In-Q-Tel Portfolio Gadget for the CTO
In-Q-Tel is a famous not-for-profit organization created to help bridge the gap between the needs of the US Intelligence Community and advances in commercial technology. In-Q-Tel has attracted some of the best minds in the technology business and has also established a fantastic reputation for finding emerging companies and entrepreneurs with promising ideas.
Enterprise CTOs looking to track emerging technologies should pay attention to In-Q-Tel. To help do that I wrote a Google Gadget that summarizes some of the helpful information In-Q-Tel provides on its website. The gadget uses Dapper.net to “scrape” information from each of In-Q-Tel’s portfolios. This allows for a list of all the companies in one location. I then feed the resulting “Dapp” into my favorite RSS service, Feedburner.com.
If you click on the company name you will be presented with In-Q-Tel’s write up on the company and a link to the company’s URL.
Here is a screen grab of what the gadget looks like:
Thanks to the power of Dapper, now anytime In-Q-Tel makes a change to their portfolio it will be reflected in the gadget’s window.
Please load the gadget in your iGoogle page or any other of your web properties and use it to stay up with these very interesting technologies.
To load the gadget on your iGoogle page click here: Load Gadget on iGoogle
To find a reference to my other gadgets click here: bobsgadgets.com
To learn more about Dapper follow this link: dapper.net
NOTE: Since I’m using several free services here and since there are multiple dependencies throughout, you can expect every once in a while that the gadget will not return a polished display. If that happens to
you, just reload a bit later and all should be well.
I’d appreciate your feedback and any thoughts you have on ways to make this gadget more useful.
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Bob – very nifty and useful gadget. Makes me think that another thing you could do (with Popfly, Dapper, or Pipes… but best with Popfly!) would be to take the same info from several VCs, acknowledging that not all of them list their full portfolio in a timely manner, and chart out the graph over time as some startups get added to portfolios and others dropped… Useful B.I. for some of us
great job!
(I find myself using more exclamation marks all of a sudden…)
Thanks Lewis for the comments. And I very much appreciate the concept for pulling this sort of data from Venture Capital. I have to admit I’m very much a rookie programmer, so I might not be able to throw in the time phased options, but I bet I could pull the right data from multiple VC sites that invest in companies folks like us are interested in and use that result to feed a continuously updated gadget.
Cheers! (or should I say Yahoo!).
Bob Gourley