Is there any video coverage of the event?
usually it isn't filmed because people haven't launched. it is an investor event, not a publicity event.
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Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#22The one thing I'm not sure about foodoro is... I understand paying one shipping price if I'm buying from a food catalog. However, buying six things from six vendors gets expensive pretty quickly. (Ten dollars of shipping for three fairly lightweight items?)
Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure. I suppose specialty food shops could themselves buy local and avoid supporting mega-corp farms, and there are likely other 'goods' I'm not seeing right now. Nonetheless, this strikes me as the wrong direction. Maybe I'm temporarily blinded by recent 'rebuild better over the recession' optimism.
Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure
The high-energy infrastructure is the car trip to "local", not making additional use at the margin of mail trucks which would travel the same streets regardless of whether they had another case of organic blueberry jam on them or not.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#23Foodoro seems most clearly positioned to make money. Some of the others look like it's acquisition or bust.
It's nice to see that most are trying to charge for something.
It's easy to see how cloudkick could make money, especially since their competitors already charge for similar services. However, they should probably put out a pricing plan soon. It might even draw more interest to their company (a giffen good!) because potential customers might want to do business with a company that looks like it is making money and therefore stable.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#24I have an idea. Please comment on it. Idea is about a personal info mgmt site. The system allows user to define any number of entity like Contact (Name,Address, Phone No, ..), CC-Txion Info (...) in easy steps (like online form creator but easier) and add data to it. Allows to download data (Excel) and cleanup the data if needed. Common search feature to search for info across all entities. Basically this system lies between Unstructured wiki (Easy) and Complex website generator (Online form/page builder) (Complex).
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#25I like thesixtyone. I wish we could start over with music and eliminate all non-free music from the world. Sure, there is the one or other old gem I am still attached to (Radiohead for example), but the sacrifice would be worth it.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#26The writeup describes Wattvision as being "whole-house only". For all I know, that's true. However, if it's got sufficient resolution to give "15 second" updates, it seems you could train it to recognize certain draws: holding everything else constant, turn individual items on at exact cues given by the software. (The software might even be able to form hypotheses about individual draws before they're exactly named.…
You're right -- there's a lot of stuff Wattvision can do with the data we gather today. There's no reason we can't make smart conclusions about what's running (as gojomo suggests) or or eventually expand to per-device sensors. We're just starting simple.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#27Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an…
I've really noticed a slow down in truly interesting startups over the past years/months due to a personal metric of mine. I'm finding fewer and fewer interesting announcements to share via google reader to all my slightly less techie friends that follow my shared items.
I used to be sharing announcements from Techcrunch, Venturebeat etc like mad but now there seems to be very little to get excited about.
Has everyone else been noticing this too?
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#28Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an…
The measure isn't whether something is hard, it's whether people will use it. It's great when that something is both.
There are tons of copy-cat websites because they are addressing huge markets with many different niches and until the demand curve is perfectly filled out, there will continue to be more of such sites. The most successful sites you see are as good as they are because people did use them and they gave feedback to make them better and fill in the holes -- they more often than not started out pretty bad. (check out YouTube: http://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http://www.youtube... )
I suggest taking your ideas and doing something with them. You'll find out that your ideas aren't so priceless after all. Fantasies made into reality are not necessarily solutions that work for other people. You have got to prove that your fantasies are really solutions, and repeatedly. You'll find out the sites that even bubble up to your attention have gone through many months/years of hard work and maintain themselves off some level of merit and integrity.
But even before that hard work, it takes time to develop skills and relationships that will prop you up when you need it. This is not just true on the web but in any profession. Your offline skills and the ability to communicate your ideas are extremely important and often overlooked by many programmers who aspire to be more than 9-5ers.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#29Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an…
Maybe the "you" market isn't that large? Everybody tends to assume that their needs form a large market. In any case, presumably you did not find something like Weebly a hard problem -- most programmers don't -- yet we're undeniably providing value to quite a few people: 1.5 million and counting.
You can't criticize someone for working on the needs of a large market, just because that large market doesn't happen to include you.
Re: Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day
#30Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an…
When you step back, Mongrel is hardly life changing is it. In your particular small tech circle, perhaps.
>> "ad-blocking geek with a huge PC-per-capita ratio and a hefty tech gadget/software monthly budget, how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?"
Because it's orders of magnitude easier to get a few average users to click on a few ads.
>> "And how about millions of people screaming in pain who sit in front of their half-dead Windows machines"
The technology in that problem has been solved for a while - use something other than windows. Now it's just a matter of marketing, pricing, etc to get the average user to do it.