Blog comment correcting startup gets $25m funding

by gregjor • 18 years ago

28 26 18 years ago

In a little-noticed deal that closed yesterday the Silicon Valley startup apostrophree secured a $25 million first round with Bolus Venture Capital of Palo Alto. apostrophree received seed money from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator earlier this year.

globalrev• 18 years ago

My first reaction was "how the f--- did they raise 25 million dollars ?", after reading I see their use but still, why 25 million dollars? Do they need that kind of money to expand? How many are they? Do founders ever get a large sum of such money as their own money or is it always purely investment money?

I guess YCombinator make money when their companies receive funding?

Anyway, congrats and good luck!

timr• 18 years ago

It's expensive to build the necessary infrastructure -- the conjunction junctions alone can cost millions.

henning2• 18 years ago

As Steve Yegge wrote about earlier, determining the function of a conjunction junction can be difficult.

ivank• 18 years ago

That had me going for a while.

car2• 18 years ago

Me too. Well done, and not a bad idea. The spelling Nazi in me was already rejoicing.

Loved this line: "We observed that non-technical staff with Internet access are more likely to use their computers to view and collect pornography than to post spelling corrections."

The "clue gate" in the last paragraph is the final giveaway.

gregjor• 18 years ago

I'm an apostrophree beta tester. When I read your comment I saw "The spelling Nazi in me was already rejoicing." It really works!

listic2• 18 years ago

What's so wrong with "clue gate" in particular?

softbuilder2• 18 years ago

I was suckered all the way up to the point where he describes as system for removing cliches. I am that gullible.

lxbui• 18 years ago

This artackle (sp?) wuz purdy (sp?) funny. I thought something was fishy.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

Is the name 'apostrophree' a typo itself? There are no hits on Google besides this article.

It seems way more efficient to have something like this running server side by whoever is hosting the content. This is something like charging for a spelling/grammar checker to read documents. As long as the publisher had a good editor I shouldn't have to pay for one.

henning2• 18 years ago

I think the post is a joke. That would explain a lot.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

That does make more sense, but there are so many stupid ideas that get funding it makes it tough to spot.

axod• 18 years ago

"In a typical company a small but significant number of employees read blogs and comment threads every day, sometimes several times in a work day. I say a significant number because the people who read comment threads and post comments of their own are very often among the most highly-paid people in the organization. The time apostrophree saves goes right to the bottom line.

Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online."

---

So the target customer is someone who wants to not be so hung up about spelling mistakes and grammar, and wants to save time? This just seems a ridiculous answer to me. I can see it being very useful, and a great feature in something else...

immad• 18 years ago

For those that have not got it. This is a Joke

apostrophree is not a YC startup. Presumably its completely made up (its or it's??).

softbuilder2• 18 years ago

Don't bait people! Think of the time lost.

bullseye• 18 years ago

> ... a Russian company that is working on what they call a "clue gate." The idea is to identify and filter out postings from newbies...

This has got to be an April fools joke that is just 231 days early.

fbailey• 18 years ago

ok people I just corrected my estimate of the average intelligence of HN users...

gojomo• 18 years ago

This joke should only be read through an edit-for-length proxy.

imgabe• 18 years ago

Ok, I totally fell for that. I came to this thread hoping to celebrate an end to useless spelling/grammar flamewars. Oh well.

siculars• 18 years ago

this would probably work as an ajax plugin to blogging/commenting platforms, which probably already exists.

froo• 18 years ago

If only something like this was real... or there was some other way of correcting the general butchering of the English language that occurs.

Maybe there should be some sort of law that requires everyone where some sort of modified electric dog collar so that every time someone types in "lol, wut r u sayin" - they get 10,000 volts.

This kind of technology should probably also apply to trolls, spammers and politicians.

listic2• 18 years ago

Don't be cruel; 50 volts should be enough

qqq• 18 years ago

> Programmers seem to divide into two groups when it comes to writing: nearly illiterate on the one hand, and pedantic on the other.

They shouldn't say it seems that way, they should say it is or it isn't. This is weak writing.

tobyo• 18 years ago

I like this bit: "It also looks at articles that contain flags like (sp?), which is the author telling us that he or she failed high school English."

The poor spelling found on the Internet creates a positive feedback loop that makes it increasingly difficult to spell words properly.

Before wide acceptance of the Web, most written words appeared in magazines, books, newspapers, and other sources which were, hopefully, reviewed by professionals with more knowledge of spelling than the average person. If you were unsure of a spelling you could write out the word and easily recognize if the word matched the ordering of letters that you had seen so many times before.

Now, for some words, you've probably seen the improper spelling more often than the correct spelling. That makes it more difficult to recall or recognize the proper spelling. For children subjected to this misspelling onslaught at an early age, it must be worse. I suppose many of these spelling problems would not even exist if English were a more intuitive written language. However, I expect this all to go away as grammar checkers are embedded into web browsers.

hooande• 18 years ago

That wasn't even close to being funny. And why drag YC into it?

Blog comment correcting startup gets $25m funding

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