Today we launched a new release of RivalMap. The new release focuses on better organization and presentation of information, and makes it easier to manage profiles on competitors and their products. A lot of these changes were made in anticipation of a very exciting feature launch we'll be announcing in a few weeks - a news engine that automatically tracks information about your competitors and your industry.

Here's a tour of a few of the improvements that are now available:

New dashboard layout

The first major change was to the dashboard. The improved layout makes new and popular information easier to find by focusing more on the content itself than the activities around it. We now put the title and description front and center as opposed to a summary of the activity that occurred. As a result, it's now a lot easier to scan and browse what's new, recently popular, and your own starred items.

It's also easy to identify items that you have not read or have been updated or commented on since you last viewed them. These items now have highlighted icons and bold titles on the Dashboard (and elsewhere as always).

More intuitive navigation in workspaces

The organization of content types in RivalMap has been rearranged. We created a Profiles tab which organizes profiles of Competitors, Products, and optionally Customer Segments. We also moved Concerns out to have its own tab. This organization makes managing profiles on competitors, as well as on your own company, a bit more intuitive than it was before.

Redesigned profiles for competitors and their products

The actual profiles for competitors, products, and customer segments were redesigned as well. The new changes to the profile section make it easier to add information to a profile since you can now add products, concerns, clippings, and notes inline directly to a profile, without being taken to another page. We are also trying to promote the Wiki section more now as an actual wiki page, where multiple people can contribute and organize key information about a competitor (we have examples in the FAQ). The two screen shots below compare the old and new versions of the profile.

Here is what the old profiles used to look like:

Here is a new profile:

Better filtering for Clippings and Notes

We've greatly improved the way Clippings and Notes can be filtered by tags. Before, Clippings and Notes could only be filtered by a tag cloud of a fixed size. Now, you can switch between list and cloud views of tags, and use the slider to control how many tags you want to see (ranging from all tags to only a few of the most popular). You can also now filter clippings and notes by profiles in the same way as labels, whereas before you had to go to a profile directly.

And more...

There are a host of other changes included in the new release. For instance, to fix some issues with very wide matrices that included many competitors or products, we gave the comparison matrix the full width of your browser and allowed it to scroll. We've also added an intro tab for new users, which they can hide at any time. The intro is an nice way of helping new users get started and learn how to contribute to your RivalMap accounts.

We are very excited about all of the new changes, and hope they're useful for you. Let us know what you think, and thanks for your support!