AOL: Hand Over Crunchbase and Nobody Gets Hurt
bryce.vc
bryce.vc
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.
For example: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zimbra it still look like Yahoo! acquired them for $350million but we know, that VMWare now own them.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
And it most definitely is.
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.
MA: "Hi I am Michael Arrington, I built and sold TechCrunch to AOL for $25 million dollars. We post articles online about whats going on in Tech, the Valley, etc... check it out!"
Internet: "Cool, hey Mike, I noticed that you guys seem to consistently make spelling and grammatical errors in your articles - they have good content, but is anyone checking them?"
MA: "WHAT! YOU FOOL! If you don't like the articles with all their errors then you SHOULDN'T READ IT!"
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How about a better argument:
If you're going to call your self journalists and WRITE about technology and trends and the valley and what not AS YOUR JOB why don't YOU check your fucking work before positing it online?
"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.
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).
sigh
If anyone wants to collaborate on that I might be able to find the impetus to focus on it again.