

Y Combinator Demo Day: The Ultimate Roundup - brendanlim
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/y-combinator-demo-day-the-ultimate-roundup/

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zhyder
My Picks for:

\- Most likely to succeed in a big way: Parse

\- Most interesting/clever (want it to succeed): Verbling

\- Most scary (wary of it succeeding): Double Recall

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thisisfmu
Double Recall looks like one of the very few startups that would make the
world a worse place if they succeed :(

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jeremymims
Keep in mind that Double Recall works with news publishers. The number one
thing that publishers need is more money to pay for content production. Most
publishers are toying with a paywall model right now. I hope they go the
Double Recall route. I'd rather type in two words once a day and have an
advertiser pay for my content than pull out my credit card to hop over a
paywall.

So, here's the alternative. If the Double Recalls have figured out a nice
sustainable way to pay for a good chunk of the journalism you enjoy, wouldn't
that make the world a better place?

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iconfinder
"I hope they go the Double Recall route. I'd rather type in two words once a
day and have an advertiser pay for my content than pull out my credit card to
hop over a paywall."

Well, that depends on the price of the paywall, the quality of the content and
how much you value your time, right?

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zidar
Well, what people value more depends on each individual. Some people have more
time than money, so DoubleRecall is perfect for them, while others have money
and no time.

What DoubleRecall does, is give a chance to everyone to view the article. If
you take a look at a DoubleRecall client Finance, where people can still
choose to pay monthly fees to get the content without DoubleRecall. Other
people, like myself, can now still view the premium content without having to
pay anything. I may still later decide to but a subscription and have
uninterrupted access, but I probably wont, when someone else might.

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tuomasb
No one mentioned Mixrank in the comments, I like the idea. Maybe someday it
will be one of those essential marketing tools like SEOmoz. I for one, am lazy
and would prefer just mimic my competitors ads instead of making 10 different
ads and A/B testing them.

Coverage seems quite narrow at least for .fi domains. They probably need to
get some ad-crawler servers with IP addresses(according to GeoIP) from Finland
or any other country they want to have coverage in.

<http://www.mixrank.com/a/groupon.com> lol @ "90% off"

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cooperadymas
I'm amazed at how many "Groupon for X" startups have been popping up. In this
group there is Munch On Me (restaurants) and Aisle50 (groceries), but if you
look through a site like <http://startupli.st/startups> there are a lot of
others. Opez also says they want to turn independent professionals into their
own Groupons, which doesn't really equate. I presume they really mean giving
the independent professionals the ability to publish their own coupons.

With as much criticism as GroupOn has received, and the suspect way they have
measured their success it seems there must be a better model of comparison.
Saying you want to be the LivingSocial of X would likely give a better
impression.

Still, I'm not sure applying that business model to a specific industry like
restaurants or groceries will lead to success. For restaurants, LivingSocial
and GroupOn already give out a lot of restaurant deals. Google will soon be
moving in the market also. It's quickly becoming saturated. How long can
restaurants give away meals for half price?

Aisle50 is at least attacking an area that isn't really covered by existing
businesses.

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qasar
The S11 demo day writes up are probably one of the best ways to get a sense of
what the early stage ecosystem looks like right now. Its not a bad picture
either. These are some great startups - mature and refreshingly diverse. It's
a good time to be an entrepreneur in the valley.

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prpon
Quite a few of the companies mentioned have traction and that is pretty
impressive.

I haven't seen anyone else say it but kicksend looks a lot like getcrate from
sahil lavingia with facebook integration added to it.

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ayanb
Infact, traction could be one of the key drivers behind some of the companies
getting selected into YC.

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jorde
It would be interesting to get an overview on how many of the startups in the
current batch had their products out 1) before getting funded by YC, 2) during
YC.

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whichdan
Bushido sounds really interesting. I've always liked the Add-Ons for Heroku,
and a platform-independent version of that would be a huge help.

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bdr
I'd say Codecademy has the potential to create the most value. Lowering the
barrier to learning to code will create a lot more coders.

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cyberguppy
MarketBrief sounds like a home run to me. If the product works as described
it's a tremendous value proposition.

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thisisfmu
It's basically search engine spam generated from SEC docs. Adds needless
verbosity to when people want the info in a concise format. When looking for
actionable financial info I hate having to read through sentences when a table
or graph will do. Consider why audio podcasts never really caught on for non-
entertainment.

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randall
I don't know how to read an S1, which is why I go to places like CNBC and the
sort in the first place. Granted, I'm not a financial services kind of guy,
but it's useful to have that info generated in a digestible format. I don't
think the podcast analog works quite right... it's more like taking a blog
post from tech crunch, and automagically repurposing it for usa today by
adding relevant context programmatically. There's definitely value in that,
but I don't think it's "Bloomberg" money.

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brlewis
Go Snapjoy! I'm looking to them for market validation.

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coderdude
I wonder when exactly it was that TechCrunch was like, "wow, all we really
need to do is write YC articles all day." They're playing this site like a
violin.

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tomlin
VidYard isn't really much of an innovation, in fact, Bits on the Run has been
doing this - better - for quiet some time. VidYard is caught in between trying
to emulate YouTube and being a streaming hosting provider without convincing
me of either strengths.

BOTR offers an elegant API, skin-able players, pay-as-you-go usage, statistics
and, as an option, a totally configurable ad platform plugin for the player
that works with more than one ad platform. FWIW, I know VidYard does a lot of
this, too, but what's the YouTube angle doing for them? Other than having a
chart comparing them to _community-based_ video platforms?

EDIT: Down-vote if you want, but provide a reason. Otherwise, I'll assume: "he
said something about my startup, get him!"

