Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic’s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com against 7.2M on Typepad.com, and internationally 97.8M vs. 16.8M. Here’s the Compete graph (which only measures US traffic):

And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases.

The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.

Also up for 2009 is better security. Their most recent release, 2.6.1, was an optional update (no security patches), which is a nice departure from their previous, critical ‘dot’ releases. WordPress has received a lot of flack for this recently: they were given a 2008 Pwnie for Mass 0wnage for numerous vulnerabilities that led to mass hacking.

Today we’re excited to announce a free, open, and easily-accessible API for all data included in CrunchBase, our tech company database. It is available immediately to all developers.

Since we relaunched the property five months ago, we’ve focused on accumulating and structuring the world’s most useful data about technology. And we’ve worked to make this data available in a variety of ways. For example, we’ve aggregated funding rounds and acquisitions, and we’ve built out maps and advanced search. This next step – opening up our data completely so that anyone can use it however they want – is not only logical but central to our mission as well.

The CrunchBase API is read-only and uses JSON for output. There are no developer accounts to sign up for and no throttling of requests. Just point your
browser to a special URL like this one (or curl it from the command-line), and you’ll receive pretty-printed JSON of all the data found on a normal page. The data includes company descriptions, geocoded office locations, acquisitions, executive boards, competitors, and much more.

API requests also include the permalinks (URLs) of other entities on CrunchBase that can be used to navigate across the database. While the API is released in beta, we’re versioning it so that integrations won’t break when we make changes.

We are still finalizing our data policies and terms of use, but we’ll be publishing all content under the Creative Commons Attribution License or something very similar, which means third parties are free to use it with attribution and a link back to CrunchBase. We’ve also made available some CrunchBase images (logos, iPhone icons, etc) for those who want to acknowledge us more visibly.

We’re really excited to see how the API gets used, so please let us know what you come up with.

You can follow CrunchBase on Twitter for updates about the API and other features (or just to give us a shout-out). We’ve also started a CrunchBase Blog where we’ll post regularly. And if you hate unstructured data as much as we do, come join us: we’re looking for a talented Ruby hacker.

Update: We’ve implemented several new features for the API: see the CrunchBase blog post here.

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.

As Ruby on Rails devotees converge upon RailsConf 2008 (and the simultaneously held un-conference CabooseConf), performance startup FiveRuns is launching TuneUp, a “social” debugging tool for Rails applications.

The TuneUp plugin tells you specifically where a RoR app is running slowly. If you’ve coded a few ridiculously inefficient database queries, it’ll point out just which ones.

But debugging is not always so simple, so TuneUp does something sorely needed in a world dominated by Google searches for programming answers. A reporting mechanism sends your reports to TuneUp’s site for review by others. Each report, or “run”, contains your complete Rails configuration, the entire execution path of a request, and the overall execution time. When you publish these runs, other programmers and team members can diagnose your problems and offer potential fixes.

TuneUp has the potential to get rid of long posts on Ruby forums detailing programmers’ configurations, exact SQL queries, etc. Over time (if FiveRuns structures it correctly), TuneUp may form a great pool of knowledge with common programming issues and bugs – and their answers.

FiveRuns belongs in the quickly growing category of Rails applications supporting other Rails applications. New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard are others in the category that have recently raised big venture rounds. FiveRuns itself has raised $9 million total from Austin Ventures.

See the video below for a screencast of TuneUp.

We’ve been analyzing historical TechMeme data to dig a little deeper than the leaderboard information on the site that shows top blogs over the trailing 30 days. Mark McGranaghan and I are slicing the data in a number of ways and will publish it shortly on CrunchBase.

For now we thought we’d show a teaser – below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 until today. The data isn’t 100% perfect as we’ve been grabbing it only once per hour, so a headline that was up for less than one hour may not be counted. But in terms of tracking the most popular bloggers, the data is meaningful. Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Clarification: This list doesn’t take into consideration authors who write for multiple publications.

Full list is below:

Read More

Last night, Google announced App Engine, a hosted web application platform. We’ve now tested the service directly by writing and deploying a test application called appengine.crunchbase.com—a HotorNot popularity contest for startups. Our experience with building and launching an app is below.

Google promises developers two things with App Engine: to reduce the time from writing code to deploying it on a web server, and to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure. We decided to write a simple app on the platform, deploy it, and get some traffic to really see how easy App Engine is.

Getting Started

Looking at the developer documentation, App Engine boasts a powerful API. The platform comes with a Python scripting runtime, static file serving capabilities, easy and tight integration with Google user accounts and email services (obviously a big play), simple access to a powerful persistence engine with queries and transaction support (aka a really good database), near real-time site monitoring and statistics, and the promise of consistent high performance and essentially linear scalability.

Despite its potential power and underlying sophistication, App Engine was surprisingly easy to get started with. Now, being Ruby on Rails guys, the fact that the only currently supported language is Python was a bit humbling. Still, the SDK provided by Google proved dead simple. Our first application was contained within a single Python script, making the path the code was taking to produce responses very clear. We incrementally added features: first accepting input from the users through forms, then storing and retrieving that data using the provided persistence API, and finally breaking out the user-facing web page code into a proper Django template.

The App

The web app we came up with is super-simple, shamelessly self-promoting, and easily game-able. It’s a one-page voting site using company logos slurped in from CrunchBase, our main project. The app has only two requests: one for rendering the page, the other for recording a vote (one GET, one POST request). The first real issue was getting our initial data, some URLs and names, into the database. While we later found that Google provides a slick bulk-update tool, we got going with a simple action that manually parsed our comma-separated values into the database. Another thing we wanted from the service was it to be served from our own domain. By default, Google hosts all App Engine projects on your-project.appspot.com (think blogspot), but they do offer domain services through Google Apps, which was pretty painless to setup if you just want App Engine functionality.

Deployment

The SDK provides a server that emulates the App Engine platform, making it possible to easily develop applications locally that will later deploy to Google’s cloud. Once we had a presentable first app coded up and tested locally, we deployed the app to Google’s server easily from the command line. This was particularly compelling; we’ve spent hours or even days deploying web apps to comparatively trivial servers.

Overall, the process from sign-up to deployment took about 4 hours, with the vast majority of that figuring out what we wanted to do and remembering how to do things like sort arrays in Python (we also spent an embarrassing 15 minutes on some poorly formatted hidden HTML fields). The rapid prototyping of the app and the ease of deployment is clearly the real power of App Engine right now. The scalability of App Engine is exciting but elusive; most apps won’t need it for a while. It’ll also be interesting to see how truly scalable it is, considering the linear scaling efforts on Amazon EC2. The redundancy and ease of deployment should be the immediate attraction for developers.

Try our app out: appengine.crunchbase.com.

Mark McGranaghan took the lead on coding for the site and contributed heavily to this article.

Update: Looks like our app was a little bit too popular:

Update #2: Back up now. Great success!

Scalr is a recently open-sourced framework for managing the massive serving power of Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. While web services have been using EC2 for increased capacity since Fall 2006, it has never been fully “elastic” (scaling requires adding and configuring more machines when the situation arises). What Scalr promises is compelling: a “redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling” network, or a nearly self-sustainable site that could do normal traffic in the morning, and then get Buzz’d in the afternoon.

The Scalr framework is a series of server images, known dully in Amazon-land as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), for each of the basic website needs: an app server, a load balancer, and a database server. These AMIs come pre-built with a management suite that monitors the load and operating status of the various servers on the cloud. Scalr can increase / decrease capacity as demand fluctuates, as well as detecting and rebuilding improperly functioning instances. Scalr is also smart enough to know what type of scaling is necessary, but how well it will scale is still a fair question.

Those behind Scalr believe open-sourcing their pet project will help disrupt the established, for-pay players in the AWS management game, RightScale and WeoCeo. Intridea, a Ruby on Rails development firm, originally developed Scalr for MediaPlug, a yet-to-launch “white label YouTube” with potentially huge (and variable) media transcoding needs. Scalr was recently featured on Amazon Web Service’s blog.

I’d argue that Scalr makes Amazon EC2 significantly more interesting from a developer’s standpoint. EC2 is still largely used for batch-style, asynchronous jobs such as crunching large statistics or encoding video (although increasingly more are using it for their full web server setup). Amazon for their part is delivering on the ridiculously hard cloud features, last week announcing that their EC2 instances can have static IPs and can be chosen from certain data centers (should really improve the latency). But for now, monitoring and scaling an EC2 cluster is a real chore for AWS developers, so it’s good to see some abstraction.

Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation is rumored to be in the $200 million range. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish an office in NYC (they are based in San Francisco). This is Yelp’s fourth round of funding since their founding in 2004.

Yelp is also boasting some impressive stats: 8.3 million uniques in the past 30 days and over 2.3 million reviews (with the 1 million mark being reached on May 2007) (these are internal Google Analytics stats that the company shared with us). Yelp is in a competitive space with InsiderPages (acquired by Citysearch), and YellowBot. The real competition, though, will eventually be Google Local and Yahoo Local.

With this latest round, DAG joins previous investors Max Levchin ($1 million, Summer 2004), Bessemer Venture Partners ($5 million, Q4 2005), and Benchmark Capital ($10 million, Q4 2006). The company has now raised a total of $31 million. Revenues are rumored to be sub $10 million/year.

Instapaper is a cool new service taking bookmarks back to basics. If you come across some websites that you want to read but are too busy to do so, you can click on an Instapaper browser bookmarklet and then return to the Instapaper website later to read them. Think of it as Del.icio.us stripped of any tagging or social features.

Instapaper is a side project of Marco Arment, lead developer at Davidville, which produces the very popular micro-blogging service Tumblr. Here is Marco’s premise for the site:

You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.

You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.

Instapaper has a very simple design; you don’t even need a password or email address to use it. When logged into Instapaper, your links are sorted into three groups: Unread, Recently Read, and Recently Skipped. Buttons on the side help you sort links between the groups. Clicking one of the ‘Unread’ links automatically pushes a site down into the ‘Recently Read’ feature.

Instapaper also plays nice with the iPhone, featuring an optimized interface and the now-obligatory customized web clip.

We’ve covered two other similar bookmarking services recently: WebMynd and ControlC.

[ via John Gruber ]

EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For EveryBlock, it boils down to three types of information: geographically-relevant news and blog entries, civic information, and “fun from across the web.”

“Hyperlocal” is the buzz-word for this service. Among the data aggregated are geo-tagged images from Flickr, lost/found items from Craigslist, and cafe reviews from Yelp. While EveryBlock aggregates plenty of data from web services such as these, it’s particularly focused on surfacing data managed by the government: liquor licenses, restaurant inspections, and crime reports for example.

To get a taste of EveryBlock’s power, you can check out a map of all photos taken recently in Downtown San Francisco, a list of the vehicles stolen in Chicago, or even a log of the graffiti recently cleaned up in Brooklyn. While EveryBlock does not yet provide an API, RSS feeds for specific neighborhoods are available.

The team of four behind EveryBlock is led by Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the popular Python framework Django. Holovaty is also behind chicagocrime.org, a “freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.” EveryBlock is funded by a $1.1M, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a competition for making local news more easily obtainable.

EveryBlock competes directly with Outside.in. Yahoo’s OurCity, while still beta and only covering cities in India, has many similar features as well. Also see YourStreet.