
AOL: Hand Over Crunchbase and Nobody Gets Hurt - pclark
http://bryce.vc/post/4187806633/aol-hand-over-crunchbase-and-nobody-gets-hurt
======
blizkreeg
This post hits the nail on the head. CrunchBase has been a neglected property
for some time now, pretty much due to a lack of resources I think. The
engineers before me did a terrific job on the app but given that TechCrunch
has been and is a fairly small setup + revolving around editorial, CrunchBase
hasn't always received the love it deserves. As an Engineer at TC now, I would
like to chime in.

I joined TechCrunch to work on CrunchBase back in October soon after the AOL
acquisition and became the only non-editorial/sales person in here. My
energies were split across a multitude of things and I found little time to
devote to CB.

Over the past month however, we have hired two more devs, one to work on the
blog network side of things and another who will be working on CrunchBase
full-time along with me.

The frequency of commits has already started to show and we will be pushing
out a number of improvements and features over the next few weeks. Top of the
list is scalability and performance improvement since speed has been a
bottleneck. There are other neat things such as trends/charts and more data
widgets that we'd like to deploy. We are also working on cleaning up data
integrity.

In short, I think you will see noticeable progress on CrunchBase within a few
weeks.

~~~
togasystems
Mobile interface in the works?

~~~
blizkreeg
We didn't consider it so far but will now.

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nikcub
I created Crunchbase within TC. It goes down all the time because every dev TC
had has left, most of us prior to the acquisition. I believe there is a single
person there atm looking after everything, and the mixed environment (RoR for
CB, PHP for the rest) doesn't help.

Nothing has been added to CB since I left - because I assume that the dev who
is there is now stuck in the trap of administering what is there and not
having the time to do development. CB is also hosted separately, and while it
does go down, it just needs some TLC and a cleanup.

There is no way they will hand it over. It is worth far too much. They just
needed a kick in the butt to get it back in order. CB ranks far too well on
startup terms, has a lot of its own traffic, and is probably worth $10M+ on
its own.

If you are a RoR dev and want to work on CrunchBase, I suggest you ping them
(note I have no idea what the situation there is atm)

On the other hand, there is a legacy in my decision to make the API
unrestricted and just simple json output. So CB can never disappear or be
controlled. An application can get to the data as easily as a user can. The
license is also super-liberal, all that is required to use the data is
attribution (it's CC-Attribution). If you are ever implementing an API for an
important community resource I suggest you do the same and forget API keys and
all that.

~~~
mhendric
Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan deserve the bulk of the credit for today's
CrunchBase, IMO. They (re)coded the guts of it in early 2008 and put in place
the API. Others also deserve props for improving it over the years (Andy Brett
comes to mind but there are others with whom I'm less familiar such as Ben
Schaechter). Not to mention those who have led efforts to maintain and improve
its content, such as Gene Teare.

Like others in this thread, I'd love to see CrunchBase get more developer
attention, and accordingly, I agree that talented RoR developers who are
interested in big data should consider applying. There's a lot of great stuff
that can be done with CrunchBase's data and for its audience.

~~~
nikcub
Ye I agree. Big part of the reason it rocks is because of the data that is
entered every day, which is still happening. I just checked the feed and it is
averaging 20+ items per day, which is what has kept it as the main source of
startup info.

The OP gripe is about it being down, slow etc. and the stagnation in dev - all
of that shouldn't be hard to fix (and it may well be on the way to getting
fixed) and it certainly isn't at the point of neglect where they should
consider giving it to somebody else.

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brown9-2
There is an API for getting data out of Crunchbase:
<http://www.crunchbase.com/help/api>

I used it a few months back for a personal project where I thought the
Crunchbase data set of summary information about startups would be useful -
turned out this data wasn't useful for what I wanted to do; I was hoping to
built up a corpus of words for a "startup idea Markov generator" but I found
that the submissions ended up resembling regular English too much.

I don't recall any type of rate-limiting by the API, nor does it seem like you
need to register to use it.

API documentation (from the above link):
[http://groups.google.com/group/crunchbase-
api/web/api-v1-doc...](http://groups.google.com/group/crunchbase-
api/web/api-v1-documentation)

~~~
russtrpkovski
Check out <http://www.fundastic.info/>

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coderdude
"there's no better team reporting on tech these days. They've really come into
their own over the last couple of years and are producing high quality
articles and videos at scale and driving conversations forward that are
important to all of us."

TechCrunch is really awesome. Top-notch tech journalism of the highest
caliber.

~~~
phlux
> _TechCrunch is really awesome. Top-notch tech journalism of the highest
> caliber._ \------

Ok, hold on one second there mister. Ill give you that TC is _very well
connected_ \- but I don't know if you've read any of the articles/listened to
Paul Karr's ego any time recently -- but I have yet to see any TC posts
without spelling/grammar/editing errors.

Sure, they have a sweet spot between people actually _building_ stuff and
those who read about it... but until their own staff proof-read their own
pieces... lets hold off on the journalistic praise of any caliber.

~~~
anamax
After all, ghod knows that copyediting is journalism.

~~~
wmeredith
...is _part_ of journalism. FTFY

And it most definitely _is_.

~~~
anamax
> is part of journalism

Part yes, but the poster said that Techcrunch was worthless because of the
copyediting mistakes. That's not "part of", that's is.

There's a related idea which says that journalism is good stories and copy
editing.

Both are wrong. Good storytelling and copy editing are part of good
journalism, but they're not the whole story. In fact, they're not even the
majority of the story, even though they're dominant skills of most
journalists.

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troymc
From the Crunchbase Licensing Policy:

"We permit anyone to republish our content in accordance with this licensing
policy.

"We provide CrunchBase’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution
License [CC-BY]..."

from <http://www.crunchbase.com/help/licensing-policy>

So the information in Crunchbase could be copied elsewhere, so long as the new
publisher gives credit (attribution) to the original sources.

Maybe this is a business opportunity --- something too small for AOL to care
about but big enough for a smaller company.

~~~
blizkreeg
There is an API to get a lot of data out of CrunchBase even now and people are
doing interesting mashups of the data. I'm not sure business opportunity is
the right word since Michael's vision for CB is/was an open, wiki-style
research/analysis tool.

~~~
troymc
Just because the data is open doesn't mean there's no business opportunity.
There are plenty of businesses built on using open data.

Example 1: Some businesses publish and sell paper books containing Wikipedia
articles.

Example 2: CloudMade provides platforms for building web and mobile apps using
OSM data (CC-BY-SA 2).

------
rajeshrajappan
<http://ycpages.info> is developed using CrunchBase API. It is only for YC
funded companies at the moment. I have plans for adding more Seed Accelerators
though.

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sayemm
CrunchBase is an invaluable resource and its importance is only growing as the
startup ecosystem continues to accelerate. I'm obsessed w/ it and I'm always
checking it whenever I scope out a new site... so I whipped up this firefox
add-on a while ago using CrunchBase data, the web startup toolbar:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-
startup-t...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-startup-
toolbar/)

