Local startup tech firm outdoes Twitter

SARASOTA — A Sarasota-based startup that offers a digital matchmaking service for businesses, opprtunity.com, picked up several kudos in June from well-read tech blogs and websites.

In fact, one website, Mattermark, ranked opprtunity.com in sixth place worldwide for hottest startup of the week in a report posted June 27. Mattermark.com's weekly momentum rankings look at the growth rate of a company's online footprint, not total traffic. Opprtunity.com, with its sixth-place ranking, even outscored Twitter, which was in 19th place for growth rate. DuckDuckGo, (duckduckgo.com) a search engine that promises more privacy and less spam, was the top-ranked company.

Opprtunity.com also picked up positive press recently from KillerStartups.com, a web portal that offers entrepreneurs information, tools and training. One blogger on the site, in comparing Opprtunity.com to LinkedIn, wrote that “if you're feeling a little worn out by the behemoth that everyone's favorite networking site has become and want something a bit more effective, it's time you checked out Opprtunity.com.”

Local entrepreneurs Janis Krums and Bill Jula founded the business earlier this year. The model is to connect and match people with like-minded business needs and backgrounds to each other using their LinkedIn profiles. The site is free for now, though eventually there will be a subscription service to receive multiple matches. The company, in addition to the recent press, attended Startup Alley at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 conference in April.