I just follow them on Twitter and/or subscribe to their blogs. Unless there are acquisition rumors or other things the startup wouldn't talk about publicly, Twitter and blogs get me the same info as TechCrunch stories, and I'd rather hear it straight from the startup than from TC.
Agreed - if there's one thing I don't need more of in my life, it's emails to read.
To me this seemed easier than scanning through a bunch of primary sources all the time, and I also don't think a lot of the interesting news necessarily ends up coming from official blogs. However, future versions of StartupFollower may include official company blogs as sources if you prefer that.
Interesting idea - Any sense for how many startups on TC get more than 1 article?
In the last 16 days, TechCrunch stories have been tagged with 284 unique companies a total of 482 times. 50 of these companies were tagged in more than one story, with the most popular being Facebook (tagged in 32 stories), Google (28), Twitter (18), Apple (16), Amazon (10), Groupon (9), Microsoft (8), and digg (7).
Great idea for aggregating TC-specific news about selected companies. Though for more in-depth notifications I'll be continuing to use Google Alerts.
cool concept, but does the techcrunch data link mean what i get is the same content as the techcrunch tag?