Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.
Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.
We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.
Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date.
Apture
Apture is a startup trying to bring “depth to the web” with contextual popups that require no browser plugin. The product’s blog integration provides a very visual and intuitive way of navigating CrunchBase entries. Here are some examples (click on the little book icons to the left of the links): YouTube, FriendFeed and Evan Williams. Also, check out this video they compiled:
Zemanta
Zemanta, a blogging enhancement tool that launched back in March, recently integrated CrunchBase so that publishers can easily slurp in extra information like company logos into their posts.
Zemanta’s product integrates closely into blogging platforms such as WordPress, and it helps to semantically link up parts of your post with sites from around the web (CrunchBase now included). These guys have been on our case (and rightly so) to release an API for a couple of months now, so it’s great to see their implementation go live. They even offer their own API which takes plain text as input (say, a blog post), and spits out correctly disambiguated CrunchBase entities.
You can check out a demo of their product here.
Flash CrunchBase
Nicolás Parziale has created a very cool flash app inspired by They Rule that visualizes the graph of connections throughout CrunchBase. You can start with a company (such as Digg, shown below) and then flesh out different parts of the graph with your mouse. You can even input any two companies, causing the app to crawl the web and visually display all of the connections between the two.
The Flash CrunchBase app is really impressive. I just waited 20 minutes clicking on companies and dragging their employees across my monitor like puppets.
I know, isn’t it? Total time suck. Did you try the connections functionality?
It’s always interesting to see what developers do with an API that provides a wealth of information.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank HENDRICKSON!!!!1 for our lovely new CrunchBase API logo.
I just reviewed a site that used the crunchbase API as well called QuarkBase.
A little rip off on the name, but it’s a cool little mashup for site information.
yeah that Flash app is awesome.
Hi,
Henry thanks for the mention!
Zemanta hopes to provide gateway from text to structured world of information via the API. And I hope we can get the CB-Wikipedia equivalencies working soon
Also wrote a post about what is really tricky when autolinking http://www.zemanta.com/blog/ze.....nch-again/
Oh and for others: we are always taking ideas on what to integrate next!
Bye
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
Wow. You guys just saved me a ton of effort! I’ll be implementing Apture and the Flash app as part of an effort at Sensidea.com soon!
Thanks,
Jaafer
IT’S too bad that crunchbase kind of sucks. sorry, but it looks like it was built with a kid and a typewriter.
I actually wonder if Crunchbase API’s can potentially help bloggers boost their search engine rankings , just by having the widget code on blogs and websites…
http://www.myspace.com/sophisticatedndetermined
Congrats to Mike and the team at TC for the awesome numbers! It’s great to compete with top guys like that.
Gonzalo
P.S. AMAZING flash app!
This post describing some of the uses of the CrunchBase API looks quite interesting. Thanks for creating the API and making it available. The way Apture has used it, seems like a good idea. Will check out the API in more detail …
- Vasudev
Now, I am also thinking about ways to integrate CrunchBase data with our site PressReleasePoint.Com
Hey Henry,
Ditto here from the team at Apture. Thanks for the post, we just announced the new CrunchBase functionality on the Apture blog along with some other cool examples of how it can be used to tie together company PowerPoint presentations, interviews with founders, and CrunchBase profiles. I’m truly excited by the ways journalism about entrepreneurship and technology companies in Silicon Valley can be enriched with CrunchBase’s wealth of resources.
http://blog.apture.com/2008/8/.....nch-twice/
Cheers,
Tristan
Co-Founder of Apture
Hey guys!, thanks for this amazing feedback!
I’m really happy to see my work on TC !!!
The new link for the app is: http://nparziale.googlepages.com/killerflashapp
Thanks!!