947 companies in 43 categories part 2: The crowded marketing tech landscape comes alive

Remember Scott Brinker’s massive marketing technology infographic, which attempted to show the massive growth of the marketing technology landscape? Brinker showed how the industry grew from perhaps 100 companies in 2011 to 350 a year later, to a massive 947 at the beginning of 2014.

Now that static document is coming alive. And growing.

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Brinker has partnered with VBProfiles to turn his listing into a dynamic, continually updating matrix of the mar-tec ecosystem, which marketing professionals and industry watchers can use to track and analyze news, mergers, investments, key people, and announcements, all in once place.

(Full disclosure: Venturebeat has an ownership stake in VBProfiles — a collaborative effort between VentureBeat and Spoke Intelligence. Spoke CEO Philippe Cases is also chairman of VentureBeat’s board.)

“VBProfiles helps managers, salespersons, investors, and research professionals make better decisions by providing a contextual understanding of their industry,” Spoke Intelligence CEO Philippe Cases told me via email. “The Spoke Network lets users track an ecosystem at an affordable cost. It provides information such as the latest product announcements, funding announcements, acquisitions, new hires, and more.”

Essentially, the service incorporates thousands of data sources to track everything that’s going on in an industry — in this case marketing technology — and provides a summary to subscribers in a single daily email. It also allows you to view the industry in aggregate, see all the funding and where it’s going, and slice and dice the data.

In one example, Cases said, a headhunter assembled a list of the top 50 VPs of marketing in an industry, then used that as his top prospect list for a new position. Others use the tool to track competitors’ movements or just to get an overall ongoing feel for the big trends in their industries.

Brinker, who is now tracking more than 1,000 companies, says there’s more value now than in the original infographic.

“Our graphical landscape diagram now becomes dynamically searchable, continually updated, and connected with the depth of VentureBeat’s company and investor databases,” he said in a statement. “I think many industry professionals will appreciate the transparency, access, and insight this brings to this growing space.”

The data comes from a variety of sources, Cases said.

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60 percent of it is aggregation from news sites like VentureBeat, plus press releases and personal blogs. Another 20 percent is crowdsourced by Spoke Intelligence’s own users adding their data or others’ data to the system. And the final 20 percent is manually curated data — in fact, VB Profiles employs seven people full-time to sort through, analyze, and add the most high-impact news to the site.

“All of our funding data is being curated,” Cases says.

Once you subscribe to Brinker’s index, named Chief MarTec after his popular blog, you get a continual stream of news and updates via daily emails. You can customize the list — or only subscribe to a portion of it, like marketing environments or backbone platforms. And you can pick curated slices of other ecosystems as well, Cases said.

“We have 300 different public landscapes or markets, covering among others Mobile, Big Data, Sales, and of course Marketing Technology.”

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The new index is available immediately.