It’s normally TechCrunch that reports the news on everything happening on the Web. Well today, they’re making news of their own with some seriously impressive improvements to Crunchbase,
their tech startup blue pages.

According to TechCrunch the new features include:

Maps: Company and financial organization headquarters are now geocoded and locatable on an interactive map using the Google Maps API.

Advanced Search: Browse by City, State, Zip Code, or Country. Or choose an arbitrary location and map all of the results within a certain range (e.g., all the startups within 10 miles of Sydney, the 165 companies in Manhattan, or the VCs on Sand Hill Road).

Jobs: CrunchBoard job listings are now shown on company pages. You’ll now see, for example, that Digg is hiring. With this additional functionality, and our LinkedIn API integration, we hope CrunchBase will become an ever-more important research tool for job seekers.

Milestones: Milestones is our newest and most experimental feature on CrunchBase. It was inspired by our writing team, which receives many press releases with titles like “Service X hits the 1 Million user mark,” or “Company Y hires new CEO.”

While these news items don’t always make TechCrunch’s front page, we wanted a place to highlight them in CrunchBase, so we created a lightweight data type called Milestones. It’s pretty simple: each milestone has a date, description, and source (if available somewhere on the net).

The new features are smart, and above all, necessary. Who needs Hoovers!

Originally posted on June 22, 2008 @ 8:13 pm