Content Drives New Business Social Network GageIn
How do you keep up with the flood of information, news, social media and more across the Web? The answer is you can’t. Whether you visit aggregator sites, employee RSS feeds, or simply surf like crazy, it’s impossible to stay on top of everything happening on the Web.
But you can try. GageIn today joins a growing chorus of solutions designed to streamline information flow, giving users a reasonable shot at staying on top of the information most relevant and timely to them. GageIn co-founder and CEO Luosheng Peng said his company’s new service stands out because of its focus on content sharing.
“Services like LinkedIn are useful once you’ve built up your connections, but how do you aggregate information before you even make any connections?” Peng said in an interview with InternetNews.com. “When you join GageIn, you already have access to all kinds of information on companies and people.”
GageIn launches as a free beta service with five core functions: “explore,” “receive,” “connect,” “collaborate” and “promote” that the company said can be used to increase sales, gather competitive intelligence, track market data, promote your own company and develop alliances.
The main GageIn page acts as a kind of dashboard for content where you can access things like company news, white papers, regulatory filings, YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations and Twitter feeds that you follow.
Content management features give users the ability to mark items to read later and save searches so you can pick up where you left off.
GageIn lets users enter, upload, or import contacts from Outlook, webmail, spreadsheets and services like LinkedIn, to quickly get started building out their GageIn network. In a demo, Peng used a simple point-and-click to adjust the importance of who you follow and select what you want to follow such as press releases, blogs, whitepaper, slide decks, earnings and events.
“You can also see what other employees at your company are following,” noted Peng and pick from a database of information sources that includes business and industry sites such as InternetNews.com.
GageIn is also taking pains to limit access to business email accounts and will alert accounts not active for three months to update their status or risk being dropped (though Peng stresses it will be easy to reactivate accounts and not lose any information if someone is late responding).
Peng said GageIn is going to employ a so-called freemium model of offering a base set of functionality that he thinks “will get companies excited to use the service.” Additional premium services will likely be rolled out in the second half of this year.
David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
David Needle is an experienced technology reporter, based in Silicon Valley. He covers big data, mobile, customer experience, social media, and other topics. He was previously the news editor for Enterprise Apps Today, TabTimes editor, and West Coast bureau chief of Internet.com.