What's with the ad hominem?
I was stating an opinion. You don't know when I came to know Google or Microsoft and you don't know what my opinion of them was. You also don't know how good a judge I am of very early stage startups, which is largely irrelevant, because hardly anyone is a good judge of startups at this stage. Almost everyone knows that. In fact, I asked how to predict startup viability right here and well, see for yourself, no one really knows: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 At least I admit it.
That isn't even what I was saying, I was saying I'm not impressed with them. When I say impressed I mean in the "Do what is hard" sense. I mean in the blue ocean sense of creating markets. Building a product in an existing market and relying on a mastery of networking, pr, and marketing to make it successful simply doesn't impress me. It has nothing to do with the viability of the startup. The least impressive startups are often the most successful.
I can go into more detail for you. Granted I don't know the founders, I only have a 2/3 sentence explanation, but here goes...
LaunchHear -- This can be accomplished with a database of bloggers and the types of products they review and a list of companies that make that kind of product. When a company wants to send a product, they enter the type and get a list of addresses to send it to. It's a fairly simple app. It's not a technical problem, it's a sales and marketing problem. Plus the manpower to find the blogs and even that can be automated.
NewsLabs -- Basically a blog with some SEO and Ad tools built in. How many journalists are doing this on their own right now?
Seeing Interactive -- Plenty of startups, some of which are run by hn'ers are doing this now. I know of one out of austin, but can't remember the name. It's been done over and over -- not to say SI won't succeed -- it just isn't impressive. EDIT: You know what is hilarious? Seeing Interactive is the company I was thinking of from Austin. I was mistaken -- they're out of College Station, but I can be forgiven for that because it was many months ago when I saw them and haven't seen them sense.
Notifo -- apparently a lot of people like this one, but still, there are lots of SMS api's and text messages can be sent via email address too. I don't know exactly how notifo differentiates itself from those methods, but it's basically sending messages to people's phones and that's not impressive.
Zencoder -- This is old hat. It's an ffmpeg cluster with a queue. Put the file on your server, send the url to zencoder, it downloads the file, encodes it, then makes a callback to another url to let the requester know where to get the encoded files. I built one of these by myself 3 years ago. You could even edit the video online cropping out certain sections or adding different audio tracks.
Nowmov -- Is it difficult to search twitter for links to movies and see who has retweeted them the most? While one is playing, find another one and change the innerHTML of a div to another embed tag.
Crocodoc -- This one is actually fairly impressive. This type of marking up and editing is hard and I'd like to see what becomes of it.
Gamador -- Really? Social gaming? Is it impressive? I just don't think so. How many social gaming companies are there now? Hundreds? Thousands? Why is Gamador better? It'll be a tough pitch, but if Kevin and Dan are badasses maybe that's all you need to make a great social games company.
Cardpool -- a CRUD app like launchhear. A dating site for people with cards and people who want to buy them. This is a matter of trust mostly -- not technology, but trust has been established. It'll be hard here because how often do people get cards like this? Is it really worth it to go trade them on a website? Why not just spend it at the store? You don't like the store? Lots of gift cards can be used at multiple stores. It's a "gift" card -- get yourself a gift.
Tweetflow -- I am almost never impressed by a company that creates another company wholely dependent on the survival of another company whose survival is also in question. That said, natural language processing can be difficult, but in this case, a list of positive words and negative words and some searching is sufficient. It's neat and people will probably use it and may even pay for it.
CHROMAom, Inc. -- I love colourlovers, but it's a community about color. It's neat and it's a big community and there are lots of great color patterns there, but it's not impressive in the pg do what is hard sense.
Answerly.com -- tons of these exist already. I can't count them on two hands. People go to the internet to ask questions -- that's what they do. SEO on the question and there you go. Not impressive.
Zenedy -- just watch google trends and see where there is a dirth of content for the keywords. Finding untapped markets is a neat idea, but this is mostly a horsepower problem. If you have the money to pay for the content, you can make money. Lots of companies do this. How many domains does the guy who started MySpace have? He's been doing this for a long time. Search for hiking trails and you'll get one of his sites. I'm not sure about the revenue for the foreseeable future though, because once you've found the market people know there's little competition there. Just watch what you are doing and then copy or steal the content. It's unethical, but even Mahalo does it!
Data Marketplace -- This is a neat idea -- but not impressive. It's an online store for people with data. This model exists already -- like http://www.freebase.com/ with a pay wall.
Embedster -- Others have already commented on this one. You're adding monetization on top of embedded stuff that is often already monetized. It's kind of leechy in a way. I wonder how you're going to get past adblock plus.
Etacts -- People seem to like this one too, but it's a CRM mashup with widgets.
Embedly -- Is embeddability the goal? I got to video.bing.com and I can find all kinds of videos to embed. It's a web crawler looking for an embed tag -- it isn't special. It isn't impressive.
500Friends -- I'm not a big fan of popularity contests -- too introverted for that, so I just don't even care about this at all. I think sites like this devalue word of mouth advertising and tarnish trust relationships between people. If I tell you about a product, it's because it is a good product, not because someone paid me to tell you. Any amount of impressed I am by a few of the others here gets dinged for bing in the same list as these kinds of sites. Again, my opinion and many, I am sure, think I'm wrong. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money from companies who want to pay people to advertise for them.
Infoharmoni -- Already mentione twitter before, I wish bit.ly didn't exist (another ding). Never heard of gowalla or used foursquare -- perhaps I'm a square.
140Bets -- I think sports is a net negative for society. I'm opinionated. We waste so much time on and money on stadiums that are built with lies and tax dollars and promises of jobs and increased economic activity -- and they are a horrible waste of space. Have you ever walked in a stadium neighborhood when there is no game going on? It's dead. It's wasted space that could be used for a park. Take the fence down and let people use the space -- they paid for it! Instead, 99% of the time it is unused or used by a minority of people to play a game. I love George Carlin's take on it. Give all the golf courses to the homeless people. Another ding.
Greplin -- More social scraping? Really? I suppose by this point, I'm just kind of tired of reading all the references to twitter and social networks and yada yada. Where's the innovation?
It makes me wonder how many really hard problems were submitted and how many candidates are shaking their heads right now having gone through this whole list wondering why some of these are on here and they aren't. I'm not a rich man and I'm not motivated by money so I'll probably never have enough to invest $25k or whatever in hundreds of companies, so we'll never know how good I am at picking early stage startups, but if I simply said every one of them will fail, I'll be about 99% accurate.
But I never said these companies won't succeed or the teams aren't brilliant or your ability to pick early stage companies is crap. I'm simply not impressed by them -- it's nothing personal. I am not impressed by 99% of web startups.
But I wanted to be impressed with your list and I wasn't, so perhaps I was too glibly open about my opinion. I expected a -4 for the comment and was extremely shocked by the amount of agreement.