People need to stop taking TechCrunch seriously. Michael Arrington is fed by venture capital firms and their portfolio companies, and has far too many conflicts of interest to be credible. Most of his posts are extremely biased and tilted toward the current thinking of those feeding him information. You gain no competitive advantage from reading this nonsense.
It's probably the place I first hear about most new startups. Can you think of any other source that's better for that?
Killerstartups.com if you just want volume. There's definitely room for a happy medium of the two.