We have a different name for it: keep tabs on money. You may be an insider of an industry because are involved with one of the players for that stage. Let’s say in Mobile Ads, you are part of Omniture, or Google Ads. Is that enough ? What if you have skin in the game, will it change the perspective ?
We follow the mobile space in several industries and came recently into publishing several applications (GPS Fuel Log / Log+, Truck Maintenance and others in progress). As one of us has been involved with fleet track industry/fleet management for some time, it came natural to fill in some gaps he thought of.
But more than having a job in the industry we realize the stake of the “industry insight” is totally upped when you have money captured in that sector/industry. You are interested to a different level not by your companies efforts but by all players moves. The MBA jargon of five forces becomes dear to you (not necessarily in the formal format). This is one of the main differences between US and other mobile app companies out there: we keep tabs of the players in the industry AND have money invested with (s0me of ) them.
As an example, for fleet tracking industry, we are looking at (the order is totally significant and list not complete):
- TomTom
- Calamp
- Trimble
- Fleetmatics
- Fleetcore
- Shaw Tracking
- BSM Wireless (Canada)