You may remember us mentioning a little while back almost six months ago that we would be giving you the ability to register for a CrunchBase account without using Facebook Connect.  Right now, this capability is live on CrunchBase and you may now log-in into CrunchBase either via Facebook Connect or your very own CrunchBase profile.  You also are given the option during the registration process to sync your CrunchBase profile with your Facebook account in the event you want to share edits you make on CrunchBase back to your Facebook profile. There are also a few other recent additions we have made:

Since the official launch of our integration between CrunchBase and Facebook Connect in November, we've seen 19% (5,087 out of 26,850) of our edits come from newly registered, non-anonymous users. Even after the predictable spike around the announcement, we've seen a sustained and growing percentage of our edits coming from these users (see figure below). As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so we thought it would be fun to give some credit to those users most actively involved in keeping CrunchBase up-to-date and accurate (apart from our internal team of course - it just wouldn't be a contest). The top ten startup gurus are now highlighted in the right-hand column on the CrunchBase home page, and you can also view the full list to find out where you stack up. We're planning to completely open up registration (without requiring Facebook Connect) in the near future as well to further broaden the field. We're also excited to announce a few new ways for you to keep up to date with the latest CrunchBase data.

For the past several weeks, we've been making improvements to CrunchBase to build a more engaging product for the people that drive it - which is to say, "everybody". Since it was launched, Crunchbase has always been a freely editable repository of information about technology companies. Since February 2008, we've received over 100,000 edits from anonymous users in addition to the copious amounts of information that TechCrunch writers funnel to it on a regular basis. We're excited to announce that these contributions no longer have to remain unattributed. Starting today, anyone with a Facebook account can sign up for an account on CrunchBase by using Facebook Connect. Edits will still be moderated (after all, this is the Internet we're talking about here), but users who prove themselves to be trustworthy will, with time, start to see additional privileges associated with their accounts. All of these edits represent a treasure trove of information, so we've also been working on ways to better present the edits as they occur. Visitors to the CrunchBase homepage will now notice a list of recent milestones - a "stream," if you will - that represents the most recent changes to the database. We've filtered out the more trivial edits in an effort to make this the kind of real-time information that even Paul Carr could love. These funding rounds, acquisitions, investments, IPOs, and other major milestones will now also appear on the individual pages that they relate to.

Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. Over the past several weeks, the developers here at TechCrunch have been working on some high-priority improvements and upgrades for our entire network of sites, in addition to CrunchBase. As a result, we haven't been able to give CrunchBase the attention and support that it needs and deserves. The good news is that we're nearing a point where we have put a lot of the other more pressing issues to rest and will soon be able to focus on improving CrunchBase - and trust me, no one is more excited about that than we are! Thanks for your patience while we get to that point. In the short-term, the API is back alive and well (and actually has been for some time now). Some of the exciting things on the horizon include a redesign of the site layout, better ways for users outside of TechCrunch to contribute (and get credit for contributing), and more refined ways to interact with the raw data that powers CrunchBase. Have suggestions for features you'd like to see in the future? Leave them here in the comments, or join the CrunchBase Google Group. And I'll send a TechCrunch t-shirt to the first commenter to identify the reference in the title of the post.

We here at Crunchbase are totally astonished at how much activity there is on Crunchbase, both on the web application as well as on the API.  A good problem we’re having is that the increased traffic means that our poor server is increasingly unable to handle it all.  Accordingly, we’re taking this opportunity to regroup [...]

So here at TechCrunch, Henry Work has been holding down the fort by himself since December apparently, and now has moved on to a new chapter in his life. So I’ve taken it upon myself to carry his torch of Crunchy dev-goodness. Actually, Hunter the intern is here as well, carrying the torch with me, [...]

After being behind the times for a few months, the CrunchBase logo (see above) now joins its peers across The Crunch Network with a new, sporty look. We’ve also updated the CB favicon, iPhone webclip, and the TechCrunch logo in the bottom-right-hand corner of the site. Lastly, we added the TC Network tab to the [...]

If you’re a CrunchBase API developer, we have two new APIs for ya. These should make it easier to find CrunchBase entities, as well as match TechCrunch stories related to particular companies and people. We use these APIs ourselves for implementing the Company Index on TechCrunch, and so we thought these might be useful for [...]

This past week, TechCrunch released its first research report, The 2008 Year in Review. The primary data source is CrunchBase, our wiki-style database of start-up companies, people and investors where we’ve been collecting data for the last fifteen months. Jeremiah Owyang, a sr analyst for Forrester Research and general internet strategist, was one of the first [...]

Here’s a cool usage of the CrunchBase API: The CrunchBase Shot. Snap Technologies is the company behind Snap Shots, the link enhancer that ‘shoots’ you to webpages without actually leaving the page that you’re on. Now Snap recognizes links to CrunchBase, and thanks our API, creates a custom view template that looks quite nice. Snap [...]