Y Combinator held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive. Paul Graham started off the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to close deals fast on the 11 week old companies. Here’s a look at the presenters (note, some of the 19 companies declined mention in this roundup): Anywhere.FM We announced Anywhere.FM’s launch earlier last week. They compete in the online music locker space. However, I find a lot of these sites are more a niche segment of the storage market than a full application. Anywhere.fm is a more consumer friendly music storage solution and has set dead aim at being an online version of iTunes. Anywhere.FM’s site lets you upload your music collection onto their site, create playlists, and play them back anywhere from the web. You can even listen to your friend’s music on a “Buddy radio station”. You can easily start your library with an iTunes uploader. Over the past two weeks, they have received over 125,000 visits and had over a million songs uploaded to the site. Today they expanded on their monetization plans, which include advertising, affiliate sales, and premium accounts. They plan on inserting audio ads into your music stream and are in talks with TargetSpot to supply local audio ads. The player’s Buddy radio feature will serve as a discovery engine, which they can sell music through and generate affiliate fees. Finally, a paid premium account will provide higher quality bit rates and other TBA features. ClickPass ClickPass is making OpenID one-click consumer friendly. They declined to state greater details for now. DropBox DropBox is another entrant into the online storage market. They are creating a transparent file management system (Mac/Win) that aims to: sync your desktop files on the web, back up files, provide access anywhere, and make files easy to share. Although they are still in private beta, they showed an example of their product for the Mac. For the demo they showed how files stored in their desktop Dropbox folder were accessible and synced online. Your Dropbox files are backed up online, with a version history to provide easy rollback, and recovery in case you delete them from your → Read More
Fuzzwich is a dead simple application for creating and publishing animated shorts. The animation editor comes pre-populated with a random selection of music, background, and cartoon characters. However, you can easily change them to any of their other 42 characters, 15 songs, or 14 backdrops. The content library will be changing over time, and they plan on adding a character editor soon. After you have the basic layout, you can animate and resize the sprites in real time by just dragging and dropping them around the scene. The player records you movements as the clip runs. Some characters and scenes come with animations (moving arms or mouths), and speech bubbles can also be adrded. After publishing it can easily be embedded or linked to on another site. I made one myself in 5 minutes and I’m completely addicted. I’m a big fan of these hypnotic pandas. One serious limitation of the service is that users cannot upload their own images or sound files and include them in cartoons. They do, however, plan on letting people to upload their faces on the cartoons. They also have a more feature rich animation studio in the works, but have initially focused on this simpler editor since it’s accessible to a wider audience. We’ve covered two other startups, Aniboom and MyToons, that are aiming to be the “YouTube” of online cartoons. Fuzzwich competes with Aniboom’s application and MyToons somewhat, but it is also different. Fuzzwich provides a simple way to create cartoons hosted on the site. Aniboom has an animator called Shapeshifter, which is like a Paintshop pro for animation. MyToons do not offer cartoon creation tools. Fuzzwich is a Y Combinator company. http://fuzzwich.com/minivid/minividLoader.swf?pid=e60b71e9368d8a29011323114b31341a → Read More
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