I haven’t seen any formal announcement, perhaps because it’s still being built out, but there is a new feature at TechCrunch called the “TechCrunch Database.” It appears to be a comprehensive listing of startup companies with information on their products, people, funding with additional content pulled in about the company from TechCrunch posts, TechMeme, Technorati (I’m sensing a tech trend here…), del.icio.us, and the company’s blog. If you go to db.techcrunch.com you are re-directed to the main site, but if you want information on a particular company you can go to http://db.techcrunch.com/c/facebook or http://db.techcrunch.com/c/twitter to get an idea.

This is a very cool feature that gives a nice, quick snapshot of a company. It looks like it was released in posts beginning last Wednesday. What’s especially interesting is that on the same day, Niall Kennedy’s Startup Search was released and it’s almost exactly the same thing as the TechCrunch database. Startup Search has better linkage among people and investors in addition to tracking traffic indicators, but the company profiles are nearly identical.

I wonder if Mike and Niall will work together to built a more complete database faster. Both appear to have pretty limited listings (only 47 companies on startup search and I could only find a handful on TC DB, in contrast I had over 300 on the web 2.0 map last year and that number has at least doubled by now). And hey guys, bring back an updated version of the Web 2.0 Innovation map, I still think that’s a cool way to visualize startup activity.