Over the past 2 years, Tech Crunch has been a leader in providing news and reviews of up and coming start-up companies, product launches, and new web services. In their own words:

TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to new companies, we will profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.

After a lengthy hiatus, the UK and Ireland focused version of Tech Crunch has relaunched with Mike Butcher looking after the helm again. There was never really an explanation for the disappearing act of this regional branch of Tech Crunch, although there was a post from Michael Arrington back in April of this year looking for a new editor.

This could represent some competition for the newly launched Blognation Ireland, the launch of which we mentioned recently. Although obviously Irish focused content will be diluted somewhat on Tech Crunch UK due to Irish news being combined with UK news, something which has not gone unmentioned by Mike Butcher:

Right now this site carries both a UK and Irish flag. With many friends, colleagues and contacts in Ireland I am embarrassed that, for the moment, we have no dedicated Irish site. But I hope that at some point, with the proper editorial resources, this can be remedied at some point.

So it looks like there is some intention to focusing directly on the budding Irish market at some point in the near future, but for the time being, if the content produced by Tech Crunch UK is on a level with the main site, then this is definitely one to add to your RSS feeds.

Whether this will cause Blognation any difficulty is another question. Thus far the content produced by Blognation has been of a high standard and it certainly is refreshing to hear news of interesting new web ventures on Irish soil.

I do wonder who came up with those “button flags” first though - they look extremely similar on both sites!