Wolfram Alpha just announced a useful new feature if you plan to follow Disrupt San Francisco closely. It has added CrunchBase data to its computational engine. You can now learn more about a specific startup, compare them or do any other computation with other Wolfram Alpha data.
Adding CrunchBase to its data sources is part of Wolfram Alpha’s ongoing effort to make everything computable. Usually, scientific data comes first, but the company announced personal analytics report for Facebook in August and now CrunchBase integration.
CrunchBase will complete the information on private companies in search results. These days, they are focusing on tech startups and that is why they chose to use TechCrunch’s database and API. The algorithmic part of the integration still needs some fine-tuning.
They focused first on previous Disrupt finalists. For example, you can now compare the funding history of Ark, DataSift and Firespotter Labs — developers of Disrupt NYC 2012′s winner service UberConference. You could imagine any sort of computation, with macroeconomic data or any other data available in Wolfram Alpha. For example, Facebook market cap is 2257 times Firespotter Labs’ funding — but this number is slowly going down.
Finally, here are a few words from C. Alan Joyce on Wolfram Alpha’s blog: “Good luck to this year’s competitors! If we don’t cover them already, we’ll make an effort to get them into Wolfram|Alpha as soon as possible after the conference.”