Last we heard from CollegeBudget, its founder and CEO Mike Moradian was in the process of crowdsourcing a very personal decision — whether or not he should attend Harvard Business School or forgo an MBA in favor of leading his startup to victory (or the deadpool). After 80K votes, it turns out that, in spite of Vivek Wadhwa’s advice (and that of many others), Moradian has decided to turn down Harvard to focus on growing CollegeBudget. Sometimes a body has to follow their dreams and their passion, sorry Harvard.

For some quick background, CollegeBudget set out to create a variation on the Groupon discount and group buying model, specifically targeted at campuses. The goal being to bring discounts and group buying — including for textbooks and student loans — to colleges and universities across the country. Fast forward to the present and CollegeBudget is finding validation for its campus model. Since our coverage last year, the platform has grown its user base from 600K to two million students and now features deals from over 250 merchants at more than 100 campuses. The growth, Moradian says, saw a big jump in January, when the startup launched national deals with American Apparel and Skype.

Today, CollegeBudget is moving more aggressively into local offers, particularly around food. For hungry, cash-strapped college students, food discounts can be extremely appealing, especially when one of the alternatives is the school’s cafeteria. This is where Munch On Me comes into the picture. Munch On Me is a daily deals site for food, which Alexia described as a “Groupon for food — done right.”

The startup, which is a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2011 summer class, puts a spin on the daily deal model for food by offering discounts on specific dishes, rather than every item on the menu, a focus that restaurants love because it means they can prepare in advance for the increased demand. What’s more, focusing on specific dishes allows for quicker turnaround, a greater number of deals, which Munch On Me sweetened by taking a smaller commission on their deals than the bigs, like Groupon.

Munch On Me’s unique spin on food deals (as another example, because restaurants often lack quality images of their own food, Munch On Me sends out a professional photographer to snap pics for the discounted dish) became increasingly appealing to CollegeBudget over the last few months, Moradian tells us. Especially as the startup’s competitive advantages have allowed for deeper penetration into local markets and allowed it to forge long-term merchant relationships in, it just so happens, more than 20 college towns in California.

That’s what led to today’s announcement, as Moradian tells us that CollegeBudget has officially agreed to acquire Munch On Me. While the particulars of the deal aren’t being disclosed, we’ve learned that this wasn’t a pure acqui-hire, cash has indeed exchanged hands. As a result of the acquisition, the full Munch On Me team, which is currently based in San Francisco, will be staying put in the Bay Area, moving into CollegeBudget’s SF offices.

“We really liked what they were up to and were keen to build that kind of functionality into our product,” the CollegeBudget founder says. After being introduced, the teams hit it off, finding that they shared a similar vision for their companies, and it wasn’t long before Munch On Me agreed to integrate their product and style into CollegeBudget.

The combination of the two services, Moradian believes, will help strengthen its leadership in the college social commerce market, bringing Munch On Me’s active, food-centric user base to CollegeBudget’s growing network of college students and merchants, allowing the newly formed business to expand into new markets.

The cost of the college experience (tuition and otherwise) has continued to grow, to the point of absurdity. Student debt in the U.S. today has pushed north of $1 trillion, with the average debt per student standing at more than $25,000. As a result, CollegeBudget, Moradian says, wants to do everything it can to save students on college expenses — and with Munch On Me on board, a lot of that attention will be paid to reducing food costs.

The team is in it to revolutionize student discounts, and it’s no longer subscribing to a “daily deals” model, instead deals are open for one to two weeks, meant to give companies a greater window of opportunity to bring in new, young customers — a demographic that’s obviously much coveted among consumer brands. (Hence the American Apparel and Skype campaigns.)

As for Munch On Me users, the startup will continue to offer access to its coupons until September 1st, at which point it will officially shut down its website. You can find out more here.

More from CollegeBudget on the acquisition here.

AnyVivo, a startup that launched this spring out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 program, has a pretty big mission: It wants to be the e-commerce hub for all living things. You might think that Amazon sells everything, and you’re almost right — but AnyVivo wants to pick up exactly where it leaves off, at pets and plants. Selling and shipping such things is actually pretty complicated from a warehousing and logistical perspective, but AnyVivo says it wants to take on the challenge.

The company has started with a focus on one thing: Jellyfish. With its flagship site Jellyfish Art, the company sells custom kits with jellyfish tanks, instructions, food, and the animals themselves. It sounds esoteric, but it’s actually been quite lucrative. AnyVivo is currently profitable, employing a staff of six out of a 6,000 square foot warehouse in downtown San Francisco.

Things are going so swimmingly (ha) that for now, the company is opting to not take on any outside venture capital money beyond the small seed round that Y Combinator invests in all its portfolio companies. In this current funding environment, which is proving especially strong for Y Combinator Winter 2012 startups, that in itself is newsworthy.

But cooler still is AnyVivo’s warehouse, where it breeds and houses jellyfish until they ship out to customers. So TechCrunch TV headed on over to AnyVivo’s headquarters to get an inside look at the company and interview its co-founders, Alex Andon and Cameron Urban. Watch the video embedded above to hear about the initial vision for AnyVivo, why they started with jellyfish, what plants and animals are next on the list, and more. Of course I think you should watch the whole thing, but if you just want to get your zen on and see the jellies floating around, you can start the video at around the 4:30 mark.

Online payment platform WePay just announced that it has raised $10 million in a new financing round. This round was led by Ignition Partners. Two of the company’s existing investors, Highland Capital Partners and August Capital also participated in this round. WePay, which bills itself as the “anti-PayPal,” is a Y Combinator alumni and was founded in 2008. The company raised a total of $9.15 million in two previous rounds over the last two years. In today’s announcement, WePay notes that this is a growth round and is meant to allow it to scale its technology and workforce.

While WePay doesn’t reveal its revenues, its CEO and co-founder Bill Clerico told our own Leena Rao that it grew revenue ten-fold in 2011. The Palo Alto-based company has about 40 employees and expects to significantly grow this number in 2012.

WePay currently offers a range of payment products that are mostly geared toward the small and medium online businesses. The company’s tools currently focus on four use cases: selling products online, selling tickets, accepting donations and sending bills to request payments. Merchants can use WePay’s tools to set up online stores and embed them on their own sites.

WePay plans to launch its first mobile apps later this year, though the company remains mum about what exactly its mobile strategy will look like. Chances are, though, that this will put it into even more direct competition with PayPal and the various other startups and existing players that are vying for attention in this space.

I would normally rather have a root canal instead of write about the issue of women in technology. I just find most essays on this really tedious and obvious. (Sorry Alexia.)

But I do want to point one thing out. When I went to my first Y Combinator Demo Day three years ago, there was one woman. At this week’s Demo Day, there were six companies with one or all female founders among the 66 startups in the class.

I’m going to keep this post simple. No complaining. Less navel gazing. Just more role models. So here are the women of Y Combinator and they are awesome. (Update: We’re missing one at the moment, but Somaira Punjwani of MedMonk will hopefully be added soon.)

And ladies, if you’re interested in joining the next class, the deadline just passed. But there are two classes a year, so the next one will come up soon.

Nikki Durkin, 99Dresses

Durkin wrote her first business plan when she was eight years old. As a girl growing up in the Australian countryside, she desperately wanted a horse. After begging didn’t work, she biked down to her local co-op, determined the price of hay, calculated out operational expenses and wrote a cost-benefit analysis, even sticking in a risks section just in case the horse died.

“Ever since then, I’ve been pretty good at figuring out how to get what I want,” she said.

At 15, she and her thirteen-year-old brother started their first online business called KultKandy, where they designed T-shirts and drop shipped them from China.

While in college, she came up with a concept around dress swapping. She put her idea on Facebook and sent it out to friends in Sydney. In less than three weeks, suddenly 20,000 women signed up from around the country.

“It wasn’t really planned out to the nth degree, but it really resonated,” said Durkin, who is now 20 years old. “Girls absolutely loved it.”

The idea was to have a market where women post pictures of their clothing and swap it. The seller would set the price and handle shipping costs. Instead of using a real currency, Durkin wanted to use a virtual one so that the experience would really feel guilt-free. She asked the community for a name for the virtual currency, and they came up with “Buttons,” for which she now charges $1 a piece.

Within four months, women had uploaded 4,500 dresses and sold 3,500. She hadn’t even heard of Y Combinator until a business adviser Matt Barrie, who is the chief executive of Freelancer.com, told her about it.

“I told him that I’d love to get into the American market but I didn’t have any of the connections or a tech team,” she said. She rounded up a technical co-founder, applied, got in and moved all the way from Australia to the Bay Area. “There’s a lot of potential here,” she said.

Tracy Young, PlanGrid

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Young was always fascinated by buildings. While working as a civil engineer on constructing hospitals, she was intrigued by the little curiosities that told a story about every building.

Like why did a hospital need to have video cameras on every corner of its third floor? (It was to guard infants in the maternity ward.)

“I love learning about how and why buildings are structured in the way that they are,” she said. She added, “Nothing compares to the smell of drywall dust and seeing people work together to build something that’s useful.”

But being a civil engineer wasn’t quite enough. Growing up just miles away from the headquarters of companies like Apple and Google, Young had the entrepreneurial itch.

“It’s pretty hard to grow up in this area and not want to start your own business,” she said.

Young started with what she knew best. The construction industry had horribly outdated software that often cost firms north of $100,000.

“There’s a really small overlap between construction and hackers,” she said. “Construction software is just notoriously bad so we knew that we could do better.”

On top of that, she and her co-founders estimated that for every $1 million spent on construction projects, about $3,500 of it would go just toward printing blueprints.

“Blueprints are constantly changing so they’re always being reprinted,” she said, adding that one $240 million hospital project she had worked on had budgeted $1 million just for blueprints.

So she co-founded PlanGrid with one other civil engineer and two hackers. They’ve started with an iPad app that lets people save and share blueprints with others. They use a freemium model with prices that range from totally free to about $50 per month. So far the app is spreading by word of mouth and it has 3,500 users and 1,000 projects on it.

“I don’t believe that Steve Jobs realized how he was going to completely disrupt the construction industry with the iPad,” she said. “Now a construction superintendent can bring a computer out to the field that’s light enough to carry in a bag and has enough battery power to last the whole day.”

Young says the company has other ideas in the works for managing bids, estimates and workflows. PlanGrid is in the process of closing their angel round.

Olga Vidisheva, Shoptiques

After making her way to the U.S. as a teenager from Kyrgyzstan and Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vidisheva didn’t have much money to pay for living expenses and tuition at pricey Wellesley College. So she modeled on the side, doing everything from wearing Ben Sherman to appearing in vacuum cleaner ads.

And while she was at that, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and landed a job out of school as one of two women out of around 100 men in her investment banking group at Goldman Sachs.

Both the modeling and the banking experience are now paying off. Today she’s running Shoptiques, an e-commerce play that brings high-end boutiques online. Even before Demo Day, the company’s seed round was snapped up by three of Silicon Valley’s top tier venture firms including Greylock Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital.

Vidisheva’s modeling helped her understand how to present merchandise and do high-end photography for her clientele.

“Very highly curated models can work well,” she said, pointing to models like Fab, a design-centric flash sales site. “We’re creating a market for tastemakers.”

Shoptiques handholds sometimes very tech shy fashion boutiques onto the web. Vidisheva’s startup eats the up-front costs of building the e-commerce presence and photographing the apparel. The company sends these shops the shipping labels, provides the tracking analytics and handles payment processing. Naturally, Shoptiques intends to make its money back through a revenue share on sales. It’s just launched with 50 stores around the U.S.

While at Harvard Business School, she researched the plan for what would become Shoptiques for well over a year.

“I saw this huge gap in the market,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to breathe if I wasn’t doing this business.”

Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s co-founder, paired her with some alums who were behind Anyvite, an events invitation startup that came out of a mid-2008 class. Dan and Jeff Morin were thinking about next steps with their company, and Graham suggested they meet Vidisheva. After trial run where they worked together for a few weeks, they joined full-time on the startup.

“PG is amazing at figuring out people who will work well together,” she said.

Elli Sharef, HireArt

Growing up in Colombia, Sharef was lucky to have a strong female role model right by her side. Her mother had a Ph.D. in economics

“She’s a strong figure with opinions and she was an intellectual,” Sharef said. “I never thought about being a man or woman. She just told me to be ambitious, to do my thing and try and build something good for the world.”

Sharef’s company is attacking the HR and recruiting space. She’s a co-founder of HireArt, which is trying to ease that first step of sifting through an impossible number of resumes.

HireArt has job candidates actually perform a series of tasks or do video interviews. For example, if an interview candidate says they are an expert in Excel, they can demonstrate their skills on HireArt by creating an Excel model using a dataset.

“I saw how hard it was to hire the right person. Everyone knows that the right person can 10X your team,” she said. “At the same time, it’s equally bad when you don’t hire the right person. It can be really terrible.”

HireArt’s site is growing 40 percent week over week and currently has 238 open positions. The company earns revenue every time a candidate is successfully placed, the way a good recruiter might earn a fee or a salary percentage if they find a good hire.

To get into Y Combinator, Sharef came together with a few friends from her university days at Yale: Dain Lewis and Nicholas Sedlet.

There’s a question of how easy it will be to scale HireArt’s model given the idiosyncrasies of hiring and finding a good cultural fit between employees and employers.

Sharef says that over time, the company will collect more and more data from employers about interview questions or tests that are strong predictors of success.

“We really try to work with data to understand which questions work the best. You can think about it like designing the SATs for different jobs,” she said, pointing out that one of her co-founders has experience working with huge data sets as a commodities trader and quant.

Kathryn Minshew, Alex Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery of The Daily Muse

This trio met on their first day at consulting giant McKinsey. After finding that they worked well together through their two-year analyst stint, they started thinking about what to do next.

“While we felt like we got a lot of great training at McKinsey, we felt like there wasn’t a go-to resource for young women who wanted career advice,” McCreery said.

They had worked on a previous startup before, but then decided to start over with a new concept called The Daily Muse, a career resources destination for high-achieving young women. They packed it with advice on salary negotiations, interviews and how to manage people for the very first time.

But there was a lucrative piece that was missing — job search. Because the site had started attracting a small, but valuable audience of young women from top-tier universities, employers reached out wondering how they could recruit some of these visitors.

“Talented people choose jobs, not the other way around. So we realized there was a need for us to profile awesome companies,” she said. ”Women and men look at things differently. Women will go to a store and browse. But job search is built around knowing what you want and going after that.”

So The Daily Muse has these immersive company profiles, which tell the story of the company’s culture and explain what it’s like to work there. There are video interviews with current employees and professional photos of the office space. ”We want to be the go-to career resource for young, professional women, and now we’re also helping them discover cool places to work,” she said.

McCreery says that The Daily Muse already has 25 paying companies. Monthly fees are variable, but a ballpark range puts them around $1,500. Then there are another 70 companies that are on the waiting list.

Admittedly, any content-centric play is going to have issues scaling. But McCreery says the team has experience. ”We’ve never seen ourselves as just a media company and we’ve done scaled content before,” she said, saying that the site the team last worked on had 200 writers and a full-time editorial staff of five. The company is working on training three full-time employees to make the company profiles.

Yesterday, Y Combinator double alum and video sharing app Socialcam debuted its new and improved wares at Demo Day. Today, the startup is following up with the official announcement of Socialcam 4.0 — the biggest release for the video sharing tool since it released its filters — that brings themes and soundtracks to the so-called “Instagram for video.”

Since Socialcam spun out of Justin.tv last year, it’s been on a mission to bring video creation to the mainstream. As Eric wrote in January, the app passed 3 million downloads in December, and had begun sending 3 million notifications per day. The reason for this was largely its sharing feed and filter that are now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram.

But the Socialcam team thinks that the release today brings it closer to a video creation tool for the mainstream, as it complements the ability to take videos with custom filters with themes and soundtracks, all in one app, making it into a mobile, filter-improved YouTube. Just to give you another analogy, not that you need one.

More importantly, how does it work? Well look at it this way, if you weren’t on Socialcam 4.0, you’d have to go through a process like this: Upload a video with your iPhone’s camera, download another app to add video filters, or maybe purchase iMovie for iOS to add the title. The app would then put you through a bunch of licensing-related stuff so that videos would avoid being blocked on video sites and social networks. Then you would upload that puppy to YouTube, and share the link with your fans, followers, and groupies.

But with Socialcam, you can shoot, share, and edit a video in seconds. And that, my friends, is gold. Aside from making the process of creating mobile video easier, Socialcam is adding a whole mess of themes that allow you to customize your videos to make them reflect the content, or maybe even your mood. For example, the “Journal” theme makes your video look like a journal entry, “Casual” gives your video a handwritten title, “MTV” gives your video the music video “metadata” on the bottom left. There are nine themes in total, each of them with a different quirk.

On top of that, Socialcam now includes a simple tool to add instrumental background music to your videos, with the ability to adjust levels of the music and microphone. The new release includes 10 featured tracks, including Breezy, March, Deep, Happy, Action, etc., which the startup is offering in partnership with Friendly Music, the product of music licensing firm Rumblefish.

Socialcam Co-founder Michael Seibel says that the team is working on adding more tracks soon, and the next big focus for the startup will be on speed improvement.

But in the meantime, users can take solace in its other updates, like notifications when Facebook friends view your video, Facebook open graph integration, Twitter account creation, and, Seibel says, a 50 percent increase in video quality.

For those interested in checking out the app, you can find it on the App Store here.

Will be updating…

If you want a better way to shop, hire, share video, or stay in touch with your significant other, you’ll love the companies that presented at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day session four. Many are already gaining traction, and investors are vying to get in before their valuations increase.

Check out why Y Combinator companies are all about mobile, as well as our coverage of the first, second, and third sessions. Here’s a look at the seven companies that strutted their stuff in session four:

Shoptiques: Local boutiques are great places to find unique women’s clothing, but the last thing most of them are set up to do is have an online presence. That’s where Shoptiques comes in. As we covered, it brings the inventory of small, local women’s clothing boutiques to the web. Consumers can come to Shoptiques and shop in all their favorite boutiques from all over the world, and boutiques are happy because they have a beautiful presence online and a new e-commerce arm. Shoptiques takes what it calls a “healthy commission” from each transaction. So far, Shoptiques has brought 12,000 products online from a clientele of 50 boutiques — and there is purportedly a “long” waiting list of other boutiques who want in on the action.

Pair : A private social network for couples first covered by TechCrunch last week, Pair lets two people create a private timeline where they share photos, videos, sketches, activities and more. The iPhone app, which launched just four days ago, has already garnered more than 50,000 registered users who have used Pair to send more than 1 million messages. Pair has received funding from SV Angel and Path founder Dave Morin, who told Pair’s team that Facebook has created social networking’s “cities,” Path is building its “houses,” and Pair is like its “bedroom.” I think the the one-click “Thinking of you” button could be a big hit with guys.

Daily Muse: Built on the idea that text-based job search is on the way out, we’ve covered how businesses can use Daily Muse to build compelling, media-rich websites about their company culture to hopefully attract talented new employees. It also has a unique focus on women. Daily Muse, which takes a $1,500 monthly subscription fee from companies, has attracted a base of 100,000 monthly active individual users since launching four weeks ago. Its clients include Pinterest, Foursquare, Klout, Tumblr, Goodwin Proctor, and many more — with 70 businesses on the waiting list.

Per Vices: Wireless apps today require dedicated hardware to control them. Per Vices says it can put an end to that with what it is calling “the Holy Grail of wireless technology.” Per Vices has created a single device that uses a technology called software defined radio (SDR) that purportedly can run any wireless application out there right now. The company says it is out to replace every existing wireless device on the market with this one single SDR device.

iCracked: Chances are, if you’ve owned an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, you’ve either cracked your screen at some point or come perilously close to doing so. iCracked has built a very booming business fixing those problems. iCracked says it is currently the nation’s largest iOS device repair company, and it has more than 500 technicians worldwide who can come to you and repair your cracked or water damaged device in a half hour for half the price of its competitors. The company has had over 10,000 customers in the past three months, tripling in size since January, and is signing up 10 new iTechs (device repair people) per week. Going forward, iCracked is looking to expand out of iOS, build an insurance arm, and launch device redistribution models.

Socialcam:  An app for shooting and publishing videos from your mobile device. You could call it an Instagram for video thanks to its sharing feed and filters. It’s growing like wildfire, with daily active users up 300% in the past 3 months. Co-founded by Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel and staffed with more alums from that company, Socialcam has one of the most experienced teams in video. The company has raised $1.2 million of it $1.5 million seed round, and will close the round in the next two weeks. I’ve heard Socialcam has clout with teens, so it’s definitely one to watch.

AnyVivo: Ever want to buy a jellyfish online, but end up being bummed to discover that it’s not exactly in Amazon’s purview? Anyvivo has your back. This startup sells living things online and delivers them anywhere in the United States. It has started with jellyfish, and has had some impressive traction: In March the company will post nearly $150,000 in sales with  profit margins in excess of 50%.  The company has a 6,000 square foot warehouse in San Francisco and a full-time team of eight. People want pets that make them stand out, and Anyvivo delivers.

[Image Credit: Intuit]

Read more Y Combinator Demo Day coverage and check out all 39 startups who presented publicly:

• TechCrunch’s Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day
• At Y Combinator’s Biggest Demo Day Yet, Mobile Is Taking Over
• YC Demo Day Session 1: PlanGrid, Medigram, Zillabyte, HireArt, Flutter, Givespark, Popset, SendHub, Screenleap, Coderwall, LVL6
• YC Demo Day Session 2: Midnox, 42Floors, Sonalight, Your Mechanic
• YC Demo Day Session 3: Crowdtilt, Flypad, Carsabi, Anyperk, TiKL, Dealupa, Priceonomics, Kyte, EveryArt
• YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, Minefold, Exec, 99dresses, Matterport

We’re covering Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where 66 startups are presenting the applications they’ve built over the past three months in YC’s Silicon Valley incubator to a roomful of the tech industry’s top investors. This is Y Combinator’s biggest class yet, and the event is certainly buzzing.

All the founders are presenting over five sessions; you can find our coverage of the first one right here. Here is the second batch of YC startups who presented on the record today:

Midnox: They’ve built the Luma, an iPhone app that stabilizes the videos taken with a mobile phone in real time. The app also adds full resolution visual filters in real time, which are “non-disruptive,” meaning that they can be changed or removed after recording is over. The company has also built editing tools and sharing features for the videos taken with Luma.

42Floors: Aiming to be the Trulia for commercial real estate, 42Floors has built a slick website for companies searching for office space. 42Floors has also built a marketplace for service providers such as interior designers and furniture suppliers for when commercial tenants need to outfit their new offices. 42Floors already has 10 investors including SV Angel and Startfund.

Sonalight: Touting itself as “Siri on steroids,” Sonalight is an app aimed at letting you send text messages while driving by using just your voice. The app purportedly works even while a phone is your pocket. Already, the app has been used to send 500,000 text messages at a rate of 50,000 per week since its debut back in October. In the long term, the Sonalight team aims to bring its voice command functionality to other devices such as thermostats.

Your Mechanic: Aiming to be the “Airbnb of car repair,” Your Mechanic is a website that connects you with the best mechanics in your local community, and commission them to come to your house and fix your car. According to the company, this is on average 30 percent cheaper than the typical mechanic or car dealership. In private beta, Your Mechanic has had $90,000 in billings thus far, saving each user an average of $200 per transaction.

Josh Constine contributed reporting to this post.

Read more Y Combinator Demo Day coverage and check out all 39 startups who presented publicly:

• TechCrunch’s Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day
• At Y Combinator’s Biggest Demo Day Yet, Mobile Is Taking Over
• YC Demo Day Session 1: PlanGrid, Medigram, Zillabyte, HireArt, Flutter, Givespark, Popset, SendHub, Screenleap, Coderwall, LVL6
• YC Demo Day Session 3: Crowdtilt, Flypad, Carsabi, Anyperk, TiKL, Dealupa, Priceonomics, Kyte, EveryArt
• YC Demo Day Session 4: Shoptiques, Pair, Daily Muse, Per Vices, iCracked, Socialcam, AnyVivo
• YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, Minefold, Exec, 99dresses, Matterport

We’re here live at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where top early-stage fund Y Combinator is kicking off its biggest demo day yet — 66 companies are in this Winter 2012 class, and all of them are presenting (although not all of them are ready for publicity, so some are presenting their apps on an “off the record” basis.) Almost all of them are in the process of raising money.

The day is divided up into five sessions. We’ll be doing a post on each session. Here’s the first set of on-the-record YC Winter 2012 startups.

PlanGrid: The company offers an iPad interface for construction blueprints. It allows the construction industry to get rid of reams of paper and instead keep up to date on the latest changes to projects via their devices.

Since launching at the beginning of the month — see our in-depth coverage from then — the company says its client base is showing hockey-stick growth. This is already driving new revenue.

Medigram: Doctors can’t use texts because of HIPAA federal guidelines passed in 1996. The resulting poor communication has resulted in approximately $10 billion in losses — not to mention the illnesses and deaths.

The solution is a HIPAA-compliant group messaging app, that only requires a simple download to get started using. It’s already live at three hospitals at Stanford and in Palo Alto, Calif. Future plans go far beyond chat — lab reports, medical records, etc.

Zillabyte: Styling itself the “Palantir for salespeople,” this company tries to identify key new leads scattered around the web. Users come to its site, provide a description of their ideal customers, then the site uses a combination of human teams, machine learning and big data analysis to identify prospects across the web.

HireArt: Instead of asking applicants to talk about their experience, HireArt has them actually perform a series of tasks. As we covered earlier this month, this means that if an interview candidate claims to be an expert in Excel, an employer on HireArt might ask them to create an Excel model using a dataset they provide, then have them upload the completed file. Another employer may instead want to hear a creative’s pitch for a new product. It has helped hiring in hundreds of positions already, it’s seeing 40% growth and a 100% fill rate since launching in mid-December. Clients include Warby Parker, AirBnB, 1800 flowers, and Autodesk.

Flutter: An app for Mac that lets you control the play function on Spotify or iTunes by simply waving at your computer, the company has an even more interesting long-term vision. It wants to use gestures along with our voices to tell our machines what to do, as we covered yesterday, rather than pressing buttons or clicking a mouse. The app already has 15,000 downloads and has recorded more than half a million gestures from users.

Givespark: An app that lets celebrities launch fundraisers for their fans to participate in online. The idea is that lots of celebrities are on Twitter, and they often use that platform to highlight philanthropic causes about which they’re passionate. So the company lets them turn that awareness raising into actual money for the cause. And it’s already started working: A celebrity recently used Givespark to launch a campaign benefiting a bone marrow foundation, and raised $87,000 in two weeks.

Popset: An iPhone app that lets people passively upload pictures taken with their mobile phones to group albums. Yes, mobile photo sharing is a crowded space, but Popset says it is tackling a major problem that still remains: When people are at an event together, they still end up uploading their photos from that event to their own respective individual albums. Popset says it is already very popular with teenagers, and has been growing its user base on average of 20 percent every week since its launch.

SendHub: A group messaging service that spans email, SMS and other platforms, the company is now sending 120,000 messages per month, up from 6,000 at the start of the year. Customers include Stocktwits, the Republican party of Florida, and Teach For America. Future plans include integrating more communication platforms. Check out our previous coverage here and here.

Screenleap: It wants to “make screen sharing sexy in the same way that Dropbox made file sharing sexy.” The site lets people share their screens with others in one step, without needing to download any special software — viewers just need to follow the link sent by the screen sharer. The current status quo for screen sharing is Cisco WebEx, which Screenleap says requires a 15-step process to share a screen. In the six weeks since Screenleap launched to the public, its users have grown by 37 percent every week, and the average Screenleap session is over 22 minutes long.

Coderwall: A “credential repository for the hacker community,” Coderwall is a site where programmers quantify their skills and achievements by accumulating badges, rather than in the the typical resume format. The reason the tech recruitment industry is so bloated right now is because everyone wants to hire coders, but the best and most talented programmers aren’t actively looking for work or participating in sites such as LinkedIn. Coderwall purportedly is a fun community that programmers want to be a part of, so it can also eventually be a very attractive place for companies to look for new employees.

Lvl6: A mobile social game developer that has come up with an equation that it says “guarantees that our games will engaging, monetizable and huge hits.” It has some evidence of this. Its first game, Mercenary Inc, reached the top ten of all app stores and gained more than 250,000 new users in one week. Its engine lets it develop high-quality titles in a fraction of the time that competitors take.

Additional blogging by Eric Eldon

Read more Y Combinator Demo Day coverage and check out all 39 startups who presented publicly:

• TechCrunch’s Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day
• At Y Combinator’s Biggest Demo Day Yet, Mobile Is Taking Over
• YC Demo Day Session 2: Midnox, 42Floors, Sonalight, Your Mechanic
• YC Demo Day Session 3: Crowdtilt, Flypad, Carsabi, Anyperk, TiKL, Dealupa, Priceonomics, Kyte, EveryArt
• YC Demo Day Session 4: Shoptiques, Pair, Daily Muse, Per Vices, iCracked, Socialcam, AnyVivo
• YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, Minefold, Exec, 99dresses, Matterport

If you were to stop for a moment and consider what your perfect deals site would be, chances are it doesn’t look a whole lot like any of the big names currently operating in the space. When it comes down to it, we all have our own individual preferences when it comes to products, activities, and experiences. So, the lowest common denominator would be a platform that routinely serves us great deals on the things we actually enjoy. As simple as that may sound, there are few deals players that do it well. Dealupa, a startup that’s part of Y Combinator’s current winter batch, is launching today with what it hopes is a solution to deal disappointment, aka deal fatigue.

Considering the slew of daily deals sites that have emerged, it’s no surprise then that, in an effort to serve people with deals they actually want, a number of deal aggregators have popped up to wrangle all those discounts and offers into one place. The problem is that instead of giving users better choices, these aggregators often just give us more noise. With more deals comes the need for better filtering — for better recommendation engines.

This is where Dealupa comes in. Founded by two former Google engineers, the deal aggregator is taking a page out of their former employer’s book, having created its own “Dealrank” technology (patent pending) that is designed not just to serve more relevant results to each user, but to serve deals that are of a higher quality. The algorithm is, of course, Google’s PageRank applied to deals. For those unfamiliar, PageRank is the ranking and sorting algorithm behind Google search results; by way of link analysis, the technology aims to surface pages (or content) that is most relevant to your keyword search.

Just as the success of the content aggregation/search engine depended on a smart technology (presumably designed by objective parties/technologies) that could identify both popularity and relevance to serve better results, Dealrank’s algorithm, too, is trying to boost the quality of deal aggregation by measuring popularity and relevance. Dealrank works to identify the quality of deals by combining various signals into its ranking function, which then serves the closest matches at the top of its homepage — er, your homepage.

The Dealrank algorithm considers, among other factors, how many people are sharing and liking a deal — not just in your social graph — but on Twitter and Facebook as a whole, how many people are buying the deal (and is that deal accelerating or stagnating), as well as the Yelp rating of the merchant offering the deal.

The algorithm combines these qualifiers and other intrinsic signals of a deal’s quality with users’ personal preferences and attributes, like what type of deals they like and where they’re located, to create an internal ranking. (Just to clarify, Dealupa doesn’t actually have a numerical ranking on each deal, it’s inherent to the algorithm.) But one of my favorite features of Delupa is that, when you sign on, you can browse through all the different categories of deals, and reject those you don’t want. Tired of being sent deals for spas or half off at those all-you-can eat local hamburger joints? Cross them off the list.

After that, with Dealrank plugging away behind the scene, the deals at the top of the page are supposed to be of a higher quality — and more relevant — than ranking systems that are simply social, or location-based, or just arbitrary. Dealupa is using collaborative filtering, and interestingly, Dealupa Co-founder Sanjay Mavinkurve tells us that they aren’t interested in your personal social graph.

While Dealupa pulls in deal data on what deals are getting the most “likes” and so on from Facebook’s API, they’re not fully buying into the social proof dynamic that would say that just because your friend bought the deal, so will you. They’d rather find similarities in a Facebook-wide graph between you and someone who has similar preferences, tastes, and biographical info. Mavinkurve said that he thinks this is far more accurate than the traditional social recommendation model.

The co-founders also said that they’ve found it’s useful to provide “experiential” classification of deals rather than “factual.” This means that rather than labeling categories plainly as, say, “gym deals,” consumers would rather see deals in categories like “Adrenaline,” or “Once In A Lifetime,” or “Date Night.” These indicators are a little bit vague, yes, but the co-founders think that they more accurately get at the experiences you want to have. This kind of categorization tells them more about who their customers are as people, rather than the specific coupon-clipping deal they’re interested in at the given moment.

Having followed the deals space for awhile now, I have to say it’s interesting to see where Dealupa has ended up. We originally covered them when they launched as “Deelio” back in November. I was quick to point out that the product experience, the design of an aggregator’s site, can matter — and I thought the site looked pretty good. But, really, it was just a small iteration on the common theme.

Then, the co-founders joined Y Combinator, and have since completely rebuilt their product. That means that, along with its launch and another name change (they moved from Deelio to The Dealmix but had to deal with domain squatters), Dealupa has launched a new design, and a totally different UI. (And apparently they now own the trademark to “Dealupa,” so no more name changes.)

The old design was reminiscent of Dealmap and 8coupons, but the new look has a lot more Pinterest influence, with cascading verticals and deals-in-boxes. You can still flip to “map view,” but it’s a different way of doing it, that adds the appropriate visual element on top of the Dealrank tech, after all, this is a deal site, not a search engine. It’s good to see that they get that.

For some quick background, Dealupa co-founders, Sanjay Mavinkurve and Vijay Boyapati, are both former Google engineers. Mavinkurve also happens to be one of the early engineers at HarvardConnection (later known as ConnectU), which was founded by the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra in 2002. Mavikurve began the early work on HarvardConnection, but graduated in 2003 and went to work for Google. (Victor Gao replaced Mavikurve in a part-time capacity, before recommending Mark Zuckerberg. The rest, as they say, is litigated history.)

Dealupa will have to deal with plenty of competition, especially from deal aggregators/recommenders like Yipit. But, whereas Groupon may have 30 deals for a particular city, building on the archives they amassed at The Dealmix, Dealupa has 700 to 800 deals per city. That’s comparable to — if not more than — the average on Yipit. (Yipit is currently showing 154 for San Francisco.)

The map view has been a little slow to load, and there are still some kinks to work out, but if Dealupa can offer better inventory and quality of deals through Dealrank, it will be interesting to see if users buy in.

Check out Dealupa at home here, and let us know what you think.

Say you’re sitting at your laptop, listening to music while responding to emails, writing code, or reading blogs. Then your phone rings, and the typical scramble ensues: You minimize your browser, maximize your music app, and search frantically for the pause button or volume control — all, hopefully, before you miss the call. Sound familiar? That’s a problem that Flutter, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies, has solved.

Flutter is an app for Mac that lets you control the play function on Spotify or iTunes by simply waving at your computer. You can watch it in action in the video embedded above. That in itself is pretty nifty — as evidenced by the 11,000 people who downloaded Flutter in the first 11 days it was available, and the 400,000 gestures the app logged from those users. In the near-term, Flutter expects to expand its functionality to control other media apps such as Pandora and YouTube, as well as to other operating systems and devices beyond the Mac.

But the really interesting thing is the company’s long-term vision, which goes well beyond the ability to start and stop a Rihanna song with a wave of your hand. Ultimately, Flutter co-founders Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala tell me, Flutter wants to power the eyes of our devices — in the same way that Siri functions as the iPhone’s ears.

It’s a big ambition, but it makes a lot of sense. Webcam hardware has become so inexpensive — about 50 cents a pop — one is included in practically any new laptop, tablet or phone that enters the market today. But we really only use them for two purposes: Shooting photos or videos, or video-chatting with others. The guys at Flutter envision a future where we use gestures along with our voices to tell our machines what to do, rather than pressing buttons or clicking a mouse. It’s all about interacting with our devices in a more natural, human way. As an expert in computer vision, Dalal especially is well-positioned to lead this push.

For now, though, Flutter is keeping it simple, trying to make the best tool for easily controlling the music playing on your computer. Maintaining a narrow focus is smart for a tiny six-person startup that’s just starting out. But it’s the long-term potential of the technology and the team that really makes Flutter one to watch.

Multiplayer online games are becoming increasingly popular, so much so that the already-addictive web has become rife with way-too-addictive game experiences that will steal hours from your day — and probably most of your rent money. Zynga’s Cityville is played by over 61 million users per month, and the cult sensation Minecraft recently reached over 24 million registered players.

As everyone knows, multiplayer is better than single player, and as the geeks among us know, there’s a set of multiplayer games, like Minecraft and Urban Terror, that offer software that allows gamers to host their own servers. For games like Minecraft, running your own server means that you don’t have to be subject to the rules and regulations of other hosts — you get to invite all of your friends into your world to play, and you get to set the rules.

While this can make the game experience infinitely more fun, gamers have to rent their own servers for $70 a month, be their own sysadmin, and are thus subject to their system’s RAM and CPU constraints. In other words, for hardware novices, the process can get complicated. This is where Minefold enters into the picture. Minefold, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, wants to be a more consumer-focused Amazon EC2 for the multiplayer gaming world, offering on-demand game servers for a nominal monthly fee ($5).

Existing game server hosts basically force the admin person to collect money from all their friends. If they stop paying, all their friends are also kicked out and the game’s data is lost. Minefold wants to eliminate any sort of system administration by allowing gamers to simply go to their site and start playing, allowing each player to pay for their usage separately. The startup is currently only catering to Minecraft players, but it plans to expand to other multiplayer games in the near future.

Minefold Co-founders Christopher Lloyd and David Newman originally hail from Sydney, Australia, but they re-located to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator’s winter batch, and will be headquartering their company in the Valley. Both avid gamers and mobile games developers, the co-founders told us that they want their service to make it simple for users to start playing private multiplayer games with their friends, without having to worry about the technical details that plague the current game hosting industry.

On Minefold, every player has an individual account, which spreads out the cost of the game amongst all its players, so that even if the person who initiated the game stops playing, all members can still continue to connect and play, without worrying about losing their work/data. Minefold is also looking to disrupt the current game server model by presenting users with rich data about the games they’re playing from the Web.

For example, Minefold offers game-specific features that designed to make gameplay even better, like rendering bird’s-eye views of Minecraft worlds, which helps orient them in the game and serves as a meeting point where players can discuss their experience. The startup also enables gamers to show off their creations on the Web, providing a directory of popular worlds on Minefold so that other players can clone the worlds they like and start playing with a few clicks.

After soft launching in December, over 6,000 hours of Minecraft have been played through the site, which the co-founders hope is a sign of the growing engagement they hope to facilitate with their on-demand, full-stack hosting platform. With architecture that offers quick scaling and is inspired by Heroku, the Aussies want to nail the Minecraft experience first. Once this mission is accomplished, they plan to offer similar gaming experiences across desktop, mobile, and console games.

The startup is currently hiring. For more, check them out at home here.

We’ve heard a lot about photo-sharing apps over the last year or two, and although the launch of a new social photo app may result in eye-rolling by some, images are becoming an ever-more important medium for communication. As our lives, products, and communications become increasingly visual, content producers, app developers, and site owners alike all have to ramp up their services to meet that escalating demand. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

That’s why Chute, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, doesn’t just want to be another photo sharing or syncing app, it wants to be the service every app developer and content producer uses to manage and enhance their photo capabilities. Chute is an Images-as-a-Service startup or, in other words, a cool API for photos. What does that mean?

Every time a developer or a site owner wants to build photo functionality into their app or website, they’re essentially forced to re-invent the wheel. Mobile developers aren’t always familiar with the ins-and-outs of web development, just as the same can be said for web developers, so Chute has built a system that works for both, handling the entire backend environment for uploading, processing, authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

This means big savings for developers, both in terms of time and money, as they don’t have to worry about managing servers, scaling, or dealing with multiple third-party APIs. Another way to think of Chute says co-founder Ranvir Gujral: “It’s like Twilio for photo infrastructure.”

If, for example, you’re running a popular website and you want all of your users to be able to have profile images, you can sign up for Chute and paste a few lines of code into your application, and that’s it. Users will then be able to upload images to Chute’s servers, where they will be cropped, re-sized, etc. according to your specifications, before being served onto your site.

Obviously, because Chute removes the pain of having to deal with code and servers for image hosting, the service is particularly useful for mobile developers, who, depending on their setup, may be able to cut the cord on servers altogether. What’s more, the startup allows developers to offer user authentication via the traditional username and password method, or to login through Facebook or Twitter, which means that if a developer’s app or service doesn’t already offer user accounts, they don’t have to build that functionality to host user-generated content. Pretty cool.

The value prop also applies to big online publishers, as the startup’s service comes with something called SlideChute included, which is essentially their own user-generated content management system. Because the startup’s service is driven primarily through APIs which work the same for mobile as they do for the Web, publishers are safe in the knowledge that if they start out as a Web property and their users create and upload a bunch of profile images, when they later release a mobile app, all user images are transported seamlessly into the mobile experience.

SlideChute was built to be straightforward and easy to use, designed for publishers that don’t have access to much IT support, which means that, as mentioned before, publishers can integrate the content management system into any site with one line of code.

In addition to its APIs and user-generated content management system (SlideChute), Chute also has its own dedicated developer site, Picture.io, which will provide direct access to its API and SDKs, and aims to offer every infrastructural component a developer might need to build the front or backend of their apps. Chute’s SDKs will be available starting today, while direct access to APIs will remain in private beta until later this month.

Co-Founders Ranvir Gujral, Gregarious Narain, Gaurav Sharma all worked together on LifeGrams (instant, photo-enabled baby books) before starting Chute and joining YC’s 2012 winter class. The team launched Chute’s limited private beta in December, and has seen activity more than quadruple in January and February to the point where Chute is now serving millions of photos per month — pre-launch.

Much of this early activity has come as a result of the partnerships Chute has been able to forge with publishers like Today.com, which uses Chute to collect and serve user images, as well as the well-known golf apparel and equipment maker TaylorMade, which used Chute as part of a larger social media campaign, called Driver Love to collect, moderate, and display user photos via direct upload on its Facebook page, on their own site, and on the campaign’s microsite via email, etc.

Gujral tells us that the startup is getting ready to announce a number of other partnerships and integrations in the next few weeks with app developers that will be using the startup’s API directly. He hopes that these relationships will continue to validate the ease of use for Chute customers, taking things like server management and scaling right out the pain equation.

And this is where Chute’s plans for monetization come in, as the co-founder tells us that SlideChute will end up being on an SaaS subscription model (after all, it’s just software built on top of the Chute API), and the API itself will likely have metered usage — all standard ops for an API business, with potential lucrativeness depending on how well they’re able to leverage its partners to bring traffic to its API and paying publishers to SlideChute.

Of course, tongue planted firmly in cheek, Gujral said that, in the big picture, the team is aware that their technology will make it more likely that we’ll see further waves of potentially obnoxious photo-sharing apps, but that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. Of course, he would say that, but it’s hard not to agree when he says that the success of tomorrow’s photo apps will be determined by who has the best, most user-friendly UI. But there’s no reason that all those apps can’t use Chute as their backend. There is a trend we’re seeing in mobile development in which designers and developers are looking to outsource more and more of the difficult work to third-party, B2B services — Urban Airship would be one example.

The Chute co-founder believes that there is plenty of room in the space for those who specialize in one particular (and painful) part of the process, and I would be inclined to agree. For mobile developers and publishers, Chute is definitely worth checking out. I know we’ll be hearing more from these guys in the future.

Chute is also offering the first 50 TechCrunch readers instant access to SlideChute’s private beta, so head over to the homepage to learn more.

Sometimes the genesis of a startup happens just like this: Guy buys iPhone. Guy breaks iPhone. Guy then pays Apple way too much to fix said phone, grumbling ensues. Guy breaks phone again. Roommate breaks phone. Then, a lightbulb goes off. This is what happened to A.J. Forsythe when he was a student at California Polytechnic State University. He and his friends broke their iPhones more than a few times, so he decided to teach himself how to fix it. Then, like any good entrepreneur, he turned that solution into a business. Forsythe started charging people at school $75 per fix, set up a few social media accounts to hawk his services, remodeled his room into a repair shop, and iCracked was born.

Forsythe sourced distributors of inexpensive screens, eventually finding those he could trust, and then began pitching the business to college campuses. By March 2011, about a year after initially hatching the idea, the business had grown beyond them — to 20 locations across the country — and was profitable. Forsythe began to hire tech-savvy “iTechnicians” to help he and his partners absorb the demand.

Fast forward to the present, and iCracked has become a member of Y Combinator’s winter class of startups. The team’s understanding of the market and its business model have begun to solidify, so today, iCracked is officially launching to the world. Granted, that model is not wholly original, as iCracked is definitely reminiscent of the Geek Squad of Best Buy fame, except they focus explicitly on repairing iOS devices. Which makes sense, when you consider the margins…

The majority of iPhone breaks are superficial, and replacement screens can be purchased for cheap, yet iPhone users are traditionally locked into the process of searching for a proximate Apple retail store, making an appointment, only to discover when they get there that Apple will be charging them upwards of $200 for a replacement phone. And oftentimes this means losing some or all of the data on your old phone. Thus, for iPhone owners with with superficial damages, one could still charge customers $100 for repair, which they would happily pay at the competitive price, while the expense of parts and service is comparatively small.

The opportunity and the margins are there, but the iCracked team is being smart about their approach to the business, as they want to become an all-in-one solution for people with broken devices, regardless of their location. Today, the startup offers three repair options: Users can find a certified local iTechnician near them and schedule an appointment. (iCracked now has 125 technicians working for them, many of them freelance. If they operate within a 30 minute-drive of your location, they’ll come to you.) The second option is to repair by mail, which takes 3 to 5 days to turnaround, though the team can send you an “interim Go-Phone” if you can’t be without your phone for 5 days.

The last option is DIY, in which iCracked sends people a complete repair kit with detailed instructions to allow you to fix your own phone. They hit all three bases there pretty well. Without a 20K+ person team like Geek Squad, it’s tough to be everything to everyone. But for a team of 15, with 150 technicians, iCracked seems to be on the right track. They wouldn’t tell me what their revenues look like right now, but they did say that they continue to be profitable and are re-investing nearly $9 out of every $10, which, again, makes sense given their stage of development.

In terms of what they fix, obviously the team has considered Android phones, due to the platform’s explosive adoption, but the carrier fragmentation has them staying away from the OS at this point. Instead, they stick to Apple, repairing all three generations of the iPod Touch, iPhones, and though their website currently doesn’t show that they repair iPads, they do, and that functionality should be on the site within the next week.

They take these repair options, and rather than go for a brick and mortar approach, which means overhead and a lot of sunk costs, iCracked keeps it remote (although they do have one store in Long Beach). They let people buy the things they need for repairs on the site, and keep their iTechnicians stocked with what parts they need. iCracked will replace all cracked screens, repair most water damaged iPhones, and will give free diagnosis and repair estimates, most of which they claim to be able to fix.

The other smart thing the guys are doing in terms of complementary services/revenue is that they offer buyback on all old iPhones and will recycle iPhones, iPods, and iPads when customers ask for it. Naturally, the next step for the company is to expand into refurbishing and reselling iPhones, but the biggest key, Forsythe says, is that, if a potential customer can’t find an iCracked technician within a close distance and needs to do repair-by-mail, all shipping, handling, insurance and service costs are included in the flat rate service fee. Plus, they offer a one year warranty on all iCracked services.

The next big obstacle standing in their way is scale, but as an already-profitable young company, that’s been through the Y Combinator ringer, iCracked could be attractive to investors. And if they’re able to raise some capital, growing under the freelance model could be a breeze. Of course, vetting and quality assurance of those iTechnicians is a challenge in and of itself.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I have a feeling if they bring on the right investors and advisors, iCracked is going to be around for awhile, and it will be perhaps even more interesting to see how Apple reacts.

For more, check out iCracked at home here.

Smartphones have a lot of cool technology built in, from high-res touchscreens to gestural command features, like shaking, rocking, or rolling, and motion sensing via accelerometers. Just as mobile computing is revolutionizing the way we communicate and interact with the world, unsurprisingly smartphone technology is also having its way with gaming.

Since we’re rarely without our mobile devices today, mobile gaming (especially social-mobile) is becoming increasingly popular — but thanks to the wizardry of smartphone tech — a number of intrepid souls are turning back to explore the interactive possibilities between our mobile devices and our hardware — our desktops, etc. The most entertaining example of which would be the ability to transform our smartphones into game controllers.

Joypad, for instance, is transforming iPhones into game controllers for iPads, Macs, and PCs by syncing them over BlueTooth or Wi-Fi, just as Brass Monkey is doing for browser-based games.

Today, a member of the current batch of Y Combinator startups called Flypad joins the group of entrepreneurs looking to game-ify smartphones, albeit with a more specific focus. Flypad transforms the iPhone into a steering wheel for PC racing games, allowing gamers to steer their vehicles of choice in games like Need For Speed: The Run — with their iPhones.

Initially, the team was on a similar trajectory to that of Brass Monkey, in that it offered support for Android and iOS that, through apps and Wi-Fi, linked smartphones to browser-based Flash games. However, the team found that browser-based games attracted a more casual gaming audience that didn’t care quite as much about peripherals (devices connected to a host computer) as more hardcore gamers playing PC racing games. To that point, the newest version of Flypad has seen 7,000 downloads in beta testing and is resonating particularly in international markets, where the cost of buying controllers, steering wheels, and the like, are higher.

Going forward, Flypad has two immediate goals, which are to increase the amount of play-able racing games (and beyond) in its bullpen, as well as rolling out a full set of APIs for game developers, which allow them to easily add the iPhone as an input for their games.

Of course, integrating with existing games is just the beginning, as the team’s eventual plan is to enable a whole new class of games to be developed. Typically, game controllers today are simply just pieces of hardware, but eventually controllers themselves will be running their own complex software, opening up whole new ways of interacting with games.

Some of the other solutions out there today, says Flypad Co-founder Ayo Omojola, tend to have heavy developer focuses up front, but, at the end of the day, gamers don’t play games because of the phone or the novelty of the technology, they play because they love the gameplay or experience of their favorite racing games. So Flypad focused on offering a quick way to preload content into the experience, so that gamers don’t have to worry about the technical side, they can just sit down and play.

So, while they initially offered a browser mechanic that enabled gamers to quickly play on the Web, although HTML5 in progressing rapidly, the gameplay just wasn’t the quality as those Steam games, for example, which is why Flypad is currently offering compatibility with some of the games in the Need For Speed series, DIRT3, Burnout, and Ignite. Certainly, Flypad faces some friction in that it isn’t platform or device agnostic, and the fact that many serious gamers prefer fixed-wheel controllers to something more free-wheeling like a smartphone control; however, at this point Omojola says that the team is focused on killing the experience of PC racing games on the iPhone.

Next, the founding team, which also includes Gaurav Namit and Femi Omojola, plans to actually embed themselves in their users’ living rooms, so that they can better observe the habits of gamers, how they play, what their engagement looks like, etc. But for now they know that opening their doors to other game developers represents the best immediate opportunity for increasing the number of games (and features) that they can integrate with their smart, motion-sensing steering wheel. To do so, the team recently released its Flash API, and is looking to launch its Unity API next.

Of course, in the big picture, it might be easy to see Flypad’s technology as an add-on, but in reality, their smart steering solution is meant to get developers excited about creating games for smartphones, and that in turn, hopefully encourage gamers to follow. What’s more, the real nifty bit of the technology Flypad offers is the ability to provide users with dynamic interfaces on their smartphones, which change in realtime, so that, say, if you’re playing Madden, your playbook only shows up on your phone and not that of your opponent.

The technology around mobile device-controlled has so much potential, and although it’s still fairly novel to most gamers, I’m sure we can expect some cool things out of Flypad as they push forward.

For more on Flypad, check them out at home here and in the intro video below:

Back in August, Y Combinator held its summer session demo day, introducing the world to 60 new companies in one of its strongest batches to date. One of these companies, DoubleRecall launched as a platform that enables companies to roll out digital campaigns that actually succeed in prompting users “to read an ad,” rather than scoff and click elsewhere.

In that sense, the Y Combinator alum is looking to replace — or at least become a complement to — paywalls with simple, CAPTCHA-like messages that have the potential to be less annoying revenue generators. For example, DoubleRecall might offer its service on a news article, which would contain a CAPTCHA-like recall mechanism that would prompt readers to pick out a couple of words from the text and enter them into a textbox.

The idea is to create experiences that are quick enough for users to navigate that they lower the barrier and obnoxiousness level and are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether.

As to the effectiveness of this model, DoubleRecall says that the campaigns it ran over the course of Q4 2011 showed an 82 percent engagement rate, versus one to three percent for paywalls, an average CTR of 3.6 percent, and an elevenfold increase in brand awareness, versus using banner ads. The startup closed the year with $300K in revenues, which isn’t too shabby for having been up and running for four months at the end of the year.

These results have been intriguing enough that investors are buying into DoubleRecall’s strategy, as the startup has announced that it has raised $1.6 million in seed funding. Like the other startup’s in YC’s summer batch, DoubleRecall was offered $170K from Yuri Milner and SV Angel’s Start Fund, as well as Y Combinator. Since then, Digital Garage, Itochu Ventures, Mentor Equity and TEEC Angel have all joined in to bring the round to $1.6 million.

Sure, this model is great, in that it’s got the potential for publishers to monetize through an alternative approach, and readers don’t have to wrestle with paywalls, but with this slight description, readers may be inclined to see this as a me-too idea very reminiscent of the same strategy that has seen Solve Media attract buzz and venture capital.

DoubleRecall COO Julien Coustaury tells me that the main similarity between Solve and DoubleRecall is that, at some point, a reader has to retype words from text into a textbox. Solve’s “TYPE-IN” platform replaces those fuzzy CAPTCHA words and numbers with a brand message or logo, with an input box. Essentially, they’re using input boxes for advertising. DoubleRecall, on the other hand, doesn’t want to advertise on the input box, but instead wants to serve some non-branded text readers have to recall, and use that to unlock content.

In most cases, this would come in the form of pay walls. Sure, publishers, content producers need to make money, but readers generally shudder at pay walls, especially if they’re not loyal customers of the brand in question. Those who read the Wall Street Journal everyday don’t mind paying a bit more for some of their content, while casual readers may seethe at finding a pay wall, when they were looking for a specific article that couldn’t be reached other than by paying.

Thus, DoubleRecall works with publishers and sites to maintain this wall, but replace it with another gateway. They get the user clicks, show the content they want to show, and then get to give readers access to the content anyway. It can be a win-win, although there’s still a lot more testing to be done.

DoubleRecall is opening headquarters in NYC this month, as it works to expand its reach internationally (the team is originally Slovenian, and gained a bit of European traction in the earl-going), launching in Japan later this month. So far, the startup has signed on 40 publishers and 50 brands in total, and will look to use its new infusion of capital to fuel this international expansion and ramp up hiring.

The company also has a social component to let brands share the best from their social media streams, as well as real-time monitoring and report making to enable them to instantly adapt to feedback.

For more, check out DoubleRecall at home here.

Inherently, we like doing things in groups, as it makes our experiences more social. It’s not about what we’re doing so much as who we’re doing it with that makes our experiences enjoyable. Group messaging took off two years ago, overrunning SXSW, as a better way to keep groups of people engaged; Kickstarter has grown like a week thanks to the power of the crowd lending legs to fledgling projects that need quick capital to get off the ground.

A new startup launching today called Crowdtilt is taking a page out of Kickstarter’s book, riffing on “crowdfunding,” but instead choosing to call itself “groupfunding” or a “Kickstarter for groups of friends.”

What does that mean? Well, we all love Kickstarter, but if you’re looking to pool money to throw your friend a birthday party, for example, that ain’t going to happen on Kickstarter. For a good reason, but that doesn’t mean the crowdfunding model can’t work. Thus, Crowdtilt has built a site that makes it simple for groups of friends to organize things to do together, with the specific focus on making it easy for the organizer to collect money from anyone.

How does that work? The site allows you to easily create a campaign, like “Help Hagan get to San Francisco” or “Phish Party Bus in DC,” while specifying how much money is needed for the campaign to actually happen — or in the startup’s lingo — “tilt.” You can then send this campaign out to your friends, who can authorize their credit cards for a certain amount with Crowdtilt.

Like groupbuying, friends’ credit cards won’t be charged until the campaign has tilted, or in other words, the specified amount has been reached. Not dissimilar from Kickstarter in this way, especially as projects have a certain amount of time before they become defunct.

Crowdtilt gives the organizer and friends 7 days to raise their total, and then shuts it down. And the startup, at least initially, isn’t taking a cut of credit card transactions. Although the need for a clear business model remains, Crowdtilt is trying to keep their platform as frictionless as possible in the early going to try to reach critical mass.

Testing it out within the confines of Y Combinator, Crowdtilt Co-founder James Beshara says that the current YC batch used Crowdtilt to organize buying a communal pickup truck that current founders can use to move their stuff in and out of offices, etc., as well as using it to organize social events like BBQ’s. I mean, it’s deceptively simple: One person creates a campaign, anyone else can contribute, paying when it meets the benchmark.

Bashara told us that the platform started under the auspices of a way for charities to efficiently collect donations, but he decided to pivot once he saw the idea taking off among groups of friends. Other unexpected use cases have emerged in early testing, like a couple in Denver creating a campaign for friends and family to contribute towards the cost of their wedding, rather than putting it all on the groom’s father.

Crowdtilt currently has 3,000 users, and the number of campaigns has been doubling every seven weeks, with campaigns succeeding in raising 188 percent of the proposed total. And all this has come entirely through word of mouth. The team soon plans to add social features to their model, allowing people to follow their friends so that you can be quickly notified when they create campaigns.

Unlike Kickstarter, there’s no requirement for users (or organizers) to specify multiple levels of rewards, apply, and wait for approval from management. Simply create a campaign and share it with the people who you want to share it with, pay when you get there. And it doesn’t just have to be your friends. I almost feel like I’m repeating myself, because the idea is so simple, but in that way it’s intuitive, and potentially savvy.

The longterm goal for Crowdtilt is to become the default way to manage all group-based transactions online. Right now activity happens on the Crowdtilt portal, but the team wants to take the experience to other websites, where the UX of sites that rent hotel rooms, for example, could integrate the Crowdtilt model as another way to serve their customer. And that’s where revenue models would enter the picture.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because it’s Friday, maybe because I’ve wanted to build something similar myself, I think Crowdtilt is really onto something here. Come on, trolls, you hate group email and “reply alls,” so when APIs spread this around the web, you can use it to buy a new couch for your mom’s basement.

Check out Crowdtilt at home here, and let us know what you think.

If you’ve ever set up an automatic ‘Bill Pay’ feature on your bank account to pay off your utility and cable bills, then you’ve taken advantage of a nifty feature called an ‘interbank transfer’, also known as an ‘Automated Clearing House’ payment. Once they’re set up, they tend to be very convenient — the amount of the bill is automatically deducted from your account, saving you the hassle of having to write yet another check (or fill out another online form) each month. Merchants benefit from this system as well, because their fees are significantly lower than those that are charged by the credit card companies.

Thing is, this feature is typically only available for paying bills from big companies — it’s rare to see a smaller online merchant that’s offering these automatic transfers, because the process for them to set it up is complicated and costly. Until now. Y Combinator-backed startup GoCardless is launching today as a UK-based service that allows smaller merchants to easily set up interbank transfers for customers.

Part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 class, GoCardless was founded in 2010 by Oxford graduates Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson. GoCardless is also announcing a $1.5 million round led by Accel Partners, Passion Capital, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Y Combinator. Proceeds will go towards building out the team and product, and expanding the merchant base.

The service is offering a REST API that allows smaller merchants and companies to easily integrate these automated transfers into their sites for one-time and recurring payments. By bypassing the credit card network, GoCardless is able to offer the service for one-third to one-fourth of the cost of most network-based payment options — the fees charged are around 1 percent (but will never reach higher than 2₤ per transaction, no matter the amount).

As the startup explains to me, interbank transfers are commonly used in the UK and Europe to pay bills from giant companies, like your gas or phone bills. But each of these payment applications had to be custom-developed by a consultant, and negotiated individually with each bank — which is an impossible task for most small businesses.

GoCardless has spent the past year speaking and negotiating with banks, doing all the requisite legwork for broad approval. And, aside from the lower fees, another advantage of interbank transfers is that merchants don’t need to worry about credit cards expiring (which is a huge problem with recurring or subscription payments) and there is no need to deal with PCI compliance.

For consumers, GoCardless makes it quick and easy to make payments. After the initial sign up, users can authorize future payments anywhere GoCardless is offered with just one click. The company has also created a dashboard where users can easily manage all of their payments made via their bank accounts, giving them more control over their online spending.

Since launching a beta product in late 2011, GoCardless has already integrated with over 300 merchants and is growing quickly. The startup has over 1,000 merchants in the UK who are on a wait-list. For example, Kashflow, an online accounting service for SMEs, integrated with GoCardless to help its customers collect money. Other users include SaaS companies and those who charge for digital content.

Interestingly, Dwolla is also doing something similar in the US, allowing an easier way to accept payments (and reduce fees) for merchants. One advantage GoCardless has in its favor across the pond is that it is fairly commonplace to pay via interbank transfer in the UK when it comes to major company bills.

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Jon Paris, CEO and co-founder of Astrid To-Do. Astrid participated in AngelPad and immediately raised a successful seed round from Google Ventures and other investors. His opinions are his own.

Incubators are playing an increasingly vital role in acquiring meaningful investment for first-time entrepreneurs. TechCrunch reported that elite accelerators like Y Combinator receive on average one application every minute, and AngelPad reminds its participants that it is many times more selective than the Harvard Business School.

Incubators ask for a 2 to 10 percent stake in your company, a sum that could alternatively be used to attract a junior co-founder or provide meaningful ownership to the first few engineers you enlist. In return, incubators offer intensive coaching, networking with other founders, and warm introductions to likely investors. Incubators give first-time entrepreneurs and international teams alike a crucial link to Silicon Valley.

In addition to the giving up of meaningful equity there are other downsides to consider before participating in an incubator. Most have a schedule that’s built on a demo near the end of the program. While many companies view that external structure as helpful, others can find that working with such a timeline damages their business.

The long lead up to D-Day could mean a delay in fundraising or product launch, which in turn can translate into missed opportunities. There are other potential pitfalls, from committing too quickly and prematurely to an idea, to trying to scale before properly understanding a market and the company’s place in it. And with any robust community, there’s the danger of succumbing to groupthink. Founders need to remember they understand their market better than anyone.

For most first-time founders, these downsides are far outweighed by the benefits. Below are some lessons I regularly share with prospective entrepreneurs interested in applying to incubators.

1. Know their interest and expertise

When planning to apply to such incubators as 500 Startups, Y Combinator, TechStars or AngelPad, watch any and every online video you can find of incubator leaders outlining what they are looking for and what they can offer your company. Numerous incubator leaders, including Paul Graham, Thomas Korte and Dave McClure, have explicitly mapped out what they can bring to the table and what kind of companies they are targeting.

Know what’s important to the investors: Dave McClure at 500 Startups will want you to have a deep understanding of the micro-economics; AngelPad loves great B2B opportunities; and Y Combinator appreciates founders who have already demonstrated their smarts with submissions on Hacker News. They all will make exceptions, but you should pitch in a way that will resonate with the specific incubator.

2. Understand their challenge

All incubators play an arbitrage game, curating great early-stage startups for the community of larger investors. They need to believe they can readily convince other investors to put in an even larger sum at the end of the program. It is your job to convince them you have the raw material, which usually means great engineers (preferably branded by great universities or companies), beautiful design, strong team dynamics, and an ability to get a meaningful user base. If you have these ingredients, the incubator can help you polish your pitch and get in front of investors.

3. Intros matter

Getting a friendly introduction from someone the incubator knows can prevent your startup from getting buried in the application avalanche. The best intros come from people they trust who have insight into what it takes to start an effective company. Founders, fellow investors or former colleagues (hint: search LinkedIn for shared connections) can help get that needed extra attention. Intros from their friends and family members outside the startup ecosystem will be much less helpful. I got a key intro to AngelPad from the MoPub founders and to Y Combinator through Posterous co-founder Garry Tan.

4. They will be watching closely

Many incubators now require a video submission with your application and will follow up with an in-person or video chat with you and your co-founder(s). While these might cause the incubator to miss great people due to some unconscious bias, they also give a glimpse of confidence, charisma and, perhaps most importantly, your relationship with your colleagues.

The least you can do is ensure that everyone pays attention to whoever is speaking. If the engineer rolls his eyes, yawns or corrects the CEO when he speaks, the incubator might regard your startup as radioactive. If you get a live interview, make sure everyone has defined roles, with the CEO answering all market and business questions, the CTO answering all technical questions, etc. And practice the interview dozens of times. Enlist smart friends to barrage you with questions in rapid succession until you can confidently provide short and clear answers.

5. You’ll get a new Alma Mater

Incubator provides fantastic coaching and rich networking opportunities with other companies and investors during their programs. This is especially helpful for international teams that can boast great products and meaningful traction, but lack connections to the Silicon Valley investor community. But the time in the incubator is just the beginning. Months out, the mentors continue to provide trusted counsel and meaningful introductions.

Our incubator class provided us with thousands of dollars in free services and have consistently been among the first to try our new products, provide honest feedback and give them a five-star rating in the App Store. The camaraderie runs deep, fostered by shared experience and an understanding that each companies’ success will elevate everyone’s status.

Many first-time entrepreneurs succeed without participating in an incubator, in the same way many professionals can have successful careers without going to college. But this will increasingly be the exception. Young companies passing on the incubators can squander time, even years, when they could be building their networks, getting greater market feedback and scale their business with investor dollars.

In the past year, I have seen four great teams with early traction and Stanford founders stagnate while trying to do things on their own. Each had a few connections with the investor community, but they didn’t compare to what the best incubators deliver. Don’t make their mistake — if you want to build a company with world-wide impact, joining an incubator may be your most important early step toward achieving success.

At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.

While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy.

The company boycotts  have sparked a thread on Hacker News, where user Solipsist posted a link to the list with the comment, “While I understand your sentiments towards SOPA, are you really going to distance yourself from all of these companies?”

To which YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham replied,

“Actually that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.”

Disinviting offending companies to YCombinator Demo Day? That takes, um, guts. Graham told me in a followup email that he was indeed serious and had just given the list of SOPA supporters to the people in charge of the Demo Day invites, ”I don’t know exactly which companies had people on the list.  But I know which will now: none of them.”

When asked if that boycott extended to investors in those companies, Graham responded, “Several of the companies on the SOPA list have venture arms.  I encourage startups to boycott them.  We’ll certainly encourage all the startups we’ve funded to.”

The rationale? “If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?”

The next YCombinator demo day is scheduled for March 27th, 2012.

You can read through our full coverage of SOPA here.

Update: So which companies on the SOPA list are being denied YC invites? Well no one except Demo Day organizers knows for sure, but as BI’s Matt Rosoff points out, Comcast/NBCUniversal’s Comcast Ventures has a stake in YC company CarWoo and listed companies like CBS Disney, GoDaddy, News Corp., Sony, Time-Warner, and Visa have all made tech investments in the past.

Last week, Erick wrote about the dramatic increase in startups and early-stage businesses we’ve been seeing over the last few years, likening the phenomenon to the Cambrian Explosion. In these fertile times for startups, naturally, there’s plenty of funding to be had: In the last year, according to CrunchBase, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008.

There are fewer barriers to startup creation now than ever before, and as businesses pop up left and right, so have the incubators and accelerators that provide these companies with the early fuel they need to build their products. Y Combinator, one of the more well-known startup incubators in the world, is now receiving over one application every minute, for example, and recently expanded the size of its classes to keep pace with demand.

Each of the prominent incubators, Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, and Founder Institute, among them, have been expanding their programs and networks, both at home and overseas. TechStars has added hubs in a number of cities, and both 500 Startups and Y Combinator recently launched their “largest batches yet”. It seems that with each passing “semester”, enrollment continues to grow.

But which of these incubators is the largest? It depends on how you define “largest” — each of these incubators rock and each has its own case. But one in particular thinks it has the “biggest” case: Founder Institute, today announced that it has become the largest incubator in the world — at least in terms of the number of alumni, mentors, and locations.

Founder Adeo Ressi told us that the incubator has now helped launch 415 startups worldwide, with a total of 483 graduated entrepreneurs. Founder Institute has done so in less than 2.5 years, and Ressi says that, when the ten operating sessions graduate in the next two months, the Institute will exceed 500 companies launched and is on pace to launch an average of two tech companies per day in 2012.

The Founder attributes the incubator’s growth to, among other things, focusing not on bringing startups to Silicon Valley, but on building startup ecosystems in national and international markets, allowing entrepreneurs to create their businesses at home. The Institute is directly operating in 20 different locations and counts over 700 mentors among its flock.

Of course, while Founder Institute may be the largest in terms of scale and alumni (Y Combinator has graduated 317+ companies, TechStars 114, 500 Startups 174, and Plug and Play 300+), it does not hold claim to being the largest in terms of the number of exits that generated cash returns or the amount of money raised.

The top 21 companies incubated by Y Combinator, for example, have a combined value of $4.7 billion, said Founder Paul Graham. Comparatively, 41 percent of Founder Institute graduates have received funding, for a total of more than $30 million.

Founder Institute companies have averaged about $2.5 million for their series A raises, the largest of which was $5 million. While the Institute has produced entrepreneurs that have gone on to found companies like Cake Health, I-DISP, Identifii, Kaliki, Rentcycle, and Udemy, Founder Institute has yet to produce high-valuation companies like Dropbox and Airbnb — both of which are Y Combinator graduates and have raised over $100 million.

While more than 100 of Founder Institute’s graduates are based internationally, 20 percent have female founders, 40 percent have been funded, and the Institute plans to add another 75 international locations, the incubator has to be careful that it isn’t just becoming a startup mill. Entrepreneurs want to be sure that they receive fair ROI, and the total amount of funding raised by graduates, the number of successful exits, and high valuations can be a good marker for determining this.

Founder Institute accepts an average of 30 percent of the startups that apply to its program (compared to 3 percent for Y Combinator), so startups know that they have a better chance of getting in. Yet, unlike other incubators, Founder Institute doesn’t invest in its startups, though it does take 3.5 percent of the graduating companies and puts it into a pool for the founders, mentors and people who operate local chapters.

The key for Founder Institute is its international footprint. Seed Camp, in contrast, has a significant (and growing) international presence, but it doesn’t have the same connection to Silicon Valley that Ressi has forged over the last 2.5 years. There is a growing push to invest in up-and-coming international tech hubs, and with the Institute planning 75 new locations (in London, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Bangalore, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, and Cape Town, to name a few), the incubator may have a leg up on incubators focused solely in the U.S.

It’s also important, as part of this expansion, to get support of local governments and ecosystems. Singapore’s government has been backing 100 percent of Founder Institute grads with investment grants, market access and other services — so even without investing significant capital in startups themselves, it’s partnerships like these that will make Founder Institute continue to fly — without being seen as a startup mill.

Applications for Founder Institute’s Winter 2011 program are being accepted through tomorrow, so readers interested can take FI’s “Predictive Admissions Test” and apply here.