In a blog post from 2006 titled, ” The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy ,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, “you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses.” Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about, and his advice – while almost 4 years old – still rings true today. If you’ve got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That’s why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition. Sponsor Developed by RivalSoft, the makers of RivalMap , Competitious is a free service that allows users to collaborate on numerous projects for tracking industry competitors. You and your team can gather and collect news clips, build feature comparison matrices and keep an eye on traffic trends with Alexa data. The comparison matrix feature is very useful and we here at ReadWriteWeb are even putting this feature to use in researching an upcoming report. However, entering in individual features for each company can become a bit tedious. It would have been nice to see Competitious offer a list of popular companies whose core features could be automatically placed into a matrix. Users would also benefit from suggested competiors for any given company based on what other users are comparing, but perhaps these features are on Competitious’ roadmap for the future. The traffic graphs can only be seen if your competitors are ranked in the top 100,000 on Alexa, which can be a problem for small business with equally small competition. Competitious does claim, however, that they are working on “a much more robust traffic system” for their post-beta release. In the meantime, free site analytics services like Compete and Quantcast can provide data for those hard-to-reach sites. Despite its early flaws, with the ability to easily compare any number of companies in a side-by-side fashion, Competitious is a convenient solution for researching that “competitors” slide in your startup’s pitch presentation. Discuss

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Know Thy Enemy: Competitious Helps You Stay Ahead

It’s no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Over the last year, we decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we’d like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from an earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can’t throw a rock without hitting some startup’s offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL. We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town. Discuss

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A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here’s Boulder

Respected industry thought leader, Joseph Smarr, announced on his blog today that he is leaving Comcast-acquired Plaxo to join Google and help drive the company’s next steps in the social web. Smarr has been a key innovator in the OpenID , Oauth and related technical movements. Smarr’s work is all about enabling innovation by making it easy for users to move data from site to site. Sponsor While noting Google’s support for specific open web technologies, Smarr also said: “Getting the future of the Social Web right – including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph – is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come. ” Smarr was the first non-founding employee of Plaxo, a dynamic contact management service that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, and then became its spammy boogeyman, and was finally acquired by Comcast 18 months ago . Plaxo was co-founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker and was backed by Sequoia Capital, the fund that backed Google and YouTube. Chris Messina , fellow open-web leader and the self-described evangelist that helped turn Smarr from the dark side of Plaxo’s early days (“champions of the open web can come from all corners,” he told us), said of the move: “Smarr joining Google is a logical next step for him – I think he’s done great work at Plaxo with John McCrea, but advancing the open web has not been able to be his priority since he took on the CTO role there.” Kaliya Hamlin , who says she introduced Smarr to the Identity community, said of his move to Google: “His spirit and energy to get things done, work across company boundaries and a deep commitment to open standards innovation will be a great asset for Google. One thing that really stands out for me was his innovation with Microsoft on the Portable Contacts API. That idea originated at the Data Sharing Workshop seeking to make progress on what was possible and within six months under his leadership it was complete.” OpenID leader Scott Kveton said this announcement is just the beginning. “That’s great news,” he told us, “and just the first of more to come I hear. It’s going to be down to Google, Microsoft and Facebook. They are hiring all of the people building the open web. I’ll be curious to see what kind of impact it has.” Smarr photo by Adactio . Discuss

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Google Hires Open Web Leader to For Social Initiatives

This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk . Now, we’re seeing reports – and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website – that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain’t so! More interestingly, is the site’s removal an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what? Sponsor We received an email from a Plurk co-founder Amir Salihefendic this morning calling MSN China’s Juku an obvious counterfeit . The proof is in the pudding. And the screenshots. And the source code: Currently, the Microsoft microblog site reads something along the lines of “We regret to inform you that the service is temporarily not available due to system maintenance. Please visit the site again later. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Perhaps they ought to be apologizing to Plurk for the inconvenience. “We were absolutely shocked and outraged,” wrote Plurk rep Dave Thompson, “when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft’s new offering had with Plurk… “We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms.” Microsoft has issued this press release that passes the buck on to an unnamed third-party contractor. Is it likely that the Microsoft executives in charge of producing the microblog were a) unaware of Plurk’s existence and design to the extent that they wouldn’t recognize a clone as such and b) that they didn’t simply point at Plurk and tell their vendors to “make us one of those”? Having had some experience in both startup development processes and corporate application deployment, I personally know very well that a (literally) criminal amount of IP theft goes on every day in Silicon Valley and around the world. Most of the time, the offending parties are operating under the belief that they won’t get caught. And a great deal of the time, they’re not caught. We must, however, applaud Microsoft’s taking the site down to investigate the matter rather than being defensive or litigious. Still, the software giant should be accepting more accountability for the attempted theft that was conducted in its name and under the auspices of its brand. What do you think? Who is to blame in this situation? Cast your vote below, and tell us what you really think in the comments. How Do You See the MSFT/Plurk Situation? ( polls ) Discuss

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Microsoft Caught With Hand in Plurk’s Cookie Jar?

Innovative real-time document collaboration software company AppJet, makers of Etherpad , has been acquired by Google. TechCrunch broke the news and AppJet promptly confirmed it. AppJet was started by ex-Googlers, got a YCombinator investment (you know, that firm that invests in college kids from around the country) and will now close down its own product to work on Google Wave. What a cynical bore. Here’s the new formula, meant only to tease users with innovation and ultimately enrich a select few Valley darlings: Sponsor Be a smart computer scientist Get a job at Google Leave Google, create startup Use your Google resume to get high profile Silicon Valley backing Build something cool, win some fans Sell to Google Tell Silicon Valley insider press about sale Kill product, break a few hearts, get absorbed again by Google but with millions of dollars in your pocket Work on less interesting Google product… Repeat, if you can get away with it. See also: AppJet’s EtherPad: The Demo That Ate the Company Some people don’t go right back to Google, they go to Facebook or Twitter. You thought FeedBurner had a lot of potential? It’s an ad network now, its founders have nice houses and work on other things or in other places. FriendFeed was cool, founded by ex-Googlers who are now at Facebook and say that FriendFeed is actually too sophisticated for the users of their new Sugar Daddy’s software. Check out the Etherpad company blog post about the deal. They didn’t even pretend to be sorry about closing the service. They didn’t thank any community of users for help along the way. They just said the deal is done, here’s what’s happening to the money you paid, now get out. Maybe Google Wave will change the world, maybe it won’t. It’s hard for a person who loves startups and innovation not to feel a little toyed with by this kind of drama though. Discuss

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Etherpad Goes to Google – Just Another Silicon Valley Soap Opera