• August 24th, 2010

    Motorola Snaps Up 280 North For $20 Million

    Motorola has acquired Y Combinator startup 280 North, we’ve confirmed. We haven’t confirmed, but have heard from multiple sources, that the price is around $20 million. This is a sizable exit for the founders – the company has raised just $250,000 in a 2008 angel round.

    280 North created a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X. Developers we’ve spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge. → Read More

    September 4th, 2008

    Cappuccino Brings Cocoa-Like Programming To The Web

    280 North, the Y Combinator-backed startup that brought you slideshow maker 280 Slides, has released a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X.

    Like SproutCore, which powers Apple’s MobileMe, Cappuccino seeks to replicate the functionality of Cocoa, a native application programming environment for MacOS X. But unlike SproutCore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development. → Read More

    June 5th, 2008

    280 Slides: Like Apple Keynote, But Online

    What happens when two former Apple employees – one from the iPhone team and one from the iTunes Store team – go off and start their own Y Combinator-backed startup? Apparently they come up with an online slideshow tool that looks highly reminiscent of Keynote. 280 North first presented 280 Slides (now available in public beta) earlier this Spring at YC’s biannual demo day. In their presentation, the three founders emphasized two reasons why 280 Slides would take off when other browser-based PowerPoint clones had failed. First, 280 North has been designed to make users forget that they aren’t using a desktop application. And they do a good job sustaining that illusion, even though the application is based in JavaScript not Flash. 280 North has actually built out an entire JavaScript framework called Cappuccino that it plans to release as open source soon. Competitors who are also trying to recreate the desktop experience in the browser, such as Empressr and SlideRocket, have been built in Flash (and Flex in particular). Secondly, 280 North touts how easy it is to download your slideshows in PowerPoint format. They figure that most people shy away from using online tools because ultimately they need to share their slideshows with friends. While Google Docs can also export to PowerPoint, 280 Slides puts this functionality front and center. Overall, this is a simple application that has been designed to work and work right. You won’t find a lot of advanced features related to charts, styling, effects or collaboration, but fundamental stuff like keyboard strokes work just the way it should. Among the features 280 Slides does boast is the ability to publish on SlideShare, grab color combos from Adobe Kuler, add videos and photos from the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and embed on other sites. It would be good to see auto-saves (my Safari crashed once, causing me to back up a bit – this is beta after all). More themes and controls over default settings (the default font, in particular) would be welcome, too. But overall, 280 Slides does enough to appeal to basic users, and it certainly presents the most intuitive user interface of them all. CrunchBase Information 280 North Empressr SlideRocket Information provided by CrunchBase Sample slideshow after the jump – it may break on Firefox 2… → Read More

    March 14th, 2008

    Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup for Spring 2008

    The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months. Chatterous Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week. Addmired Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here. Snaptalent Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here. RescueTime RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here. MightyQuiz MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions → Read More

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    Crunchbase

    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Bolt | Peters — Acquired by Facebook for $50M.
    6.21.2012
    Actual Systems — Acquired by Solera Holdings.
    5.29.2012
    5.29.2012
    ServerOrigin — Acquired by Black Lotus.
    5.29.2012
    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    Draker — Received $475k in Debt funding
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Received $2.7M in Series A funding from Advantage Capital Partners
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Received Seed funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Dr. Schumacher
    5.29.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Google Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Battery Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    Trinity Ventures — Invested in Badgeville.
    5.30.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Actual Systems — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Kurion — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    5.29.2012
    PayPal Media Network — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    Trivia Party — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    ACT for Lotus Notes CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    VMobile - Mobile CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    CrunchBase