Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/23/y-combinator/

by dwynings • 16 years ago

175 189 16 years ago

fnid28• 16 years ago

I'll take the contrarian stance and say I'm not really impressed with the list. There are some that may be good, but there's not much new. Mostly me too products.

Perhaps my expectations are too high.

Janteh• 16 years ago

I suspect that in times of crisis people tend to play it safe and start more 'simple' companies, with safer business models, instead of swinging for the fences with experimental ideas that have no clear future or business model.

Still, there are some very interesting companies in this batch that are not particularly sexy but might have great potential.

axod2• 16 years ago

I don't think these are safe business model companies.

Call me a cynic, but it may be more of a case of "built for investors/acquirers in SV".

nailer5• 16 years ago

One example:

"Our goal is to do what Gmail did to Outlook: replace a popular desktop application with a better online version."

is badly begging the question. I'd be surprised if gmail + Google calendar had more active users than Outlook.

imp• 16 years ago

I bet they have more happy users.

nhebb2• 16 years ago

I think the popularity of Gmail is overestimated by a lot of techies. Campaign Monitor posted user stats for over 300 million people last summer: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p...

Gmail came in at only 5.5%.

wtallis• 16 years ago

There have definitely been more people who've chosen to use GMail and GCal than have chosen to use Outlook. Most Outlook users have it forced on them by their employers. (They don't necessarily object, but they weren't given a choice.)

If you include Outlook Express, then you have to consider that it had the same tying advantages that IE had over other browsers. Even so, it's been months since I ran across someone who uses Outlook or Outlook Express for personal email. Thunderbird and Apple Mail are somewhat more common among the people I deal with, but the majority of people I deal with use some kind of web mail for their personal email, with GMail completely dominating among those who are at least slightly technical and among kids.

tlb2• 16 years ago

I don't think they'll be bumming if they get to be as big as Gmail.

pg14• 16 years ago

Not really. (a) Gmail has a lot of users, even if it doesn't have more yet, and (b) I bet Gmail's growth is faster.

matasar• 16 years ago

I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful.

Programming smarts != market smarts.

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

Greplin looks like an interesting possibility. Some of the others have potential. But, yes, I think you've got the general sentiment.

smurthasmith2• 16 years ago

Greplin does sounds interesting. I actually applied with essentially the same idea - cloud data indexing and search. Check it out and let me know if you want a beta invite:

www.nutmegsearch.com

Daniel Gross, if you are out there - let's talk.

emmett2• 16 years ago

Yeah, me-too products are never really interesting. I mean, does the world really need another search engine? There's already Lycos and Altavista.

Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating.

idlewords2• 16 years ago

It's 2010 - there should be things in this list that are more awesome, even at first reading, than 'embedly' and 'embedster'.

Rauchg2• 16 years ago

Hey, there's already MySpace, WHY create Facebook?! Why do something similar on the surface, but focus on what the user really wants? Madness.

AmericanOP2• 16 years ago

Well this post certainly needs a counterpoint. I don't think your generalization should be the dominant stamp on the latest batch. A percentage are really interesting, and unless you compare this to past groups how can you say this is a weak showing? Yes, some are twitter widgets but they're not bad for twitter apps. I can already think of a number of customers for 500 friends. Broad-brushed pessimism is the wrong frame when a number have obvious potential and we have no idea what pivots lie ahead for the others based on an elevator pitch. Let's judge Ycom by it's long-term record.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

Hey this is Alex from LaunchHear. We just finished our presentation fifteen minutes ago and we're hanging around outside the YC building now. I just wanted to say that a lot of these startups are actually really impressive, it's probably just not obvious from the three sentence descriptions.

Also, a bunch of these startups are still under embargo so they aren't even being written about. Give it a year or so and then start complaining.

rokhayakebe3• 16 years ago

His/her comment does not read as a complain, and I believe his opinion is shared with many. The reason, as you mentioned, is the short description takes away from the service, so I am sure these companies are in fact much much more. Another problem is that all these products are version 0.1 of a much bigger version, so they need time to mature.

Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.

paul9290• 16 years ago

Too many start-ups! 26 really? Hard for many to stand out and get good coverage/press.

Pardon if that's a downer of a comment I do wish all best of luck!

Estragon• 16 years ago

Crocodoc looks like a solution for a serious painpoint of mine.

mattlong• 16 years ago

I'm a developer with crocodoc. Thanks, that's what we're trying to do! Would you mind sharing the details of your painpoint? Feel free to email if you would prefer not to reply publicly, my email address is in my HN profile.

tlb2• 16 years ago

It sounds derivative, but in fact crocodoc is great. While there are lots of document markup tools, I actually use and like crocodoc. Use it a few times to mark up a real document and you'll see.

jmtame• 16 years ago

if it helps, farmville was a near duplicate rip-off of farm town, and it's now one of the most successful facebook apps. you don't always need to have 100% unique ideas. zynga spent more money advertising, and is now profitable with something like 100+ million players.

dannyr• 16 years ago

But they had to spend boatloads of cash to acquire users. I don't think YC startups have lots of money to spend on advertising.

Shorel• 16 years ago

The ones I though were good:

Zencoder Zenedy

The rest are very under promising.

Hexstream• 16 years ago

That's a great vaccine against missed expectations!

nhebb2• 16 years ago

I think Card Pool could make some money, but it also got me thinking about the retailers. Don't many of them operate on thin margins? If they offered card holders 90% cash back on the card amount, they might actually make more money from partial reimbursements than they would from the merchandise sales.

ericd• 16 years ago

They make quite a bit from unused and expiring gift cards, so I think they'd very much prefer to limit the options there.

staunch2• 16 years ago

There's nothing contrarian about what you're saying, and your expectations aren't too high. You're just doing what most people (outside of HN at least) do: calling the game way too early and without enough information.

These companies need time to develop/morph/mature before anyone will have any real clue as to their prospects for innovation or success.

pmjordan3• 16 years ago

I initially had a similar reaction, but now I'm not sure that's quite fair. I think the innovations aren't so much technological, they're more like business model innovations. They have the potential to generate value for customers regardless.

dskhatri• 16 years ago

NewsLabs sounds cool. There may be a lot of journalists out there frustrated with the constraints of working with a big media organization and want to do their own thing. NewsLabs could create the next Arianna Huffingtons.

Data Marketplace is promising: market research firms charge ridiculous fees for their reports which are usually overkill for what you are looking for. Data Marketplace could solve this problem.

Greplin sounds cool. 500Friends sounds like it'll generate revenue straight off the bat.

pbiggar• 16 years ago

RE NewsLabs: That is exactly what we're trying to do. Also, that's exactly how many of our journalists feel.

GFischer• 16 years ago

NewsLabs is the most exciting one from the list for me, but probably not the one with the most upside.

The list sounds good. I'd add Notifo to the most promising ones (going just by this short description of course!).

zaidf2• 16 years ago

Mostly me too products.

like...

"Google.com: A search engine that looks at link popularity to find the best search results. It's going to revolutionize search."

Talk to investors from the starting days of Google, and they'll cite you a dozen examples of similar sounding pitches. It's hard to tell from few liners about the future of a company.

rmorrison2• 16 years ago

Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses.

(Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)

pg14• 16 years ago

You flatter yourself by saying your expectations are high. Actually you're just not a good judge of very early stage startups. If you saw Google when they were Backrub, or Microsoft when they were making Basic for the Altair, you would have said the same thing. Minor, derivative products.

zhyder• 16 years ago

Ouch. If fnid2 is mistaken isn't it more likely because he has much less information about these startups and their founders than you or the attendees of demo day?

fnid28• 16 years ago

What's with the ad hominem?

I was stating an opinion. You don't know when I came to know Google or Microsoft and you don't know what my opinion of them was. You also don't know how good a judge I am of very early stage startups, which is largely irrelevant, because hardly anyone is a good judge of startups at this stage. Almost everyone knows that. In fact, I asked how to predict startup viability right here and well, see for yourself, no one really knows: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 At least I admit it.

That isn't even what I was saying, I was saying I'm not impressed with them. When I say impressed I mean in the "Do what is hard" sense. I mean in the blue ocean sense of creating markets. Building a product in an existing market and relying on a mastery of networking, pr, and marketing to make it successful simply doesn't impress me. It has nothing to do with the viability of the startup. The least impressive startups are often the most successful.

I can go into more detail for you. Granted I don't know the founders, I only have a 2/3 sentence explanation, but here goes...

LaunchHear -- This can be accomplished with a database of bloggers and the types of products they review and a list of companies that make that kind of product. When a company wants to send a product, they enter the type and get a list of addresses to send it to. It's a fairly simple app. It's not a technical problem, it's a sales and marketing problem. Plus the manpower to find the blogs and even that can be automated.

NewsLabs -- Basically a blog with some SEO and Ad tools built in. How many journalists are doing this on their own right now?

Seeing Interactive -- Plenty of startups, some of which are run by hn'ers are doing this now. I know of one out of austin, but can't remember the name. It's been done over and over -- not to say SI won't succeed -- it just isn't impressive. EDIT: You know what is hilarious? Seeing Interactive is the company I was thinking of from Austin. I was mistaken -- they're out of College Station, but I can be forgiven for that because it was many months ago when I saw them and haven't seen them sense.

Notifo -- apparently a lot of people like this one, but still, there are lots of SMS api's and text messages can be sent via email address too. I don't know exactly how notifo differentiates itself from those methods, but it's basically sending messages to people's phones and that's not impressive.

Zencoder -- This is old hat. It's an ffmpeg cluster with a queue. Put the file on your server, send the url to zencoder, it downloads the file, encodes it, then makes a callback to another url to let the requester know where to get the encoded files. I built one of these by myself 3 years ago. You could even edit the video online cropping out certain sections or adding different audio tracks.

Nowmov -- Is it difficult to search twitter for links to movies and see who has retweeted them the most? While one is playing, find another one and change the innerHTML of a div to another embed tag.

Crocodoc -- This one is actually fairly impressive. This type of marking up and editing is hard and I'd like to see what becomes of it.

Gamador -- Really? Social gaming? Is it impressive? I just don't think so. How many social gaming companies are there now? Hundreds? Thousands? Why is Gamador better? It'll be a tough pitch, but if Kevin and Dan are badasses maybe that's all you need to make a great social games company.

Cardpool -- a CRUD app like launchhear. A dating site for people with cards and people who want to buy them. This is a matter of trust mostly -- not technology, but trust has been established. It'll be hard here because how often do people get cards like this? Is it really worth it to go trade them on a website? Why not just spend it at the store? You don't like the store? Lots of gift cards can be used at multiple stores. It's a "gift" card -- get yourself a gift.

Tweetflow -- I am almost never impressed by a company that creates another company wholely dependent on the survival of another company whose survival is also in question. That said, natural language processing can be difficult, but in this case, a list of positive words and negative words and some searching is sufficient. It's neat and people will probably use it and may even pay for it.

CHROMAom, Inc. -- I love colourlovers, but it's a community about color. It's neat and it's a big community and there are lots of great color patterns there, but it's not impressive in the pg do what is hard sense.

Answerly.com -- tons of these exist already. I can't count them on two hands. People go to the internet to ask questions -- that's what they do. SEO on the question and there you go. Not impressive.

Zenedy -- just watch google trends and see where there is a dirth of content for the keywords. Finding untapped markets is a neat idea, but this is mostly a horsepower problem. If you have the money to pay for the content, you can make money. Lots of companies do this. How many domains does the guy who started MySpace have? He's been doing this for a long time. Search for hiking trails and you'll get one of his sites. I'm not sure about the revenue for the foreseeable future though, because once you've found the market people know there's little competition there. Just watch what you are doing and then copy or steal the content. It's unethical, but even Mahalo does it!

Data Marketplace -- This is a neat idea -- but not impressive. It's an online store for people with data. This model exists already -- like http://www.freebase.com/ with a pay wall.

Embedster -- Others have already commented on this one. You're adding monetization on top of embedded stuff that is often already monetized. It's kind of leechy in a way. I wonder how you're going to get past adblock plus.

Etacts -- People seem to like this one too, but it's a CRM mashup with widgets.

Embedly -- Is embeddability the goal? I got to video.bing.com and I can find all kinds of videos to embed. It's a web crawler looking for an embed tag -- it isn't special. It isn't impressive.

500Friends -- I'm not a big fan of popularity contests -- too introverted for that, so I just don't even care about this at all. I think sites like this devalue word of mouth advertising and tarnish trust relationships between people. If I tell you about a product, it's because it is a good product, not because someone paid me to tell you. Any amount of impressed I am by a few of the others here gets dinged for bing in the same list as these kinds of sites. Again, my opinion and many, I am sure, think I'm wrong. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money from companies who want to pay people to advertise for them.

Infoharmoni -- Already mentione twitter before, I wish bit.ly didn't exist (another ding). Never heard of gowalla or used foursquare -- perhaps I'm a square.

140Bets -- I think sports is a net negative for society. I'm opinionated. We waste so much time on and money on stadiums that are built with lies and tax dollars and promises of jobs and increased economic activity -- and they are a horrible waste of space. Have you ever walked in a stadium neighborhood when there is no game going on? It's dead. It's wasted space that could be used for a park. Take the fence down and let people use the space -- they paid for it! Instead, 99% of the time it is unused or used by a minority of people to play a game. I love George Carlin's take on it. Give all the golf courses to the homeless people. Another ding.

Greplin -- More social scraping? Really? I suppose by this point, I'm just kind of tired of reading all the references to twitter and social networks and yada yada. Where's the innovation?

It makes me wonder how many really hard problems were submitted and how many candidates are shaking their heads right now having gone through this whole list wondering why some of these are on here and they aren't. I'm not a rich man and I'm not motivated by money so I'll probably never have enough to invest $25k or whatever in hundreds of companies, so we'll never know how good I am at picking early stage startups, but if I simply said every one of them will fail, I'll be about 99% accurate.

But I never said these companies won't succeed or the teams aren't brilliant or your ability to pick early stage companies is crap. I'm simply not impressed by them -- it's nothing personal. I am not impressed by 99% of web startups.

But I wanted to be impressed with your list and I wasn't, so perhaps I was too glibly open about my opinion. I expected a -4 for the comment and was extremely shocked by the amount of agreement.

rokhayakebe3• 16 years ago

It is great to see you backup the companies you have funded. Any entrepreneur would love to see their investor fight for them in public. Respect.

However going back and forth about his opinion seems unnecessary. Even if all these companies became successful it does not take away from the fact that he and some other people were not impressed with it. His opinion is just that, an opinion.

Actually I would go further and say, you guys should chat privately. I am sure you have lots of people agreeing with you, so someone saying "Nah PG" could be helpful if he cared to elaborate. "When two people always agree, one of them is not needed in the room".

Cheers.

philwelch• 16 years ago

A couple of single founders in this season's batch. Interesting.

necrecious• 16 years ago

Must be pretty impressive people behind it and has a viable demo.

jpatte2• 16 years ago

I wonder if they were single founders from the very start or if the team broke during the program?

tiffani• 16 years ago

I know the Notifo guy, Chad, was working by himself. Dude's amazing. :)

run4yourlives3• 16 years ago

There are a few gems in there that I'd like to see more of (etacts for instance), but overall I'm dismayed by the sheer volume of SV navel-gazing produced twitter junk.

I'd love to see more ideas around PG's list of things he'd like to fund being presented instead of yet another "social collaboration because what else is there?" startup.

dadkins• 16 years ago

Yes, indeed. Spot the buzzword:

We make social games.

a social data request and fulfillment system

adding social data

leveraging social media

identify active social networkers

Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web

social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications

fallintothis2• 16 years ago

I was giggling at Gamador's summary.

We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better.

"Use metrics better"? I guess that one wasn't crafted with consumers in mind.

abstractbill• 16 years ago

Quoting JWZ:

"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

They're not using "social" as a buzzword indicating a passing fad. They're using it because, as JWZ points out, that's part of what software is today.

danicgross2• 16 years ago

1985: we make personal computers. 2010: we make social applications.

get on the train or get off it. social, realtime, location etc. are the new technologies of this generation.

samd• 16 years ago

Maybe the pressure of having to present something tangible with only 3 months of ramen noodles makes people reach for the low-hanging fruit.

pg14• 16 years ago

You know nothing more about most of these startups than a few sentences written for investors. That you dismiss them so summarily and so nastily says more about you than them.

Why don't you just wait and see how they do?

run4yourlives3• 16 years ago

I'll admit re-reading my comment it is a little harsh and has an insulting tone, which wasn't my intent.

I'm more disappointed; I don't really feel twitter and like applications really add any value in the long term. Their sphere of influence barely extends outside of a very vocal and visible extended SV community.

I respect and value both YC and all your applicants. Everything I've seen highlights the enormous amount of intelligence, creativity, and 'shutzpah' that you all have.

Because of that, I find it very disturbing that a lot of your collective effort goes into problems that are 1) barely issues for 90% of computer users and 2) are insular to SV and the particularities of that community.

There are a whole host of areas where YC and those it funds can make huge inroads. I just find it disappointing that I see one or two offerings to 80% of the market while the majority of funded focus on the 20% - albeit a very investor friendly 20%, perhaps making my disappointed grow - that an insular community has dictated to be the "trend".

ADDED: I'm your typical customer. It's views like mine you should be listening to, not discarding. If I say "Meh, no value add" your response should not be "You simply don't understand how wonderful we are". That's a failure in your message delivery.

callmeed• 16 years ago

Embedster and Embedly ... confusingly similar names

adamhowell• 16 years ago

I can't ever keep any variation of -ster, -ly and -ify straight.

robryan• 16 years ago

While I understand why they have to do this, I hate those types of names.

pchristensen• 16 years ago

I like etacts, notifo, and zencoder. Others like the newspaper ones sounds interesting but aren't applicable to me.

jedc2• 16 years ago

If anyone's interested, all of these are now on my "Seed accelerators and their companies" spreadsheet on Google Docs.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...

Corrections (particularly in early years of YC) welcome!

jpatte2• 16 years ago

Dropbox website is now dropbox.com

jedc2• 16 years ago

Thanks... updated.

jfornear• 16 years ago

Infoharmoni looks really cool. http://www.infoharmoni.com/

guelo• 16 years ago

Is that the Tomcat favicon? lol

_3ex72• 16 years ago

Yea, from the HTTP headers it looks like they are running Apache-Coyote server.

hristov• 16 years ago

These seem pretty good overall. Although I am rather unconvinced with the twitter ones, but then again I always thought twitter was a waste of time. But the others seem good.

There a couple of surprises: (i) there are two single founders, and (ii) there are a couple of pairs that seem to be in the same space. Obviously embedster and embedly seem to be doing something similar, but there was also a couple of search engines that do something similar as well. I wonder what Paul thinks about that. Won't the competition cause bad vibes in the meetings, etc.

Of course it is possible that I was mislead by the short descriptions and the companies do not really compete.

jfb4• 16 years ago

jfb from nowmov here. There was never really any friction, the meetings always tended to be pretty matter-of-fact and collaborative. We didn't have any direct competition, so I don't want to speak for the embed* guys, but everything was always really collegial.

There's a half-dozen or more of these guys that I'd put my own money into if I were an accredited investor (some that are still embargoed). The three sentences are really insufficient, I think.

But then again, I'm biased.

screeley• 16 years ago

There is no competition between embedly and embedster. One is a delivery network the other helps you generate revenue from the videos on your site. If anything we complement each other. (founder of embedly)

AmericanOP2• 16 years ago

I hope Seeing Interactive doesn't click the Learn More button during their demo..

euroclydon• 16 years ago

Maybe it's time for those interested in privacy to exit stage left.

I'd like to see a start-up find a way to monetize my lack of desire to have my digital information monetized, maybe by obfuscating or deleting my information, and then I buy from their partners to say thanks.

benwalther2• 16 years ago

I'm forgetting - which author wrote about 'Friends of Privacy' who would create false profiles and websites in order to protect the populace?

Question for you - how much would you be willing to pay for your name, user accounts, and other specific information to never come up on the first page of Google, Pipl, or other search engines?

barry-cotter• 16 years ago

Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

ReputationDefender.com/MyPrivacy

It appears to be very cheap. I have no connection with this company or anyone who works for it, ttbomk.

MyPrivacy protects you from stalkers, scam artists and direct marketers, by continually tracking down your personal information and removing it from databases on the Internet. MyPrivacy removes your name, address, age, phone number, past addresses, and names of relatives from websites that sell or give away your personally identifiable information without your permission.

pmjordan3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I'd love a "Tarsnap for email". GMail is good, but I do worry about it. But encrypting everything as soon as it arrives would push the burden of searching and filtering back out to the client. Haven't figured out an optimal solution.

borism3• 16 years ago

Why would it be pushed to the client?

Seems to me you can do this just as well on server side, and work more on ensuring Server<->Client interface security. Crypto tokens would be a start.

vyrotek• 16 years ago

I think the DataMarketplace is a great idea.

I wonder if quality or customer satisfaction will be an issue. I imagine there could be some datasets that don't quite meet up to the expectation of the buyer. But there isn't a real good way to refund money since there's nothing to return.

For example, how do you verify that the dataset really contains 'Every Target Store' in the US?

Perhaps they have an ebay-like seller rating feature planned?

pistoriusp• 16 years ago

I'm pretty interested to see what the CHROMAom guys are going to come up with - Are they going to build something new?

I'm a fan of http://colourlovers.com.

Maybe they'll make affordable... long lasting... PANTONE books.

andrewhyde• 16 years ago

My favorite on the list, great guys, great product!

Locke16892• 16 years ago

I'm really interested to see what happens to Crocodoc. Back in high school a programmer friend and I built a rough website to do joint collaboration that we called Collaborate. In our minds it was mainly a solution for all the peer reviewing we had to do for English class, but it follows the same track as Crocodoc. We ended up shutting it down because Google released Google Docs and a number of other real-time collaboration services sprang up. We didn't really have time for marketing/didn't know what we were doing, so it was kind of ridiculous to compete. I'm not really sad about it (we wrote it in PHP, yech), but I'm wondering how Crocodoc will deal with the same problems.

gridspy• 16 years ago

For every person using Google Docs, there are another 10 or 100 who haven't heard of it, don't understand it or think it is too hard.

Don't give up in the face of competition. It just validates the marketplace.

For instance - Dropbox went up against many other cloud storage systems and is winning.

Locke16892• 16 years ago

That's a very good point. I sometimes wish I had been a little older when we started this project because we had some cool little features that even some of the larger players haven't come out with (three-way document merge, for example).

maxklein2• 16 years ago

My picks for the ones that will be successful from the idea only, without looking at the bios of the founders or the websites:

- Notifo

- Zencoder (If they drop their prices. Those prices are horrendous for the REAL market they are targeting)

- Nowmov (with name change)

- Crocodoc (will sell, but will not have too many users)

- Gamador

- Cardpool

- Chromaom

- Answerly

- Zenedy

- Data Marketplace

- 140Bets

Rauchg2• 16 years ago

IMHO, Etacts is clearly the best.

jswinghammer• 16 years ago

I'm hoping that Crocodoc does well because I have a need for their product in a few projects I'm working on. I think there's a need for an alternative to Print2Flash which is pretty much abandoned as near as I can tell. They seem to just collect payments and not respond to emails. They don't really compete with them exactly now but if they did that could be good for them.

jon_dahl• 16 years ago

re Zencoder: thanks for the mostly kind words. We've run a lot of numbers of a few hundred thousand files on representative websites, and we chose that pricing model because it was (1) pretty competitive relative to other options, and (2) it aligns incentives with our customers well.

But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.

jolan• 16 years ago

There's definitely some cool applications for this that I hope you get into. For instance, providing format templates, i.e.:

- encode multiple resolutions for silverlight's smoothhd streaming and generate the metadata file (http://www.cmstream.net/ used to provide an opensource way to do this but they pulled the src for some reason -- I have a src snapshot if you want)

- encode mp4/ogv for use with html5 video players like sublime (http://jilion.com/sublime/video)

- support mp3/ogg for html5 audio

- support imaging (like autorotating batches of images based on exif)

Pricing does seem a tad expensive. 6cents/minute versus ~9cents/hour for EC2. I'd probably be more likely to build my own solution just because it's cheaper.

rdamico• 16 years ago

I'm a co-founder at crocodoc, and would be interested to hear your reasoning behind your "will sell, but will not have too many users" comment. It sounds like you have a specific niche market in mind that you think crocodoc will gain traction in to the exclusion of others?

maxklein2• 16 years ago

It's just difficult to explain, innit? I'm trying to imagine explaining exactly what crocodoc is to the misses and it's unclear. Usually, when there is this lack of clarity, it will tend to appeal to geeks or people who already want something like that, and not just everyone.

That's what I mean - it will be big within the crowd of people who take time to understand it, but the other people just won't get it.

georgekv• 16 years ago

Interestingly I saw Cardpool featured on my local news the other day.

lukev• 16 years ago

Kind of sad to see so many products that are derivative, either directly (we scrape twitter!) or indirectly (We're going to do what X did, only for Y!)

Of course it probably all makes good business sense and I wish them all luck and to be happily bought out.

I just wish there was something original - X because it's a good idea and will bring great good, rather than X because Y...

emmett2• 16 years ago

They're not really "Just X, only for Y" - that's just the fastest and simplest way to explain what they're doing.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XMeetsY

iamwil2• 16 years ago

Chances are, you wouldn't recognize something original if you saw it. You'd probably say, "that sounds useless" or "why would anyone want to do that"?

richcollins2• 16 years ago

Zenedy is taking the opposite approach by first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising

Sounds like MFA spam. So much for make something that people want.

malloreon• 16 years ago

It's demand media with a different name.

iamwil2• 16 years ago

In this case, 'people' would be writers, not readers.

richcollins2• 16 years ago

Sounds like a zeroish sum.

clistctrl• 16 years ago

Data Market place looks like a site I will be using in the future, and I really want to know more about embedster.

decadentcactus• 16 years ago

I was curious about data market too. I've been looking for (at least in the back of my mind) a database of people's names.

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

Do they use any DRM? It seems like data would be hard to sell because it's easy to copy. On the other hand, if you're selling to enterprisey people then they usually try to follow the letter of the law for fear of getting caught.

jlangenauer• 16 years ago

I have to say I'm not that impressed with the list either - but I offer the following anecdote as to why my opinion shouldn't count that much.

A VC was being told about a new web startup in the 1990's. The startup involved people putting their goods up for sale, where people would bid for them, then exchange the goods and money.

The VC said "People who've never seen each other, sending goods and money to one another, sight unseen? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard!".

The startup was obviously eBay, and I keep that story in mind every time I hear someone's business idea that I think is less than brilliant. After all, what do I know?

(I read that anecdote somewhere, but have lost the URL - if anyone knows it, I'd love to have a reference)

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

eBay has a pretty good business model on its face. It's hard to look back in time, but you could tell that eBay COULD be big, if it surmounted enough obstacles. On the other hand, a startup to tell bloggers about your startup has limited room to grow.

HaltingState2• 16 years ago

Ebay created the market for online auction services. They created a new category of products and services which satisfied needs not fulfilled elsewhere. These startups are not directed at market creation activity and are not disruptive.

csomar• 16 years ago

I should see the site and try out the service and watch the result to judge. Nevertheless, I'll stay disappointed from Startups that are Twitter Apps or Twitter Related. Twitter is a new phenomena, it's hot because it got lot of TV, media coverage: 30% or even less are inactive and also consider the non-real users (Spam bot, feeds, apps...). It's too early to consider Twitter a success to build your startup upon it.

100k• 16 years ago

I imagine that this has something to do with RFS 3: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html ("Things Built On Twitter")

HaltingState2• 16 years ago

Farmville has more users than twitter. Why twitter? Why not facebook?

borism3• 16 years ago

Notifo - Creating a mobile phone push notification platform which allows any service/business/app/website/anyone to send instant notifications to their users’ mobile phones without the need to develop applications for specific hardware models.

SMS?

johnrob• 16 years ago

Hopefully Notifo is building something that will replace SMS for this use case.

jfb4• 16 years ago

SMS costs. Notifications don't.

qeorge• 16 years ago

Does Zenedy sound exactly like Demand Media to anyone else?

"..first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising, and finally contracting out the creation of that content to qualified freelance writers."

That's pretty much Demand Media in one sentence.

lenley• 16 years ago

kind of, but demand's big money maker is enom.com

abossy• 16 years ago

I had the same feeling. It's interesting that YC is funding a company in this space, because Demand Media churns out low-quality content--essentially monetizable crap--and has no qualms about admitting this. PG has always been proud about the quality of the software YC companies produce, so it's surprising that there's suddenly an intersect between YC and Demand Media. I wonder if Zenedy has figured out a way to make better quality content at a similar price.

smakz• 16 years ago

It's tempting to play armchair investor and criticize YC's choices, but they've been doing this for a few years now and if at first you don't understand the choices, dig deeper.

For me, it seems at first glance to be a good mix. A few pretty obvious starting business models for some, really good synergy between the groups with their ideas, and in general it seems to reflect the scope intended for seed stage start ups.

Sure not all of them are at first glance overly ambitious in trying to change the world, but I'm also not convinced that a good majority of them can't end up doing just that.

Many of them fit perfectly with YC's philosophy of "intuitive hacks" that a group could bang out and try to build traction for in a three/four month incubator time frame.

ziadbc• 16 years ago

From my experience YC is sort of like the state of Missouri. Show me don't tell me.

The ideas on this list might not be pie in the sky, but they are most likely something people can get their head around, and are fairly polished.

This makes sense as the next step for many of these teams is going to be to try to raise capital. The more pie in the sky, the harder it is to get buy in from an investor, unless you have the goods. In three months I'd bet these groups have something pretty nice to show for their time spent in YC and inching toward an even larger goal that might not be evident from their 3 line description.

patio113• 16 years ago

Congratulations guys. We look forward to seeing what you come up with.

parasctr2• 16 years ago

Ideas mean absolutely nothing. For every idea that someone comes up with I can find you 5 other guys that had thought about the same idea a while back. Its the people who can execute the idea that YC chooses to invest. Most of the YC startup founders have done some work in the past and they have show that they are resourceful and that they can execute. So don't read too much into the idea thing.

ledger123• 16 years ago

I was expecting "Answerly" similar to stackexchange but from a cursory look, it just seems a search engine. I think some integration of stackexchange like features might be useful.

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