
Y Combinator presents 26 new startups  - dwynings
http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/23/y-combinator/
======
fnid2
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.

~~~
nailer
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.

~~~
nhebb
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...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-
popularity-june-2009/)

Gmail came in at only 5.5%.

~~~
jonknee
That's clients, not providers. I use Gmail and have for years, but I don't
have an @gmail.com address that I use or access my mail from the web
interface. My mail client is typically Mail.app or the Mail iPhone app.

They are tracking these based on loaded images, which means Gmail users by
default aren't counted. Some versions of Outlook (at least 2000) autoload
images. Lots of mobile devices don't load images, which makes BlackBerry users
undercounted.

Not to mention sample bias--I also don't sign up for email newsletters.

tl;dr those stats are a hot steaming pile

~~~
nailer
You probably don't use a lot of MS products.

Outlook 2000 is 4 (maybe 5) versions old. At least 2010, 2007 and 2003 don't
load images by default, I wouldn't be surprised if Outlook XP didn't either.

More to the point: no large organization is using Outlook 2000 anymore. It's
unsupported and you can get 2010, 2007, 2003 or even XP on your current
license agreement.

~~~
jonknee
... And yet "Outlook 2000, 2003, Express" make up 32% of all email clients
found in their study. My point isn't that these are in high use, but that they
are vastly over counted (and even then meaningless to try and find providers
as there are plenty of people using Gmail inside of Outlook).

~~~
nailer
Aye, lumping in 2003 (which is current -1, ie, still supported by MS and most
corporate customers) with 2000 and Express (which aren't supported) and
weirdly omitting XP is odd.

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run4yourlives
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
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

~~~
fallintothis
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.

~~~
patio11
If it makes you feel better, you can pretend they said "We make the games our
customers want to play rather than the games we think they _should_ want to
play." Because that is what they said.

~~~
fallintothis
_Because that is what they said._

In so many words. I trust their second sentence is relevant and makes more
sense to investors, but I imagined it being their slogan. "Gamador: We launch
faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better" just sounds humorous (hence
the giggling). To me, as a Joe-average user, it sounds more like That Guy from
_Futurama_ than "we make a lot of really addicting games".

~~~
lacker
Heck, if it made you giggle, maybe we _should_ use it as our slogan.

------
qeorge
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.

~~~
abossy
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.

------
jlangenauer
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)

~~~
HaltingState
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.

------
euroclydon
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.

~~~
pmjordan
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.

~~~
borism
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.

~~~
pmjordan
How would you do a full text search on the server if the server only holds an
encrypted version of the data? To my knowledge, no homomorphic encryption
algorithms exist that can be used for practical applications such as full-text
search.

The way to tackle this would be to make index creation on the client
incremental: any new messages are downloaded, decrypted, indexed, the index
encrypted and uploaded back to the server. I'm not good enough with either
search/indexing or crypto to know how you'd use such an incremental encrypted
index to perform an actual search without having to decrypt (and therefore
download) the entire index first. In fairness, I haven't researched this yet.

Securing the client-server comms is a solved problem, I'm not aware of any
problems with SSL/TLS as long as the server also authenticates itself (which
current browsers don't permit, but is easy to do with SSL directly).

Caveat: I'm neither cperciva nor tptacek (let alone Bruce Schneier) so there's
a high probability I made some factual mistakes in this post.

~~~
derefr
How about a mutually-trusted third party (somewhat like OpenID identity
providers are supposed to work right now)? The mail service uploads your
encrypted index to the search provider, you upload your key directly to them
as well (possibly beforehand), and the search provider returns the results to
the mail service. It's not quite client- _or_ server-side, then, though; after
all, you could specify the third party to be your own machine if you were
paranoid, or their own server if you were lazy/unconcerned. It creates more of
a flexible spectrum of privacy levels.

------
parasctr
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.

------
Locke1689
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
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.

~~~
Locke1689
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).

------
hristov
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.

~~~
screeley
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)

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

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

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

~~~
jfb
He's a machine. We're all in awe of him.

~~~
troyk
+1

~~~
ryanwaggoner
You can actually just click the little up arrow to give a +1....we don't
really need to know that it was _you_ :)

------
vyrotek
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?

------
richcollins
_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.

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

~~~
richcollins
Sounds like a zeroish sum.

------
ziadbc
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.

------
maxklein
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

~~~
rdamico
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?

~~~
maxklein
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.

------
smakz
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.

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

------
patio11
Congratulations guys. We look forward to seeing what you come up with.

------
jedc
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...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1Vnl5NmZjaTBNQWlJYVozMEE&hl=en)

Corrections (particularly in early years of YC) welcome!

~~~
jpatte
Dropbox website is now dropbox.com

~~~
jedc
Thanks... updated.

------
callmeed
Embedster and Embedly ... confusingly similar names

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

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

~~~
jfb
Nobody likes propping up insane petrodictators, but all the good names are
taken.

------
jfornear
Infoharmoni looks really cool. <http://www.infoharmoni.com/>

~~~
guelo
Is that the Tomcat favicon? lol

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

------
lukev
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...

~~~
emmett
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>

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

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

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

------
ledger123
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.

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

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

~~~
jacoblyles
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.

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

~~~
jfb
SMS costs. Notifications don't.

~~~
borism
eh?

