This is awesome! Great way to visualize the data and I really like that you used IRC.

It only shows the 1000 most common locations. Sorry!

Thanks Leland!

I also used the same data in a 3D visualization with the Oculus Rift. You can check out a demo here: http://youtu.be/dgMOdzfoPgs?t=31s

Author here, sorry about the spikes where people do not actually live. A lot of users put only their country and not city, and I didn't want to throw that data away.

I probably should've checked the specificity of the location and only thrown out the data for large countries like Russia and China, or distributed it across all other data points in the country.

Interesting project if you want to fork it!

Distributing it across should work well. Throwing out not so much because you're losing a varying big chunk of data.

It would be nice if there were an easy way to hit the population center instead of geographic center of a nation in webgl-globe, at least. That big spike in the middle of Siberia puzzled me at first.

This is the same spot in Google maps (pins), for example if you just type "Quebec" it's hits the same area hundreds of miles from the nearest town.

Take all the unknowns and spread them evenly among all the known cities.

This would falsely flatten the results.

Thanks for the link, just watched it all the way through. I felt disturbed thousands of miles away - can't imagine what it's like to actually be there, so close to death and destruction every second of every day.

It's crazy that there are so many huge companies that I've never heard of. Instagram's acquisition was huge news at $1B, but I didn't hear a peep about Ariba at $4.3B or Genzyme at $20B.

It's easy to think that consumer oriented web startups are what's hot, but this data proves otherwise.

> It's easy to think that consumer oriented web startups are what's hot, but this data proves otherwise.

I think what it proves: Crunchbase serves the PR segment of consumer oriented web companies, and fails to serve other segments well. Let's face it, it's not so much a database as it is part of the techcrunch PR machine.

I wonder if a lot of the "there's no innovation any more" talk is a result of the fact that things like biotech just doesn't get the same coverage as the web startups?

There's a lot of biotech/pharmacutecal companies in those lists. Something is happening in that industry, even if we don't hear much about it here and elsewhere.

One thing to consider is how long each of these companies hd been in existence before getting acquired. One thing with consumer web is that the time between conception and exit is comparatively short compared to other industries.