KillerStartups, or rather its overarching company Startups.com Networks, has been in the news lately. First, they picked up Startups.com in a killer deal, next thing you know they’re launching their own web applications (Twingr). Now, they’re introducing the strangely named but quite useful Dataopedia, which is meant to serve as an information resource for websites.
It’s actually very useful, even if the idea isn’t exactly new (Quarkbase, for example, is very similar if not exactly alike). Just as you would use our own Crunchbase for information about companies, Dataopedia gives you a run-down of all the data it can find about a website you provide an URL for (including Crunchbase data, in fact). The web service aggregates data from dozens of sources in combination with a number of public APIs.
It’s valuable to have all this information in one place, and it’s plenty: expect data about traffic (arguably from the poorest source available, Alexa, although there are embedded graphs from Compete and Quantcast too), screenshots, names of people involved, WHOIS information, Google PageRank, multimedia links and embeds, jobs, office locations, and so on.
The web service comes with a nice set of features that make it easy for you to fetch data the way you choose. Send a website URL to a custom e-mail address and you’ll receive a reply in HTML format with all the information about that website. Browsing on a smartphone? Dataopedia has mobile versions that can be consulted with most devices. Firefox user? Get the bookmarklet, add a custom searchbox or install the add-on (coming soon). And my personal favorite: send a Twitter message to @dataopedia with a URL and you’ll get a tweet back with a link to the appropriate Dataopedia entry.
Dataopedia, you’ve got yourself a fan.
