It took more than 8 hours of manual work to get the Seattle Startup Index for the month of December/2008 ready. This is a long story and I won't spend too much time on it. The good news is that the Index is here and we do have some pretty amazing changes.
First of, there is a company called Bluekai that has jumped to #2 on the index. The issue comes from the fact that Compete and Alexa data for Bluekai are extremely different. Bluekai uses some kind of web-page tagging to track users behavior, and clearly should not have been tracked by Compete as real unique visitors. Circumventing this kind of issue is too hard and for now Bluekai will appear as the #2 startup in Seattle. They certainly got a lot of progress, including funding, but it doesn't justify them being at the current position. However, we are not changing our methodology (for now) to circumvent this one case.
Smilebox is the biggest winner of December/08. They moved 4 positions into #3. Probably a lot of people creating collages for the holiday season. Moving a few positions on the top 10 is much harder than moving dozens of positions on the top 100. Hats off to Smilebox. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it right.
Now, there are some startups that just keep moving, moving, moving, but since they are growing "organically", you don't see a big jump from month to month and they never get mentioned here. Which is unfair to them. This month I'd like to highligh Feedjit. Month over month, Feedjit is moving 2 positions, then 4, than 6, than another 4. Keep up the good work.