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
Y Combinator’s second company of the summer season, Versionate, launches today. It is a document-driven wiki product – upload just about any kind of file (office docs, images, whatever) and Versionate will create an editable, wiki-like page with version and access controls. Versionate is a distant cousin to another Y Combinator company, Scribd, which allows users to upload and display documents in Flash. Versionate, though, is a competitor to the wiki startups as well as Google Docs. It also has more flexibility than its competitors when it comes to editing documents online, since just about any type of file can be uploaded (and files can also be exported in a choice of file formats). The company is clearly targeting a more enterprise crowd v. Google Docs and the wikis, however. And one of the most interesting parts of the service is something they say they are only considering for the future – installing Versionate on a private server: Can we install Versionate on our internal server? Currently, we are a hosted solution only. This has the benefit of allowing us to manage all the security details and lets us roll out updates on a consistent basis. If you still wish to license our software to use on your own internal server, please contact us directly via e-mail at support@versionate.com. Data security is the biggest hurdle for companies considering using these services. Allowing them to host the data on their own servers would give them significantly more comfort in using this, and could be, over time, a real threat to Microsoft Exchange Server/Sharepoint. → Read More
