A Peek At CrunchBase

YAY; those referral links were simply annoying. Could have made it so that at least the FIRST company link wasn’t going to CrunchBase.

And the widgets load very very very slow.

Thank god

yeah, we’re moving it from a dev server now. It will probably break in a few minutes, but this gives our team a good incentive to hurry up and get that new server up and running.

Hey Mike, I really like the look of the widget, but it doesn’t seem to work at all if you’re looking at the site in an RSS reader (due to it using javascript I guess). Any chance that you could use an image or pain text fall back?

Other than that, great work. Is this what you’re advertising for developers for?

This is an excellent feature and much less annoying than those infernal stealth crunchbase links. Looks like crunchbase will become a really valuable tool for the community, good stuff.

actually i think if you linked the company name to their URL, it wouldn’t be that annoying to have a small Crunchbase icon next to it that linked to their listing… however, it’s probably more effective to just show the thumbnail summary paragraph from CB embedded in the post (like you did in the FB story today). i think that’s a better technique, and will make readers more comfortable / familiar with crunchbase data. (and i assume you’ll allow other folks outside TC to embed that thumbnail & link to the CB listing, right?)

anyway, looks like good stuff & keep up the good work. (kudos to Mark & Ben

Nice work Michael, very innovative!

cute post - piss off your users to the point where they are breaking and then move it to a wiki to try to grow the site bigger and sell ads against it - what reason does anyone have to edit your directory after you used all of us for your SEO and traffic building practices? never once responding to how pissed off your readers are.

obviously your plan worked - check alexa for crunchbase - you used shady practices to gain traffic to crunchbase by making users unknowingly go to another site different than the expected site - either internal tc link or company directly - too bad google didn’t penalize.

The widgets should be showing up more quickly now. Sped up the ajax.

Thanks! This was incredibly annoying.

I hate to be the lone dissenter, but I’m not sure I agree that the CrunchBase widget adds to the reading experience. I don’t need a corporate overview of Digg every time I read an article mentioning it — I’m already pretty familiar with it. I could see it maybe being useful when you’re doing a review of a brand-new company, but wouldn’t that be highly redundant with the review itself?

Basically, if it’s not a new company, I don’t need it, and if it is a new company, you should describe it in the body. I do like having the option of going to CruchBase if necessary, though I agree the default link was really annoying.

My vote is to return to the previous, clean design: focus on the new data, not the old.

Douglas - the widget itself is an honest attempt to respond to our readers.

Mike - fking good idea mate

I think the widgets will do well, albeit you might need less posts per page –> the loading time now is massive with these widgets.

Download this widget and see for yourself

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3371

it’s getting more cluttered, I can’t say i like it. it’s bad for your advertisers too

Tcruncher2 - The widgets are not the ones slowing down the page (as far as I can tell). The site’s probably so slow for you because it’s waiting for other components to load. We realize things are bloated generally and will be working to clean things up.

Great idea. But, why only feature companies in CrunchBase that have been featured on TechCrunch.

Why not allow any startup to submit its info into CrunchBase?

The more content, the better. CrunchBase could become the defacto database of startups! Instead of the database of what TechCrunch thinks is worthy.

Just my 2¢.

Logan - we do try to create profiles for every internet company that submits their info to CrunchBase. We may be a little slow at doing this sometimes, but it’s definitely our intention to build CrunchBase up not only with companies we feature but all relevant startups.

Mark –>

http://www.getfirebug.com

Check out Network Activity –> should assist

Cheers

Dude all of you are on it. You guys are writing like developers now! NICEEEEEEEE

Thanks Tcruncher2, but already my weapon of choice.

Thank you! I got bit by the bug a couple of times. I don’t mind the extra vertical space, that’s what scrolling is for.

Nice idea and even nicer intentions. Good going!

Didn’t see an RSS feed for the recently profile companies, so I created one using Dapper:

http://www.dapper.net/services/CrunchBase

Fantastic!

It just hit me, how I frequent this site (avg. 10 times a day) expecting developing news, yet, it never stuck me to expect anything from you guys.

Truly, I’m glad to see you guys are thinking of the TechCrunch’s growth, as much as you are reporting those of others.

Keep up the good work team!

How long does it take for submitted info to appear in CrunchBase? I’ve been featured on this site several times, submitted my info myself, and still have not been added… this was about 4 months ago…

Sorry to post this here, but I didn’t see an email…

I’m in the area affected by the CA Wildfires and I think our local PBS station really deserves some kudos for using Google Maps (over 1.64M views), Twitter (updated every few minutes), and Flickr (for staff and community photos).

There are the ONLY agency that has not been affected by slow servers (unlike every other TV news station, the San Diego Union Tribune, and even the county’s emergency sites)!

http://twitter.com/kpbsnews

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms.....51&z=9

Nick

Good call Michael! Doing this will cut the annoyance while keeping it a top notch resource site. And yes, free is always good! Love the widgets but I hope it doesn’t slow down the loading time of your site (which I must admit is a little slow to load up at times).

Yay! This is rad….and as for the widgets, can we get some of that embed love?

I was just wondering about this last night and a few hours later bam! the solution. Great stuff here at Techcrunch. Reporting bugs on sidebar using Safari, hopefully fixed on version 3 =)

James Thomas - Time varies. We currently have a lot of submissions to go through. What is the name of your company?

Peter - WackyLabs LLC, umbrella for skinnyr.com and formerly jamjunky.com

This is very cool. Should have know about this earlier….

Hmmm…

here is one place where you can find all the TechCrunch startups based on the category and location integrated with Google maps( Still lot to be done thou )

http://webbmaps.com/

Cheers, Nag

that sounds cool. a peer produced data base of start ups. How close are you to releasing this? any idea who you might partner with.

see you in Boston.

James Thomas - I see the submission. It’s on our to-do list, but it might be awhile before we get to it.

Techcrunch is the only site that ADDED a click to get to the information I was looking for in 2007. Poor design or shrewd business move - Either way I am glad they’re gone.

Mike - We might be able to help you with this. We are launching a very powerful new competitor management product that sounds like it could be ideal for crunchbase. Shoot me an email if you want to talk, we are local. We also built competitious.com.

Thank god. Wonderful wonderful ideas.

Crunchbase has been structured in a very easy and user friendly manner.

http://www.meetingflex.com
Social Networking + Videos

I’m one of those people that was annoyed at CrunchBase links being inserted into posts. However, the widgets I like. Good idea!

great idea,, thanks for the post

Thanks Techcrunch - the Crunchbase links were too annoying and the widget looks useful too.

if/when you go for the wiki format you could get VC industry data from it, but you guys hit maybe 1/4 of VC fundings at this point.

Can you make the data available through a simple API as well? For example, I’d like to be able to get the crunchbase data for a specific company. This can enable building very interesting mashups.

@Jon (#23)
Thanks for creating the Crunchbase RSS — that’ll be super useful! Not sure why they don’t have RSS

Hello Techcrunch Team,

is it possible/allowed to add the Widget to a regular Website instead of a Blog?

Thanks

Werd. An API would be nice. It will allow developers to derive bigger picture data, e.g. total funding in a given year, average funding for a particular type of startup…etc etc.

Also, it would be nice to include the valuations of the companies (if they are known as in the case of Facebook).

I’m with #11. I really don’t need to see the crunchbase widget for facebook which probably is 1 in every 5 posts (a bit of an exaggeration, but thats what it feels like).

Maybe instead of a widget towards the bottom of the post you can put a crunchbase icon for those that want to read further.

You guys obviously want to develop this further as it seems that you are sacrificing usability to achieve a goal of popularizing this site. Give it a week or two and all of your users will be nauseated by the widget.

Just giving my own simple THANK YOU. This is much, much more desirable than the click through to CrunchBase. Hopefully other’s will follow suit with something similar, or equally pleasing.

Crunchbase is a nice start for the Web 2.0 space. BTW, VentureDeal is a subscription database for $25/mo and you get 100 free downloads included. It was started for some of the same reasons Michael said that he started CrunchBase - the big database companies charge outrageous sums ($15K per year), since they are aimed at the Venture Capital firms. We cover all technology sectors.

Interestingly enough, even the VCs don’t like paying $15,000 a year for the data…

CrunchBase is a 1-for-1 compy-cat of the Codex I setup over at Betaflow.com, when I started that blog. I don’t own it anymore but at least give credit where credit is due.

Maybe you could add pre-IPO latest-funding-round valuation in addition to the funding so-far figure, where available. Because that would add value to the widget.

Yea, that’s a really brilliant idea I was myself starting to develop, but I can’t compete with Techcrunch. Chapeau!
I’m surprised James from Buzzshout didn’t do something similar before you guys.

Cricketmaster - we’ll definitely consider that. I’m looking at lots of ways to improve the widget right now, so keep the suggestions coming.

Thanks for this - GREAT decision. I was slowly giving up on TC because of that linking policy, now you guys have earned back my respect. Thanks!

Now if you could pullease get rid of those annoying snap preview links as well. I mean really, they’re just too annoying. Nothing wrong with a *regular* link!

Thanks. Crunchbase linking contributed to me unsubscribing from your RSS.

I was one of those that hated the links to crunchbase, so this is a fantastic start. However, the widgets to take up a fair amount of space and as mentioned above, surely detract from the value advertisers get. Also as already mentioned, if you have three posts about Facebook per page, we don’t really need to see three lots of identical information - or information about companies we are familiar with.

A great solution would be to make the widget collapsable, so it just displays the top bar (as it does while loading), allowing you to click it to expand and see the info. It could either load in the background, or load on click (which would get around the annoyingly slow load).

Do you allow companies to update their information?

Will be providing an edit function of some sort for the initial IP address or username that made the submission?

I like the idea of turning up the site into wiki and in addition you are going to add Facebook but not sure how you’re going to keep it non spammy.

Thanks guys.
While CrunchBase is on my bookmarks and love it, it was really annoying to have to go through it to get to the linked site.

Keep up the good work!

Gotta say this widget is truly intrusive. Crunchbase = Clutter!

Hi Michael,
any plan to deportalise the CrunchBase widgets ? (like the ones you add at the bottom of your blog posts), it would be cool to have these on my wordpress blog too, I would just need to select the companies I am talking about in a drop down list and voila : the widget shows the companies details.

Bugs -
When you click on link and it goes to the company overview, the list of compnies on the right side bar disappears, Last updates and user reveiw is overlapping with the ads. When you go back, the state is not maintained that the list goes back to A-M.

Enhancements -
It will be nice to list(search) it by categories. May be you can ask the representative of each company to add a description of the company and choose a category.

You gotta love adblockplus!

@54, see above.

Do you think you could make Crunchbase more searchable? Just an advanced search function that allowed me to search specific fields would be nice - location for example?

Hey,

Will you please please please open up crunchbase via webservices!?? PLEEEAAASSEEE???

I would even help open up CrunchBase for free!

I must say that your organization is keen on listening to its readers. I hold up my glass and make a toast in your name for I only wish others would do the same. Mainly because this will now drive traffic down for your most useful database, but will in turn provide more customer satisfaction. Namely me!

“As of today that policy is being discontinued.”

Thank you!

You might also consider something simple at the start or end of a post like,

CrunchBase: Name of Co., Name of 2nd Co.

But all your ideas for opening up CrunchBase sound great. That’s becoming a really awesome reference tool.

I love it! Please continue posting these widgets!

>>Will you please please please open up crunchbase via webservices!?? >>PLEEEAAASSEEE???

Freebase.com would be perfect for that and we’d be happy to help. We already have some venture-related company info and would be delighted to pool together with CrunchBase on making the best open, free and comprehensive catalog of venture-backed companies… with web services.

Some of the data already there:
http://www.freebase.com/view/v.....ed_company

A sample app flash app built using the Freebase web services:
http://mqlx.com/~jason/VentureSpin/

I think CrunchBase is useful and has lots of good background information on companies. But like everyone else, linking to the Crunchbase record for a company rather than directly linking to the company used to drive me crazy.

Thanks for listening to user feedback and taking an innovative approach to resolve the issue!

I hope this works out for you people!
Uh, would you like a little “funding”?

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Sounds like an awesome plan!

Yep, you’re going to give away what Thomson and Dow Jones charge thousands for. That’s not “disruptive.” It’s dumb.

Interesting site / service. A couple of observations …

1. Nicely designed / laid out … easy to get around, read, etc…
2. How is it different from Killer Startups (http://www.killerstartups.com/)? One thing I appreciate about KS is their commentary about the startup, esp. the competitors section (yes, I see where you all include that, but I gotta search it out) and the “some questions” section.
3. It be nice to include the Deadpool listing, as often times this is as instructive as the successes.
4. As blissfulthinking (65) sez, search would be nice: recent funding in the past xx days / months / years, location (in addition to a gmap mashup), latest round (i.e., find me all “recent” C round funding events), and so on … this list can obviously grow endlessly.

Again, like the site and your plans for it … good luck and have fun working on it … and I foresee using it often. Thanks.

Great idea, but how can I embed the widgets myself, or where can I find the embed codes? Can someone please help? Thanks.