CoreOS.com sounds super promising. I'm gonna be rooting for them. It's been a while since I last saw a real CS startup come out of Silicon Valley, much less YC. The action in this space seems to all be happening in Boston.
My field is data analytics, and the companies that come to mind are Vertica, Tokutek, Hadapt, Autonomy. Clearly Palo Alto has Cloudera, Hortonworks, Trifacta, and I'm sure countless others. I was generalizing incorrectly.
The point I was really making was that most YC startups are focused on solving for inefficiencies in various verticals (inspired by AirBnB I guess). Very few are focused on core CS. So I was pleasantly surprised to read about CoreOS.
Sorry to toot our own horn, but RethinkDB is a YC startup which is about as hardcore CS as you can get. Clustrix too (though you wouldn't normally hear about them since they're not too focused on the open source community). There are a couple of others but I can't think of them now off the top of my head.
Core CS/systems startups are definitely a minority in YC, but there are more than a few!
Interestingly enough, the product appears to be entirely functional once that modal is circumvented. I'm not sure why they would direct the user to a functional product when they are ostensibly not open for public use.
I wasn't able to get by the modal box. Can't I actually browse the site without having to put in an email address? Not the best first impression. The idea seems very cool.
Also, as much as I love a good Canon v. Nikon flamewar, there's a huge comparison-shopping unmet need in the CSC (compact system camera) space: Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji X, Sony NEX, Nikon J/V, Canon M, etc.
Aka please send me a X100S, X-pro1, and a EP-5/VF-4 to test :)
Lumoid founders, if you haven't yet reached out to Mike Johnston, Steve Huff, Ken Rockwell, Michael Reichmann, Kirk Tuck, et.al, hop to it! They have huge audiences of photo enthusiasts who'd be receptive to the model.
Also, how do you differentiate yourselves from rentglass, lensrentals, lensprotogo, etc.?
I have no problems with sharing a camera though -- I have bacteria on my hands all the time from handshakes; etc., and well-established mitigating practices (washing my hands).
I suppose you could clean the headphones with rubbing alcohol...
Most of these websites look nearly identical (twitter bootstrap anyone?), across all three batches. As a visual learner and someone who is (unfortunately) inclined to judge a book by its cover, it's hard for me to get excited about any of these companies by visiting their sites. Frankly they look generic. The cynical part of me wonders if these companies afraid of taking risks and doing something bold with their online presentation.
Also looking forward to the next era of web company names -- let's call it post-skeunameism (Crowdery and Apptimize I'm looking at you). This batch has actually been much improved in that regard from what I remember over the past few years.
Happy to see Panorama Education here, definitely a bright group :) Also refreshing to see that they are profitable, given that these days profitability is frequently, though not always, left out of the equation for young startups.
HackerMeter is an interesting concept. Curious to try it out
edit: Logged in, I'm on the very first basic Fibonacci question and there's no support to submit my answer in JavaScript, seriously? I can understand not being to account for all the different server-side languages out there but this is a website and all browsers support Javascript. There's nothing in their "about us" that says they are targeted to a specific type of developer so hopefully they'll add this in the future.
I'll bite -- improved twitter bootstrap theme! The new design is more like the traditional "fundable" SV-startup-bootstrap theme.
In all seriousness, I think it is rather bold that they include a polarizing substance (butter) in their name. Personally I'd probably avoid the issue and go with something a bit less controversial. To be quite honest, even though I eat and enjoy butter the name "Buttercoin" is a slight turnoff -- I can only imagine how the less dairy inclined feel about it.
