For the past several weeks, we’ve been making improvements to CrunchBase to build a more engaging product for the people that drive it – which is to say, “everybody”. Since it was launched, Crunchbase has always been a freely editable repository of information about technology companies. Since February 2008, we’ve received over 100,000 edits from anonymous users in addition to the copious amounts of information that TechCrunch writers funnel to it on a regular basis.
We’re excited to announce that these contributions no longer have to remain unattributed. Starting today, anyone with a Facebook account can sign up for an account on CrunchBase by using Facebook Connect. Edits will still be moderated (after all, this is the Internet we’re talking about here), but users who prove themselves to be trustworthy will, with time, start to see additional privileges associated with their accounts.
All of these edits represent a treasure trove of information, so we’ve also been working on ways to better present the edits as they occur. Visitors to the CrunchBase homepage will now notice a list of recent milestones – a “stream,” if you will – that represents the most recent changes to the database. We’ve filtered out the more trivial edits in an effort to make this the kind of real-time information that even Paul Carr could love. These funding rounds, acquisitions, investments, IPOs, and other major milestones will now also appear on the individual pages that they relate to.
Lastly, since it’s always better to let individuals choose what news they care about, we’re providing a way for people who sign up for a CrunchBase account to see a summary of these milestones only from the products, people and companies that are interesting to them. Logged-in users now have the ability to follow entries in the database and have relevant updates appear on their home page (sound familiar?).
If you are a developer and want to use CrunchBase data, we’ve got a very open and flexible API. And make sure to let us know when you build an app that uses CrunchBase data, we like to highlight them.
We hope you enjoy the new features, and are always taking suggestions for ways to make CrunchBase better. And if you like what we’re doing, by all means, be our friend.
Great news! Now, if you can just update the API query capabilities to let us search by office location (or any specific field name) that would really increase its utility!
is there actually any work being done on the crunchbase API?
nothing seems to have changed to a long time.
despite protests that the crunchbase API is “alive, just resting”, it sure does look like Rip Van Winkle.
well, to be fair, we said that CrunchBase as a whole was resting and would be brought back to life, something which has been delivered on. the API in particular has not seen a lot of attention, you are correct, but it’s pretty useful as it stands.
i been having truble with signing on and loosing gifts and now i can’t get on face book…..
i trid to get a facebook but it wont let my do somthing about it right now
We are considering not using crunchbase anymore. Nothing seems to work properly. I don’t know how many times I have tried to add products to our profile only to have everything I add disappear.
So then I get to thinking that perhaps I need to log-in and then my additions will then be taken more seriously, because the information is then coming from the owner of the profile. This never works because the facebook log in never works!
So disappointed and loosing interest, fast.
Hi Nathaniel,
Sorry to hear you’re having trouble with the facebook login. We have seen a small number of accounts have some problems if something goes wrong between our servers and Facebook’s during the setup – I’ve sent you an email to get some more details about what you’re seeing.
As far as the edits go, I’ll talk to the moderators to see what might be going on there.
Thanks for using CrunchBase – I hope we can keep your interest.
-Andy