or may not follow each others’ activities, recommendations, introductions but they all want to connect and “remain in touch”. All of these applications are extremely good at what they do – connect persons who are friends, relatives, acquaintances or business associates. However, none of them actually keep one updated about the other’s business, company, and firm. There are three phrases that people invariably ask when you first meet with someone new in a face-to-face setting. 1) Are you on Facebook? 2) What is your Twitter handle? 3) Are we already connected on LinkedIn? However, in our kind of business just being connected to a person is not enough. And I am sure that is true for almost every business. Question is – are we connected to the business of our client, our vendor, our partner? Are we following them to gain knowledge, understanding and intelligence? And if yes we are following them then how are we doing it? Through press releases, through news aggregation services, through informal media such as blogs, forums? Why can there not be one platform that helps us all follow businesses and business personnel for mutual growth.
And the above conundrum has plagued me for a long time. However, having harbored that riddle and lack of an answer I chanced upon two executives, good friends of mine who had set out to solve the very problem with a clearly defined vision. The result is GageIn.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many large and some niche players in business news aggregation and business relationship management. However, what I believe has been missing in the space is an integrated platform which could align and streamline all pieces together that allows one to follow companies, receive business news, take actions to find and engage in business opportunities, track competitors’ latest movements, benchmark strategy and performance against the market, industry, or technology trends. In my opinion, GageIn is addressing exactly what the business market needs today.
I have had the privilege to be part of GageIn’s private beta launch. Although limited in functionality currently, I found the site focused on organizing people and news around companies and enabling users to search and follow companies for daily business news updates. The user interface is simple and easy-to-use. It seems that I could receive news from most large companies immediately upon following them while it takes a few days to start receiving news feed from small and medium-sized companies. News that is closely relevant to my interest.
I strongly urge you to try it out, apply for private beta.
