Serial entrepreneur Jim Fowler has just launched Owler.com and the Owler mobile business app (iOS) to provide a source for business news and information.
Based in San Mateo, CA- and Coimbatore, TN, India, Owler provides for free news alerts, crowdsourced company profiles and community polls.
Fowler’s previous company, Jigsaw Data Corporation, built an enormous database of business-contact information contributed by a community of people before it was sold to Salesforce in 2010 for $175m.
Now, Owler uses its community to create company profiles, which serve as living snapshots of more than 900,000 public and private companies from across all industries, to provide insight on business trends and company moves through its participation in polls to measure market sentiment.
After members select which specific companies they want to follow, the service curates and consolidates on-target business news for those companies into an online in their Owler news feed, delivered to their inbox; and in the mobile app, accompanied by real-time breaking-news alerts sent to their phone.
In 2012, Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures provided the company with $17.3m (read here) when it started as a source for crowdsourced competitive intelligence reports before pivoting into Owler.
FinSMEs
01/07/2014