Where do you head to find technology company information? Currently, there are a lot of technology blogs that provide company directories, but I think there are two key players that stand out in this sector and I’m sure their pageviews will sore in the coming months and years. Those two players have to be Crunchbase and Tradevibes.
Crunchbase is the company directory from the superblog Techcrunch. Crunchbase is build on a wiki type system and instead of just writing about companies and collect data, Michael Arrington thought it would be a good idea to actually put it all together and make some more money from it. Crunchbase has a great look about it and it brings together information from some of the most well-known companies. On Crunchbase you can find descriptions of the company, funding information, location and telephone numbers, competitors and staffing information. I would like Crunchbase to find new ways to make money apart from advertising, like a highlighted company feature.
Tradevibes has a bit of a different layout, but essentially it is the same concept with the type of wiki development. Tradevibes provide a similar set of information as Crunchbase but it also has additional features, such as a fantasy exchange game, voting system on companies, and forums. The design on Tradevibes is actually a bit cluttered and there seems to be a lot of products that have simply just been put together to add features, instead of developing something in house that matches the site. For example, the job board in the left column from SimplyHired.
Both of these companies are leading the way in this niche, however there still seems to be a lot of issues in terms of design and integrating information that is actually needed, without information overload. It would also be nice to see integration with several technology blogs to provide news about each of the companies in the database, but so far even this seems to be limited.
Crenk has joined forces with TradeVibes which will see all of the Crenk articles directly syndicated into the TradeVibes database.
TradeVibes is an ever growing company database. The companies posts information about vairous companies, and detailing everything from their address to competitors to its management. In each profiles in the right column it allows the user to stay up-to-date with the news about that specific company. The news is currently being gathered from a variety of sources, such as Techcrunch, RWW and now Crenk.
We have previously written about TradeVibes when they came out of beta. They have since made some big improvements and im looking forward to seeing their site improving in the future.
TradeVibes is now in a public beta. TradeVibes is a wiki type database about everything technology based, companies, CEOs, funding, acquisitions, news and more. They are in direct competition with Crunchbase, but I can see TradeVibes dominating this market for a long time to come.
As i have been an alpha user, i have been wondering around the site for months now and have seen some good changes and some bad. The company profiles, competitors list and web metrics are very handy. However, the news feature is something that really needs to be improved. At present the users sumbit the news onto the site and there are only 3 news stories shown in the sidebar of the profiles, this should definitely be increased to 10 because of the size of the profiles.
Apart from all that TradeVibes has launched a new Stumbleupon type feature called Discovery. Discovery allows users to to find companies in a sector they want and then the tool runs through the companies in which the users either thumb up or down the company. I dont really see this tool adding too much to the site, but it is a nice novalty feature.
