
588 Kleiner Perkins iFund Applications Accidentally Published To Web  - dell9000
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/03/588-kleiner-perkins-ifund-applications-accidentally-published-to-web/
======
daveambrose
I found Aaron Greenspan's and Joel Sadler's pitch interesting and actually
very valuable - iPhone application consolidating your flight information, et.
al.:

 _24,'Mr. Aaron Greenspan',Every one of the tens (if not hundreds) of
thousands of business travelers in the United States hates flying. More than
ever, the airlines and government regulations make life difficult, with lost
baggage, long security lines, weather delays, maintenance delays, and
confusing gate changes all commonplace. The information necessary to alleviate
many travel headaches is actually available, but it\'s not integrated in one
place in a usable format, and certainly not in one place that travelers have
easy access to. Fortunately, business travelers tend to have money to spare,
and they are willing to do anything that will make their traveling experience
less painful, however incremental the improvement to their life may be.','The
iPhone is the perfect medium to deliver an integrated view of a travel
itinerary. Far beyond the dates and times that most people assume itineraries
to be limited to, Think\'s iPhone application would bring in data from
airlines\' baggage tracking databases, flight arrival and departure
information, frequent flier mile numbers and historical information,
historical gate, flight number and airline delay information, and weather
maps. It could also eventually be used to check into flights without having to
wait in line to see an agent or use a kiosk. The bar codes that almost all
airlines currently print on paper to create boarding passes could be easily
displayed on an iPhone\'s high-resolution LCD screen. Essentially, the iPhone
could keep track of every aspect of a traveler\'s life, and it would become an
essential business tool as a result. The buzz surrounding the application
could boost sales for Think, Apple, and even the airlines themselves, who
desperately need the revenue.','Think Computer Corporation has a number of
existing technology assets that would be helpful in the development of a web-
based solution for the iPhone. Its Lampshade® LAMP framework makes web-based
application development quick and easy. Think\'s CommonRoom social network is
designed to give professionals and academics a secure way to share data and
communicate. (It could be a useful integration point for Think\'s iPhone
Travel application later on.) Think also has developed Exponent, a full-
fledged business accounting system, similar to Oracle Financials or NetSuite.
It could be extremely helpful for providing an easy way to track employee
reimbursement expenses in the long term.','The Blackberry could also be used
to provide similar features hypothetically, but no application exists to date
(to our knowledge) that integrates everything in one place as proposed
above.','Aaron Greenspan started Think from his bedroom in Shaker Heights,
Ohio at the age of 15. While he attended high school, Aaron grew Think to
support more than 150 businesses, individuals and schools across the United
States and Canada. He subsequently changed the focus of the company from IT
consulting to software development. Today, Think sells a line of web-based
applications and software development tools including Lampshade, CommonRoom,
Exponent, and Whiteboard.\r\n\r\nIn 1999, Aaron was the first place winner of
the Junior Achievement Young IT Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He was also
awarded the Kodak Young Leaders award, and has spoken at the NASA Kennedy
Space Center. In October of 2000, Aaron spearheaded the creation of Think
Computer Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with the goal of
helping children through technology. Aaron invented The Facebook while
attending Harvard College in September, 2003. He graduated cum laude from
Harvard in three years (Advanced Standing) with an A.B. in Economics in
2004.','Joel Sadler is a graduate student studying Mechanical Engineering at
Stanford University. He previously worked at Apple, Inc. in the Digital Hub
Product Design division, and is familiar with the Cocoa programming framework.
Joel received his bachelor\'s degree from
M.I.T.','','New',0,20080306125835,20080306125835);_

I'd be willing to purchase something like this.

~~~
Anon84
This one is pretty interesting also... and from someone with real world
experience.

66,'Rahul Patwari,'I am not a company, but a physician who works in an urban
emergency department. Every day I see the costs of inefficient health care
delivery. There is a monetary costs in unnecessary tests and the time delays
they cause. There is a cost to patients in that the stretched resources end up
inappropriately distributed. There is a cost to physicians who are burdened
with an ever growing fund of knowledge which is impossible with which it\'s
impossible to keep up. This eventually leads to medical malpractice lawsuits
which are a drain to our legal and medical systems. ','A small but significant
step in improving all of these problems is making it easy for physicians to
practice with the latest standards-of-care. My solution is to use the iPhone
as a platform to deliver diagnostic and treatment plans based on the current
literature. For example, imagine a patient with a stroke. The physician, using
his iPhone, can determine if he meets the criteria to receive blood-clot
dissolving medication, or determine if that would pose too great a risk of
fatal bleeds in the brain. X-rays can be ordered according to established
guidelines instead of the gestalt/gut-feeling of the physician. These rules
have been shown to be very sensitive in finding fractures, yet at the same
time reducing the number of unnecessary x-rays. The applications are quite
broad. ','There is no product like this available. The technology isn\'t
difficult, just a bunch of algorithms organized properly: cardiovascular,
neurological, orthopedics, etc. Right now the information is there in the
medical literature and unwieldy text books. My idea is simply to bring them
together into one easy-to-use program. The iPhone is a device many physicians
already carry, and if not, are looking at buying. This would be a reason to do
so. What makes this device unique is that these decisions/calculations can be
done bedside (with the doctor holding the iPhone). When done, it can be easily
slipped back into a pocket. ','There is no product like this available. There
really won\'t be competition for this product as I intend to give this away
for free. There is no reason that the patient in a poorer urban hospital
shouldn\'t have access to the same care that a patient coming to a richer
hospital would get. If everyone can practice the same degree of quality care,
I sincerely believe we can improve our delivery of health care and possibly
even to more people. It will be a long while before concrete changes in health
care delivery will arrive, but this may help. ','Rahul Patwari, MD. Board
Certified Emergency Physician, Chicago, IL. I received my BS in Engineering,
Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Subsequently I did my medical training at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and completed my residency in Emergency Medicine at Chicago\'s Cook
County Hospital. ','','','New',0,20080306165443,20080306165443);

~~~
DaniFong
It is very hard to build software like this which is both accurate and easy to
use. Especially for general use. There are a lot of expert systems for medical
diagnosis, including some which were accessible on the web (hundreds were at
Revolution Health), but they are really not useful: they take far too long to
use and are not sufficiently accurate. In fact Revolution Health removed most
of them. One of the main problems is the terrible bandwidth of answering
questions posed by a wizard.

But, at least, if it's on the iPhone, the huge costs of building and dealing
with hardware are dealt with. I wish them luck, though I expect they are
ignorant of the challenges ahead.

Some time ago, my strategy was to focus on high priority automated diagnosis,
using much higher bandwidth channels, like microphones and cameras and so on.
I had some machine learning algorithms for detecting skin cancer that I
thought would significantly improve on the best existing algorithms, reaching
80-90% accuracy on a single viewing (higher than physicians which get around
60%), and nearing 100% if the moles were tracked. There were two major, but
surmountable problems: I needed to do a lot of preprocessing to remove the
variability of different cameras and shots and conditions, and I needed to get
a good dataset to train and test (those are hard to acquire.) Ultimately I
shelved the project because my cofounder wanted to work on something else
(which I shelved because now I'm working on compressed air powered vehicles.)

~~~
llimllib
How difficult were the regulatory issues around your software? I've been lead
to believe that the FDA is quite difficult to work with on this type of
software.

Furthermore, wouldn't legal liability be quite high?

~~~
DaniFong
The regulatory issues were very difficult, and I wasn't able to figure them
all out before suspending the project. There wasn't an obvious precedent. My
suspicion would be that if you built it, you could find _some_ way to make
money with it, but it would take years before the world would open up enough
for people to, say, use it online.

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deepster
There are some errors in the sql.

The monthlyRevenue field datatype should be tinyint(1) with a default of NULL.

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russ
In case you are interested in the other questionable contents of that
directory:

[http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=kpcb.sql&...](http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=kpcb.sql&fr=yfp-t-501&u=planet.emeteora.com/%257Enitemare/&w=kpcb+sql&d=WEz8NkfiRwXx&icp=1&.intl=us)

~~~
ig1
Most of the files are fairly standard, the pics are mainly humour ones (google
and you'll find them), a few games, a windows WGA hack. Some zip files which
appear to be of other sites, and bizarely enough it appears to be hosting the
images for the coin bras at <http://www.judithshead.com>.

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bprater
Lesson learned? If a file is in the path that the webserver reads from, it
could be compromised!

By default, you should never have directory listing turned on. If you have it
on, you are just looking for trouble. (Want free MP3s? Google has lots of them
it's found like this!)

~~~
jyothi
yeah the directory listing is still available on yahoo cache -
[http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=%22kpcb.sql%2...](http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=%22kpcb.sql%22&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&u=planet.emeteora.com/%257Enitemare/&w=%22kpcb+sql%22&d=WEz8NkfiRwXx&icp=1&.intl=us)

Inappropriate or could be funny file names over there. No wonder this guy did
a blunder in letting the KBCP file go public.

~~~
boredguy8
hentaitsop.swf...(divTagExperiments)...(bras)...PopCap_Zuma_Deluxe_v1.0(crack).exe

Seriously...some bad juju there.

But the landing page <http://emeteora.com/> isn't much better.

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staunch
A good wake up call to YC/TechStars, etc. It has occurred to me that having
lots of good programmers with a vested interest in breaking into the server
you take applications from is a high risk situation. Not everyone has high
ethical standards and it is a tempting target.

It'd probably be best if all applications like this were downloaded off the
server that accepts them. But even that wouldn't prevent someone from altering
the code to send off a copy somewhere.

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nolanbrown23
My submission is in there. It didn't have any specific stuff luckily and I'm
sure that's why we didn't get funded. We didn't have a solid idea.

Now my company is rolling along really well with a solid business plan and
plenty of apps coming out. I feel like I dodged a bullet by not getting
funded.

I'm pretty pissed that my data is out there though. I keep getting emails and
Twitter messages telling me about it.

~~~
ig1
Out of curiousity, why did you submit your pitch if you knew it was so-so ? -
aren't you worried it might damage your reputation (first impression, etc.) if
you want to approach KP in the future for funding ?

~~~
nolanbrown23
I'm not worried it would damage my reputation. 9 out of 10 ideas are poor
ideas to begin with but some evolve into good or great ideas eventually. Even
the ones that get funded don't have great ideas, the best company they have
funded is ng:moco. That company is just an iPhone game company. Not exactly an
original idea.

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yan
Whoa. The snapshot of the sql dump that TechCrunch links to has not only
personal contact information, but all the pitches too.

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paul9290
Anyone have a link to a copy?

We submitted and am interested in seeing if we are on that list?

~~~
ig1
There's a partial (google cached) copy linked to from the TC article, I
haven't seen anyone claim to have a full copy yet. Although it's may well be
in the alexa archive for people who have access to that.

~~~
paul9290
I saw on TC people posting a link to the google cache but it just lead to this
page does not exist message on google.

YOu happen to have a better link? thnx if you do!

~~~
ig1
The google cache is still up for me:
[http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:http://planet.emeteora....](http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:http://planet.emeteora.com/~nitemare/kpcb.sql)

~~~
paul9290
Yeah not seeing it on my end via my IP and the goog server Im connecting to.

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matt1
Do we know if any of these have gotten funded?

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jdavid
argh,... this is why VC firms don't agree to confidentiality.

since its a 100m fund, they should give the 75 of us they breached with
$25k-$100k as an i'm sorry.

~~~
webwright
Yeah, I'm sure their limited partners would be thrilled with that idea.

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tlrobinson
It looks like an employee at their hosting company decided it would be
interesting to dump one of their customer's DBs to their personal directory...

Someone's getting fired/sued.

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helveticaman
Bloopers like these are what allow new entrants to beat entrenched leaders.

~~~
ObieJazz
Let's hope so.

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river_styx
They accidentally the whole applications!

