• Emerging phase: when the first companies in this segment are founded and perhaps receive small amounts seed funding.
• Evolving phase : when the segment is fairly well defined with some companies beginning to receive a or b round fundings.
• Mature phase : when the segment has well established leaders, is receiving late stage fundings and has seen some consolidation with companies being acquired or shutting down.

If you are enterpreneur investigating a market entry, looking to raise money or exploring a exit, you would want a have this big picture in mind so that you could tailor your narrative accordingly. And if you are investor researching a opportunity, the big picture is critical for making the right call.

In this post, we will look at News Aggregators' this segment has been around for a while and has seen some consolidation.

You begin by gathering data about the companies that belong to the segment. You could do this using keyword searches or by searching for and adding specific companies. Once you have done this, Semgel automatically organizes all this data and creates a set of standard views or reports.

One of these views is a table of all the key milestones in the journey of the startup. You can filter/sort this table to look at earliest foundings or fundings of companies.

Further, to get a better sense of the time interval between events, you can visualize these events as a timeline. You should now be able understand how the segment emerged, evolved and possible matured ' starting with foundings, going on to seeing fundings and perhaps ending with some acquisitions.

However, if there are a large numbers of events, it would still be difficult to quickly get the big picture. What would be ideal is to simple see a count of each type of event distributed across time. This can be created by exporting the table as a csv file and visualizing it as a pivot table.

If you have chosen a segment that is reaching maturity, you should clearly see three humps ' foundings, fundings and acquisitions which align with the three phases for this segment.

As an entrepreneur or investor you would gain but not only studying your own segment but looking at the evolution of other segments from which you can get a sense of the time taken for a segment to take a definitive shape.

You can also learn more about Semgel by going here or just signup to try it out now.

The vast majority of these companies are startups. And the most valuable data that is available about them is their journey so far ' their founding, fundings and exit. The chart below shows these milestones along with their associated data.

There are thousands of companies in crunchbase which have the above data

If you are an entrepreneur or a investor, you can analyze this data to gain insights into

• the evolution of a segment : when did we begin to see the first companies in this segment? what was the most active period of fundings? have there already been successful exits?
• the investments in a segment : what is the total funding for the segment, what has been the avg size of funding for a given round? who are the top investors in this segment?
• investor portfolios : distribution of a investor’s portfolio by category/geography/ stage etc. Success rate? Co-investors?
• overall investment trends : what the distribution of investments by sector or geography and stage in the last quarter? most active investors? Biggest deals?

These insights play a critical role in making decisions about market entry, fund raising and more. And with Semgel, you could get these very insights in a matter of minutes!

You can learn more about Semgel here or you can signup to try it out now. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog or follow us on twitter.

The Crunchbase website allows users to search for and quickly look up detailed profile pages for individual companies. This is perfectly adequate for the casual user who just wants to know a bit more about a company.

However, if you happen to be a entrepreneur looking to raise money or a investor scouting for investment opportunities, you typically need to gather data about a bunch of related companies and analyze the same. Semgel was designed to meet this very need.

Semgel is a web application that enables you to quickly gather and analyze data about Crunchbase. With a just a few clicks, Semgel can create a seamless database of just the companies you are interested in. You can then go on to analyze this database in a intuitive manner.

What’s more, Semgel automatically creates a set of standard views such as consolidated investment tables, activity in the sector, key people etc which would be immediately useful for you.

In future blog posts, we will show how you can use Semgel to gain insights, discover opportunities and make informed decisions faster. If you are a enterpreneur, investor or marketeer in the technology sector, we would encourage you to follow this blog via our rss feed or twitter.

You can also learn more about Semgel by going here or just signup to try it out now.