Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. Over the past several weeks, the developers here at TechCrunch have been working on some high-priority improvements and upgrades for our entire network of sites, in addition to CrunchBase. As a result, we haven’t been able to give CrunchBase the attention and support that it needs and deserves.
The good news is that we’re nearing a point where we have put a lot of the other more pressing issues to rest and will soon be able to focus on improving CrunchBase - and trust me, no one is more excited about that than we are! Thanks for your patience while we get to that point. In the short-term, the API is back alive and well (and actually has been for some time now).
Some of the exciting things on the horizon include a redesign of the site layout, better ways for users outside of TechCrunch to contribute (and get credit for contributing), and more refined ways to interact with the raw data that powers CrunchBase. Have suggestions for features you’d like to see in the future? Leave them here in the comments, or join the CrunchBase Google Group.
And I’ll send a TechCrunch t-shirt to the first commenter to identify the reference in the title of the post.
Monty Python?
we have a winner
DM me on @andrewpbrett with a mailing address and a size.
done. thx
Thanks for the t-shirt
http://twitter.com/webjay/status/4986586530
*employees/family members excluded from the t-shirt deal. also pets, sorry laguna.
that sucks, cause i actually know the answer.
Ok - I’ll get my questions in whilst someone from crunchbase is at the door listening….
1: the crunchbase API does not send gzpped responses - this means the data returned can be huge (multiple megabytes from a single request)
2: requesting a list of companies returns 24,000 companies. there is no paging of results, there is no COUNT and OFFSET for paging, there is no sorting or filtering. Combined with issue #1 this means that navigating crunchbase is less than practical.
Thanks dd - we’ll take a look at those. I’m assuming #2 also refers to requests to the API?
yes, the api needs compression, paging, sorting and filtering. it’s hard to do anything useful without this stuff.
Also it would be good to be able to select companies or people alphabetically.
It would be great for some of us non-developer / blogger types if you would create some Yahoo Pipes of CrunchBase so we can embed different views of the data lists in our blog. Either that or some additional widgets that would let us define different listing views of startups (kind of like what areastartups.com is doing with your data, but widgetized so any blog site can do it).
Also, if there is any way to “widgetize” the submission form, that would be a welcome item that other startup blogs could incorporate as well.
How long does it typically take for a submission to go through? We submitted a profile on Monday and haven’t seen anything hit the base yet. Thanks!
Hi Rich - It looks like KwiClick has been approved. Check out http://www.crunchbase.com/company/kwiclick. It’s just not showing up in the search results right now; we are still working out a few kinks from the server migration and the search index is one of those things. Will be fixed shortly. Thanks.
I was hoping you could assist me. My son left behind some items at Tech Crunch yesterday, and I thought you might know how to contact someone about things in the lost and found pile. The item wasn’t huge or vastly expensive, but it did mean a lot for my girlfriend to have the gift to give. I still have the receipt to prove the purchase.
Thank you for yoru time.
You can contact me on twitter - lauraburleson
Any updated word on new improvements for CrunchBase?