Big Plans For CrunchBase

CrunchBase has grown like a tree planted in a quiet corner of the yard and left to its own devices. Today, our free and editable industry database gets 1.5 million unique visitors a month and has had 90,000 users create 105,000 companies and 140,000 individual profiles. At age six, it’s proven to be one of the most successful of the products that TechCrunch has launched over the years

Now it’s time to think about the future. We are committing a significant amount of money to expanding the product and the team behind it. You’ll be hearing a lot more in the coming months, but here’s what we can share now.

The team of long-time staffers and experienced additions – Matt Kaufman, Gené McPherson, Vineet Thanedar, Anthony Nguyen, and Kurt Freytag – now has a blog.

And on that blog, they’ve begun showcasing top developers from among the thousands using the CrunchBase API. Big data analytics startup SiSense has kicked things off today with a post about how it’s pulled in data to provide an investment dashboard and data visualizations. Investors and entrepreneurs using the product can learn important market information like the average time between startup funding rounds year over year.

The CB team is going to be regularly featuring guest posts from any developer who has done something smart and useful with the data, provided that:

• Your application is publicly accessible


• Your application attributes CrunchBase according to the CrunchBase API TOS


• Your application directs users to CrunchBase to update missing or out-dated information

As an added bonus, TechCrunch writers who are interested in analyzing data to break stories are going to be taking a hard look at these tools and potentially incorporating them into how we work. We’ll also be interested in writing about them.

You can apply for the Developer Spotlight Program by sending them an email.

The team itself is growing, too. If you join, you’ll get to work in our historic SOMA office alongside our editorial, product and business teams, right down the street from Caltrain, The Creamery, Giants Stadium, and thousands of tech companies large and small. You will be on the pulse of the Valley, developing a beloved product that plays a key role in keeping our industry up to date. Check out the hiring details here.

Town board imposes gag order on residents concerned with fracking

During my 12-year career as a newspaper reporter, I spent thousands of hours sitting through city council meetings, zoning board hearings, property tax appeals, school board work sessions, and just about every other kind of attention-sapping municipal meeting you could possibly imagine. (It wasn’t all bad: I met my wife at one.) At these meetings, it wasn’t uncommon for the same topics to come up over and over again, frequently with the same people making the same points about the same issues that everyone in attendance has heard a million times before. (Think “Parks and Rec” without any laughs.) So I sympathize, perhaps more than I should, with elected officials and public servants who would like to find a way to make topics they’ve heard about and debated endlessly just...go... away.

Still, I had never heard of a town that actually imposed a gag order on its own citizens, until the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth) received complaints about a town board in Sanford, New York (population: 2,400), that told its residents they could no longer bring up concerns about fracking at town meetings.

Continue Reading...

Town board imposes gag order on residents concerned with fracking

During my 12-year career as a newspaper reporter, I spent thousands of hours sitting through city council meetings, zoning board hearings, property tax appeals, school board work sessions, and just about every other kind of attention-sapping municipal meeting you could possibly imagine. (It wasn’t all bad: I met my wife at one.) At these meetings, it wasn’t uncommon for the same topics to come up over and over again, frequently with the same people making the same points about the same issues that everyone in attendance has heard a million times before. (Think “Parks and Rec” without any laughs.) So I sympathize, perhaps more than I should, with elected officials and public servants who would like to find a way to make topics they’ve heard about and debated endlessly just...go... away.

Still, I had never heard of a town that actually imposed a gag order on its own citizens, until the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth) received complaints about a town board in Sanford, New York (population: 2,400), that told its residents they could no longer bring up concerns about fracking at town meetings.

Continue Reading...

So Yeah, There’s Gonna Be A Vince Vaughn And Owen Wilson Movie About Life As A Google Intern

Geographically Hollywood is hundreds of miles away from Silicon Valley, but it seems like the two are getting closer and closer in metaphorical ways.

The latest example of this is The Internship, the new buddy movie starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that’s set to premiere this upcoming summer. In it, Vaughn and Wilson play middle-aged laid off salesmen who somehow nab internships at Google. Bespectacled genius 20-somethings are their bosses, they don’t exactly fit in, and of course hilarity ensues.

It’s no surprise that the somewhat wacky world of today’s tech industry is attractive story fodder to showbiz types: The Social Network showed just how compelling these stories can be on the big screen. And what it’s like to work at companies such as Facebook and Google have held special allure to the mainstream for years now (as I say in my disclosure form, my spouse works at Google — and every holiday season he fields questions about Google’s free food and other widely-reported job perks from even my most unplugged family members.)

But what is a bit surprising is the degree to which it seems Google participated in the making of The Internship. The cast is said to have had access to Google’s Mountain View headquarters as they were preparing to make the movie, and Google itself has put out an enthusiastic statement of support that says: “We’re excited that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson chose the Google campus as a backdrop for their first film together since Wedding Crashers.” Yesterday, Google’s homepage (a notoriously sparse space that typically only gives occasional links to its own new products or big charity causes) even included a prominent link to a Google+ Hangout with Vaughn and Wilson that was apparently part of the movie’s promotional push.

It’s a far cry from, say, Facebook’s response to The Social Network, which was mostly silence punctuated by occasional flat-out rejections. They are two very different types of movies, of course, but it is interesting to see a company play along so much here.

Anyway. The trailer just hit the web today, and it’s embedded above.

I'm Back

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