From Mashable: http://mashable.com/2008/03/23/tradevibes-funding/

Wikis seem to be everywhere I look these days.  I keep hearing about people wanting to take the wiki to the masses by sharing information on some data set and allowing the crowd to do the work for you.  TradeVibes is positioning itself to be an invaluable resource for stock market players (hence the “Trade” in the name), but I find it odd that most of the companies listed in the profiles directory are private companies, many with early stage funding.  Further comedic value is provided by the fact that the first company listed in said directory is AboutUs, which could be viewed as a competitive offering.

At least the announcement here is for an angel funding, and there hasn’t been a ton of money put into this thing.  The value of an information store with regard to public market companies is (if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis) inversely proportional to the number of people who know that information.  So, by democratizing the information, the information asymmetry has been removed, and renders the information useless.  More than likely to happen, however, is what can be referred to as the Gilder Effect, whereby companies saw their volatility go bananas (that’s a technical term) whenever Gilder wrote about them in his weekly report.

So what’s the long term value of the product?  CrunchBase has the startup information store cornered, and there are many, many sites for aggregating the public information about companies.  WikiLeak seems to have sprung a leak in its legality, so it’s on its way out - and that information would have had value since the information was of a material, and non-public nature, the key words for insider trading.  Short of becoming yet another message board where pump-and-dumpers can over hype penny stocks, why will anyone come?