We’re proud to announce today a slew of new improvements to CrunchBase, our directory for information about the tech startup ecosystem.
Maps
Company and financial organization headquarters are now geocoded and locatable on an interactive map using the Google Maps API.
Say you’re checking out Yelp and want to see just where the company is located and what other startups are nearby. You can click on the [map] link next to Yelp’s address and its headquarters will show up among its 50 closest neighbors, including Kongregate the building over and Slide just a few blocks away.
Furthermore, you can now browse by City, State, Zip Code, or Country. Or choose an arbitrary location and map all of the results within a certain range (e.g., all the startups within 10 miles of Sydney, the 165 companies in Manhattan, or the VCs on Sand Hill Road).
We are also now tracking multiple offices for some of the larger organizations (see Sequoia Capital).
Advanced Search
Our new advanced search capabilities really capitalize on CrunchBase’s structured wiki format. In addition to simple keyword search, users can now search companies, financial organizations, and people by indicating special criteria to which they want results to conform. Now you can, for example, search for all companies founded after 2004 with at least $50 million in funding that have been featured on TechCrunch.
What’s great about structured data is that it’s so easily aggregated. We have lists for all the funding rounds and acquisitions in CrunchBase, each of which is sortable in various ways.
And with advanced search, you can drill down into specific results - even when geography comes into play. For example, you can make a query for all companies within 5 miles of London that have been acquired since 2004. Or all people under the age of 30 who’ve been a part of successfully acquired companies. We’ll continue to improve our search capabilities, so please leave any requests and suggestions in the comments.
Jobs
We’re now showing CrunchBoard job listings on company pages. You’ll now see, for example, that Digg is hiring. With this additional functionality, and our LinkedIn API integration, we hope CrunchBase will become an ever-more important research tool for job seekers.
Milestones
Milestones is our newest and most experimental feature on CrunchBase. It was inspired by our writing team, which receives many press releases with titles like “Service X hits the 1 Million user mark,” or “Company Y hires new CEO.”
While these news items don’t always make TechCrunch’s front page, we wanted a place to highlight them in CrunchBase, so we created a lightweight data type called Milestones. It’s pretty simple: each milestone has a date, description, and source (if available somewhere on the net).
We hope to create a useful timeline of events for every company and product. Here are some of Twitter’s recent milestones:
And as before, CrunchBase is all about community participation. Not only do we add data to the system ourselves, but we encourage everyone else to contribute as well. Notice any missing or incorrect data? Just hit the “Edit This Page” button in the top-right of any profile page and submit your requisite changes. Companies, financial organizations, and people can also be added from the homepage.
Expect to see more community features soon as work to give contributors a greater presence on the site.
golden.
Great work Henry and Mark
http://www.officesnapshots.com/
I would like the office pics of each startup to be mashed up with your maps like the Google Obama thing was.
Can Henry and Mark do that?
Very nice, when will the new features be available for all the companies on Crunchbase ?
Simon: they’re available to all companies. Let me know if you’re having any issues.
@Chris - very cool suggestion
congrats henry, mark, and mark – looks great
Nice job Henry
We need an API. Maybe there is one but I have not seen it.
An API for all of this would be really cool. Also, doing some basic thematic mapping by changing the icons based on category, company, size, etc. would help users to discern data on the map more easily as well. Red pushpins are bland.
Email me if you want a comp’ed account for our little map icon factory: http://www.cartosoft.com/mapicons
@6, as much as those guys from officesnapshots were jerks to Mike at his house, you may want to consider licensing the content. It would be a great addition to Crunchbase.
That or Mike could simply drag a Digital SLR camera to the startups when he goes to visit and create his own officesnapshots to add to Crunchbase.
Maybe he’s too good for that, or it would be too bothersome for him, I dunno. Just a suggestion.
rokhayakebe: no API _yet_. We hear you.
Andres: cool idea. I’ll look into it.
Greatest TechCrunch product (and best designed).
On a different note, isn’t it time for a TechCrunch redesign? I’m glad I use Google Reader, because I hate looking at the main blog’s current design.
Awesome! One week on the job and my code is already live on the site! That is a personal record.
Does this mean I can keep my job?
Suggestion: Maybe some categorization of milestones? i.e.: number of users, funding received, financial data, annual revenue… It would be very useful for planning similar ventures (to the ones you have in CB), analyzing the market, writing forecasts.
Looks fantastic. Great job!
Great service ! Maybe will be nice if we can vote in the companies.
Arrington hasn’t been heard from in 24 hours. He must be negotiating with his bankers to keep “All Things Y!” above water. Inside sources say that executives might be leaving. We will post as we hear more.
@16
Yes, why not build a user rating system for the startups?
Rob - are you that intern that works here that’s always in the back yard?
Crunchbase should automatically setup a twitter account for each company so that people can follow any changes made to that companies profile. It might be useful / interesting to get automatic updates whenever a company hits a new milestone, is hiring for a new position, relocates offices, new round of funding…etc.
Keep up the great work.
Hi,
Great new feature however my map pointer is a few hundred km’s off, how do you move it?
Thanks,
Gary
beautiful work! any chance you could pull in newsfeeds as well? or a user registration element such that i might track and manage my own subset of data from within the crunchbase?
Very cool. Milestones is a great idea - might be fun if you can overlay them on the traffic graphs too, to see if any milestones affect site activity…
do interns get paid?
Great job but Sequoia Capital & Khosla Ventures are not correctly located on the map, hope this helps,
Mark
Check the map link on this page: http://www.khoslaventures.com/contact.html
Or
http://local.google.com/maps?f.....122.220818
Excellent.
One of the features I have seen useful and personally like is a visual linkage map between people/companies. eg.
Jeff Clavier — (investor) –> Seesmic <– (Board Member) — P Omadiyar
I have seen this previously somewhere (don’t remember the website name), but you get the idea. Rob, you gonna be building this by next week? Right
Indus
Simply Brilliant! The vision is clear with this, this is really going to go somewhere.
I second hat API request!
@Mark Hendrickson & @Chris
I think we should have every startup mashup their location with a video of their own bullet-bend-experiment (shot in their office). That would unleash so much creativity…
By the way, we’re in Downtown SF now. Any fun suggestions for this evening?
Well done!
Now Crunchbase is actually useful.
Don’t let the sidejob of maintaining a thorough database cause you to post articles about uninteresting companies.
Yes:
- Milestones should be mapped on a timeline.
- # of results returned by Google Search for [company name] should be mapped on a timeline - each week
- # of results returned by Google News for [company name]…
- # of results returned by a Blog Search
- # of results returned by Twitter
And other indicators that a company is in the public’s consciousness. If you do this retroactively for startups that were interesting last year, you’ll see the data is revealing.
Looks awesome… Crunchbase rocks!
Michael Arrington - Yeah guess so.
Extreme heat decreases productivity + you have a nice backyard.
When CrunchBase got the makeover there was talk about OSS’ing the CrunchBase code.
Still going down that road?
I joined this community in mybloglog and since this is all about gadgets and everything, will there be a chance that we can have the same festure in our sites one day?
Anyway, CHARMINGFACES would like to thank you for the helpful blogs. We will add you to our techno faves.
Henry Work said…
Our new advanced search capabilities really capitalize on CrunchBase’s structured wiki format. In addition to simple keyword search, users can now search companies, financial organizations, and people by indicating special criteria to which they want results to conform.
Henry Work, it looks to me that your search uses Boolean Information Retrieval Model. Boolean is fine, but it is an old technique first developed in the 1960s for text retrieval but it is inferior compared to modern techniques such as LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which is the state of the art today. In metric for searches, it matters much if the capability for recall (ie, the fraction of the documents that are relevant to the query that are successfully retrieved) is high. LSI has higher recall than Boolean.
If you need to be pointed out about resources (open source APIs, publications) on LSI, then I am happy to point you out in the right direction of where to look.
Great stuff!
I built a track to show this post around (to some colleagues) in a more convenient format (it took me a few minutes in fact). So for those who whant to jog this post and view the links whilst reading the text, be my guests! You can minimise the reader (the botton part with the text) for a better readability…. and as usual simply jog to the end of this track to automatically land back on this post…
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=145
Awesome work Henry and Mark.
@Kayembee - nice work!
Why don’t you post jobs in other countries, especially Asia and Australia?
I love CrunchBase!
I personally use it a lot to do my research and learn more about new start-ups. With the new features, it’s going to be even more useful to track updates (via milestones) and contacts (via maps/etc) .
Can’t wait to see more features to be added in the future. I love the API idea from the comments and perhaps a “graph/chart” feature to give an overview and more meaning to these hefty data.
Keep up the great work!
Best regards,
Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com
About the “graph/chart” feature - It will be nice if it’s more dynamic and users can customize/filter certain metrics/criteria . That will be sweet!
Best regards,
Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com
I am loving the new features. Great.
congrats henry & mark
(only Crunchboard jobs? why not Simply Hired listings as well? or are you aggregating other listings via Crunchboard?)
Crunchbase can do no wrong. 6 Flags!! More Flags….you know the deal.
@gary: if the address is correct, then we’re at the mercy of Google’s geocoding API. Maybe we’ll make lat/long editable directly.
@dave: we’re on it.
@23, anthro: yeah, timelines should be and will be beefed up. I like the idea of measuring ‘hotness’ of a company (though there are plenty of other companies that do it)
@Adam: we’ll see.
@gonzalez: the social media page could use some sprucing up….
@mcclure: just our own board currently.
Crunchbase is a great resource and well organized but why is it that in comparison to other Techcrunch properties, you seem to have a hard time landing sponsors?
See http://www.startupwarrior.com for a better visualization
I like.
I was intrigued to see the number of startups and other companies listed in my hometown of Phoenix - somewhat more than I was expecting. I wish it were easier to organize the list of geographical search results, though. Specifically, I’d like to see TC posts attached to the results, or something similar to offer a sense of the “importance” or weight that each company has.