

Does Paul Graham Get What He Asks For? [infographic] - kapilkale
http://www.giftrocket.com/blog/does-paul-graham-get-what-he-asks-for

======
MatthewB
For "fix advertising," Munch on Me and Groupon were listed. I'm trying to
figure out how these two companies have fixed advertising and I just can't. I
don't even know why they are mentioned with regards to advertising.

There's still so much room for innovation in the advertising space.
Advertiser's think that click through rate is the key metric for them, this is
far from true. Click through rate just means the advertisement itself is
compelling enough to garner a click. What about after the user clicks? Why are
advertisers paying on a CPM basis when they are looking at CTR as the key
metric? CTR means advertisers want people to visit a subsequent page and
perform additional actions. Companies have tried to assign cost to these
additional actions but have mostly been unsuccessful because it is extremely
difficult to track. Google Adwords is better for this but people are moving
away from standard search (in the long term at least) and it is still far from
perfect. Also, there's enormous display inventory out there that needs to be
disrupted.

I could go on for a while about advertising and I have some initial ideas for
improvements of the online advertising model. I'm excited to talk to like-
minded people at the YC ad innovation conference.

~~~
robryan
The new startup DoubleRecall fits under this heading as an attempt to
redefine/"fix" advertising.

~~~
MatthewB
Checked out double recall, seems interesting but at the same time it seems
like a combination of in-line text ads and interstitials. I am sure it will
catch people's attention having to type in a product name or words related to
a product but I believe that will only annoy potential customers.

~~~
robryan
I think it will to, depends on your value proposition, I see it working for an
article I want to read because the minor inconvenience is worth it for the
article. If what your producing is fairly low quality and available everywhere
you will drip away a far larger % of users.

------
markmccraw
I know the creator acknowledges this, but the news sites aren't even close to
(or trying to) fixing the news. Maybe someday down the road they will morph,
but in fact there has been very little to be done to create an online news
organization that both provides original reporting and is substantially better
than the web adaptations that traditional media provides. If all we get is
better aggregators, the orgnaizations generating the news to be aggregated
might still fail.

Personally, I think the best prospect for something awesome to happen in the
news sector is that a profitable aggregator similar to HuffPo (but probably
not them for a lot of reason), Techmeme or Google News, really makes a run at
becoming a media organization. This would require investing in setting up real
live bureaus and paying for boots on the ground journalism, but at the rate
the current guardians of media move (AP just added links into their stores),
it might have some traction.

~~~
kapilkale
I agree with the first paragraph of your comment. Another YC-backed startup
called NewsTilt was trying to tackle this problem more directly, but failed
soon after launching.

[http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-
down...](http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/)

------
ayanb
Actually the RFS has changed a bit for winter 2012. There are new categories
like "New Paths Through Product Space" and "Ephemeralization Apps"

See Link - <http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html>

------
jf
I'm not sure if 280 North should be categorized under "web office apps"? Their
main products were Atlas and Cappuccino - 280 Slides was more of a demo of
what was possible using their tooling?

~~~
Me1000
Cappuccino wasn't really their product either, it was a means to establish a
foothold in the framework area... Such that atlas would be popular.

------
manuelflara
The point 22 doesn't have any samples: A web based database/Excel hybrid. I
think Wufoo (a YC company), if used for oneself, could be thought as something
like this.

~~~
chime
I keep coming back to this idea over and over. DabbleDB was sort of like this
but it closed shop after a talent acquisition. Formstack.com (formerly hosted
at formspring.com) had very cool table-building tools but it appears they
pivoted to become yet another Wufoo/SurveyMonkey. JotForm is somewhere between
Wufoo and a database. FormLogix is another form-builder. Hyperoffice.com and
Zoho.com/creator sell themselves as MS Access alternatives. FileMaker.com is
probably the closest thing to pg's request.

Nevertheless, I still feel there exists a sweet spot that nobody has managed
to reach yet. But I don't know how I'd go about finding out if people would
really pay for a good excel-db hybrid web-app or not, considering so many
alternatives exist, many of them nearly free.

~~~
s-phi-nl
Along with DabbleDB, bList (also acquired, by Socrata) was the other startup
mentioned at the time as satisfying this idea.

------
sequoia
Rockmelt: "Simplified Web Browsing" Yeah... right.

------
pyre
How does Gmail qualify as CRM anymore than YahooMail or Hotmail do?

~~~
kapilkale
It isn't visible in the 600px version, but the feature of interest is Gmail's
People Widget, which is a lot like Rapportive.

------
flipside
I could potentially position my startup under 1, 2, & 7, but since it forces
me to pick one I'm skipping it since none of those is likely to be our
explicit focus. Story of my life, I've never fit nicely into one box and I'm
not gonna start now.

I guess I'll just leave it up to them to make sense of a universal
feedback/recommendation engine that's a mashup of Pandora + Delicious + 20
Questions (aka Pandora for Everything).

------
mmx
After looking at that hopefully he asks for easier ways to view,submit and
create custom reports from public health data for both doctors and patients,
I'll be here Paul.

~~~
iBercovich
How is patient's data public? Health is such an interesting space- there is so
much that can be done to make people's understanding of their health and their
health costs better. The problem is the enormous amount of bureaucracy and the
artificial barriers of entry (boards, professional organizations, other semi-
public institutions). How do you go about dealing with that?

~~~
mmx
I don't think I was clear, but my startup allows you to see drug side effects
reported to the FDA by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst
others over the last 6 years. It'll also allows you to narrow down those side
effects to age and gender and make custom reports you can discuss with your
doctor. The AERS data is public and has been for a long time, but it's
increasingly harder to sort. We try to keep the site as clean and easy as
possible.

------
Havoc
Took me a while to figure out its not RockMe_i_t...domain isn't even
registered.

------
voidfiles
They forgot picplz.

------
praptak
"Asks" for? Paul Graham never _asks_ \- the reality just models itself after
his writing.

