Who doesn’t love free stuff? I sure do. And when they can be used to make your business offerings even better, I call that Awesome with a capital A.
I was just reading Dharmesh Shah’s Embarassingly Gushing Praise for TechCrunch And The New CrunchBase API on OnStartups.com and it got me thinking.
What Shah is so excited about is CrunchBase’s new & free API. CrunchBase is a “free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit”, much like a wiki. It’s not technically a wiki yet (I believe that’s in the plans though), but pulls in a ton of data (from sources like LinkedIn and Google Maps) in addition to offering manual input from editors and the community. In short, it’s a fairly robust database of business information for the high-tech & internet industries.
To put it another way, it’s a valuable resource for competitive intelligence. Which means if one of these online competitive analysis services were to jump on the API and start including this data, they’d have quite an attractive offering. Or aat the very least, they’ll make things easier for business researchers.
Plus, CrunchBase’s API is free. So why the hell not?
Why the hell not, indeed.
It’ll be interesting to see if people start building some apps around the CrunchBase API. I’ve got a couple of ideas floating around in my head.
You should totally build out a few of your ideas. Perhaps, by using the CrunchBase API, Arrington & company will be so flattered that they’ll mention you on TechCrunch! ;-)
I have never really used crunchBase before. Interesting service. I can’t see how it benefits Techcrunch at all though.
Cool post Mike.
BJ- TechCrunch built CrunchBase so that we would have a place to store all the data we aggregate when profiling startups. Arrington talks more about his reasons in this post http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/11/version-2-of-crunchbase-released/