After Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Y Combinator funded Reddit, people took notice. This wasn’t just some quirky incubator where they gave college students a few bucks to kick start their new companies (although it is that, too – their standard deal is $5000 + $5000 per founder, for 6%ish of the company) – real products were coming out of Y Combinator, and people started to notice. Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below. Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode: Zenter Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show. Weebly Weebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here. Virtualmin Virtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device. Octopart Vertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal → Read More
The launch of Picnik a couple of days ago brought us yet another online photo editing tool. Like Fauxto, Picnik uses Flash, whereas most of the earlier editing tools all use Ajax for in-browser editing. Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading. Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes: Fauxto Fauxto is a Flash-based Photoshop look-alike. It is the only layer-based online tool that we know of, and is by far the best of the bunch. But if all you are looking for is photo editing, and you aren’t familiar with Photoshop, Fauxto will frustrate you with its complexity. And if you are already familiar with Photoshop, chances are you have a copy already. Fauxto is lovely to look at and it is a really nice example of Flash in action, but I’m not sure who their target market is. Picnik Picnik is the new kid on the block, and they’re the best so far. It is also Flash based, it is the fastest of the bunch and the user interface is the most intuitive. Once you are done editing, you can transfer your photos directly to Flickr. Picnik has replaced Ajax-based PXN8 as our favorite online photo editing tool. Picture2Life Picture2life is an Ajax based photo editor. It’s focused on grabbing and editing images that are already online. The tool selection is average, and the user interface is poor. There are some bugs on the site. Photos can be transferred to Flickr, 23 and Imageshack after editing. Preloadr Preloadr is a Flickr-specific tool that uses the Flickr API, even for account sign-in. The service includes basic cropping, sharpening, color correction and other tools to enhance images. The fact that Preloadr is designed specifically to work with Flickr may not be an advantage – some → Read More
Two companies launched last week that will try to build a business catering solely to Flickr customers – FlickrInspector and Preloadr. Coincidentally, both companies are located in Europe. Flickr, by the way, definitely punches above its weight in the photo category when it comes to attention v. relative size. It’s a distant 6th compared to other sites with about 6 million U.S. visitors each month and 80 million or so page views. Compare that to Photobucket’s 13.8 million monthly U.S. visitors and Yahoo Photo’s 11.2 million (no. 1 and no. 2, respectively, in the photo category). CNET’s Webshots is also slightly larger than Flickr, with 7.6 million U.S. monthly visitors. (source: Comscore, June 2006) FlickrInspector FlickrInspector is a simple tool that uses the Flickr API to provide information about a particular flickr user. Photos, tags, contacts’ photos, sets (albums) etc. can all be viewed on the site, for any Flickr user. Preloadr Preloadr is a very useful flickr-based photo editing tool. They’ve integrated the Flickr API with nexImage photo editing software and presented it as a new, free online service. No registration is required (or even possible) – you simply log on to your flickr account through the Preloadr site. Pictures can be uploaded, edited and transferred to Flickr, or pictures can be pulled from Flickr, edited on Preloadr and moved back over to Flickr. There are several editing tools like cropping, sharpening, color correction and more. The only thing it doesn’t have, unless I’m missing it, is a cure-all “enhance” button that seems to work so often in iPhoto. A red-eye remover would also be appreciated, as mentioned in this blog. Preloadr is not the only, or even the best, online photo editing service. My favorite is PXN8, which also offers Flickr integration. Others include Creating Online, Snipshot and Picture2Life. → Read More
