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Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

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Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#71

Post by rmorrison »

zaidf wrote: post #61
fnid2 wrote: post #2

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.

Mostly me too products. like... "Google.com: A search engine that looks at link popularity to find the best search results. It's going to revolutionize search." Talk to investors from the starting days of Google, and they'll cite you a dozen examples of similar sounding pitches. It's hard to tell from few liners about the future of a company.

Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses.

(Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#72

Post by pmjordan »

borism wrote: post #64
pmjordan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#73

Post by tbrooks »

nhebb wrote: post #29
nailer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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... Gmail came in at only 5.5%.

I think the data is skewed; most email marketing is used for B2B, rather than B2C.

And many people have more than one email address and in a corporate environment, it shouldn't be surprising Gmail falls below 10%.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#74

Post by rokhayakebe »

Alex3917 wrote: post #38
fnid2 wrote: post #2

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.

Hey this is Alex from LaunchHear. We just finished our presentation fifteen minutes ago and we're hanging around outside the YC building now. I just wanted to say that a lot of these startups are actually really impressive, it's probably just not obvious from the three sentence descriptions. Also, a bunch of these startups are still under embargo so they aren't even being written about. Give it a year or so and then…

His/her comment does not read as a complain, and I believe his opinion is shared with many. The reason, as you mentioned, is the short description takes away from the service, so I am sure these companies are in fact much much more. Another problem is that all these products are version 0.1 of a much bigger version, so they need time to mature.

Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#75

Post by mccutchen »

staunch wrote: post #58
idlewords wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2010 - there should be things in this list that are more awesome, even at first reading, than 'embedly' and 'embedster'.

Says the guy who created a Delicious clone in 2009! http://pinboard.in/about/ (I admit it's a bit ad hominem, but putting other people's stuff down for being derivative when your thing is the epitome of that seems lame to me.)

Ah, but he made a clone of del.icio.us from back when it was new and minimal and still really awesome. Which is much, much better than a boring old clone of modern Delicious.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#76

Post by 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.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#77

Post by Rauchg »

emmett wrote: post #33
fnid2 wrote: post #2

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.

Yeah, me-too products are never really interesting. I mean, does the world really need another search engine? There's already Lycos and Altavista. Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating.

Hey, there's already MySpace, WHY create Facebook?! Why do something similar on the surface, but focus on what the user really wants? Madness.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#79

Post by Rauchg »

maxklein wrote: post #24

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

IMHO, Etacts is clearly the best.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#80

Post by jpatte »

jedc wrote: post #8

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... Corrections (particularly in early years of YC) welcome!

Dropbox website is now dropbox.com
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