Back in August, Y Combinator debuted its largest (and I’d say most stellar) class of startups to date. One of those companies is now ready to fully peel back the curtain and launch its app into the public fray. Vimessa is a free video voicemail app for the iPhone that allows consumers to send high-definition video messages to any mobile phone number or email address. And, unlike FaceTime, iMessage, MMS, and other video messaging services, the app works on all mobile devices and desktops, including feature phones, smartphones, and tablets.
What’s more, users don’t need to have Vimessa installed or even own an iPhone to receive these free high res messages, they can access them through a simple link. However, because it’s faster to send, receive, and view messages for those who have the app installed on their phones, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone apps are on their way. → Read More
Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School in a candid interview with Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. You can watch the full interview here, and it starts around the 43 minute mark, and lasts for roughly 40 minutes. If you have some time to spare, it’s well worth a look.
Zuck revealed a number of fascinating things about entrepreneurship, founding Facebook, and product development, but one of the more interesting (and surprising points) came at the end of the interview when Livingston asked him what he would do different if he could go back in time. Zuck replied: If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. → Read More
In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company.
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Wow. Silicon Valley-based startup incubator Y Combinator is getting just over one application per minute, according to a Tweet from co-founder and partner Paul Graham. Today is the last day for applications for the next Y Combinator class, and clearly founders are in a rush to get their applications in.
Back in August, Graham said that the acceptance rate to Y Combinator is just 3%. But because of an increase in applications, Y Combinator has increased its class sizes of late.
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If you’re advertising a product, would you rather simply have an image of that product, or have your consumers be able to watch a video of that product in action? Unless you’re sarcastic like myself, you probably answered with the latter, because the truth is that videos help products sell online. This is true even for those vendors that sell products that one wouldn’t necessarily assume would be made more attractive with video. Consider Zappos, for example, which currently offers over 50,000 product videos. Zappos also happens to do a pretty good business.
For SellStage, a startup from this summer’s batch of Y Combinator companies that is launching today, Zappos is the standard. But most big eTailers are far behind the shoe seller in terms of video content. So SellStage is launching a platform that is designed to make it easy for both big and small businesses to add video content to their websites to showcase their products.
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Y Combinator is about to wield its rapidly-growing influence in the tech community to help startups everywhere. And it’s taking on one of the hottest (and most fear-inspiring) issues around: patents.
Today YC cofounder Paul Graham has written a note called The Patent Pledge in which he proposes that tech companies should commit to a straightforward promise: “No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people.”
That’s the entire pledge. There’s no legalese or confusing conditions around it. But it could shake things up for tech companies in a big way. More important: unlike government intervention, which would likely take years, YC’s Patent Pledge could be widely adopted in a much shorter timeframe. YC has set up a site at ThePatentPledge.org that lists a roster of the companies that have agreed to the pledge, which already includes fourteen well-known YC alumni like Airbnb, Disqus, Hipmunk, and Weebly.
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Assumptions are rarely safe. But I’m sure most of you will come with me when I go out on a limb to say that, by and large, kids love toys. Yep. And they also love cartoons. This has been true as long as either have been around, however, a more recent taste to trend among the world’s wee ones: Love for the iPad. Some even said it was the toy of the year in 2010.
A new startup from Y Combinator’s gigantic summer batch of 63 companies launching today, called Launchpad Toys, agrees that tablets are big among kids — and that they just happen to be an incredibly effective educational tool to boot. → Read More
Y Combinator has just unveiled the dates and times of its 7th Annual Startup School; 2011′s event will take place on October 29th at Stanford University, where hundreds will gather to listen to talks about entrepreneurship and innovation by some of the Valley’s most influential founders and investors. → Read More
Yelp provides a compelling platform for small businesses to connect with consumers via deals, reviews, reservations, information and more.
But independent service professionals like hair stylists, bartenders, and DJs have a problem: if they jump from one establishment to another (which is quite common), they have a hard time taking their clientele with them. Enter Y Combinator-backed Opez, a platform that’s looking to help these professionals keep in touch with their clients on a long-term basis, making it easy to keep them informed of any job changes or hot deals they’re offering.
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When it comes to file sharing, there is no shortage of tools and services to help you transfer your files, big and small. There’s the old tried and true approach on email, or using VOIP services like Skype, or cloud-based services like Dropbox and Box.net, or the browser-based Ge.tt, to veterans like WeTransfer and YouSendIt. Then there’s newcomer, the social and sharing-focused Minus, which recently scored $1 million in funding and Sendoid, whose launch we covered back in March. The list is long, but new sites continue popping up, because no single business has a stranglehold on the market, and each method of file sharing has its drawbacks — and its limits. → Read More
As we’ve written in the past, Drchrono, a startup thatsimplifies the professional lives of doctors by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad, has received official government certification. This is will result in doctors receiving $44,000 in incentives when they use drchrono as an electronic medical records platform.
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My, how Y Combinator has grown. It wasn’t that long ago that the prestigious startup incubator had a dozen or so startups per batch. These days, class sizes are more like 60, and the alumni network is huge: in total, Y Combinator has invested in some 317 startups.
Given how many YC startups there are, it isn’t really surprising that a lot of them have some overlap, or are at least tackling similar problems. Today, YC is announcing an event that’s taking advantage of that fact: the Ad Innovation Conference.
The event, which takes place on September 14, will feature fifteen YC companies involved in building new ad-related technologies. Among the topics that will be covered: → Read More
Drchrono, a company that brings electronic health records to the iPad, has raised $675,000 in seed fundig from General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Gmail creator and FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit, Google’s Principal Engineer Matt Cutts, and the Start Fund.
Y Combinator-backed drchrono simplifies the professional lives of doctors and medical professionals by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad. The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, dictate notes via audio, take pictures, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. → Read More
MemSQL may not have the sexiest name or, as a database management software startup, live in the sexiest industry, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t appealing to investors. The Y Combinator Winter 2011 grad is announcing today that it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding, led by an impressive list of angels and VCs. The stalwart list includes venture backing from First Rounds Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Start Fund, SV Angel, and Y Combinator — as well as angel participation from celeb tech investor Ashton Kutcher, early Google employee and FriendFeed Co-founder Paul Bucheit, Loopt Founder Sam Altman, Guy Oseary, and several others. → Read More
It’s a well known fact that people improve foreign language skills when interacting and communicating with other people who speak the same foreign language. Y Combinator-backed Verbling is launching today as a easy to use online conversation exchange for language learners, leveraging in-browser video chat.
The site allows you to sign up and choose the language you want to learn. Since the site doesn’t have a massive userbase just yet, Verbling hosts sessions as specific times daily (12 pm PT and 7 pm PT) where people can show up and chat with each other. Once you join the site during a session time, you are automatically paired with a language speaker who is fluent in the language you wish to learn. The site encourages users to talk to a number of different speakers within each session. → Read More
Most charts I get sent are up and to the right. Not this one.
The chart ReadyForZero sent me (above) goes down and to the right. This is meant to showcase just how much debt the service is helping users eliminate. They’re the blue lines on the bottom. It’s like golf, the lower the better.
All told, ReadyForZero is already helping their users eliminate some $42 million in credit card debt since the beta launch just four months ago. We’ve covered the Y Combinator alum a few times over the past several months for a good reason: it’s a solid and much needed service. And today, investors are putting even more of their money where the credit card debt is disappearing, giving ReadyForZero a fresh $4.5 million Series A. → Read More
Y Combinator has just announced its “Part Time Partner” program, which will bring in former YC alumni to mentor the most recent cohort of startups, like regular partners, but only 1/5 of the time.
Joining the prestigious ranks of Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, MIT professor Robert Morris, and Harjeet Taggar are Loopt’s Sam Altman, Posterous’ Garry Tan and Justin.tv founders Emmett Shear and Justin Kan. Altman, Shear and Kan are from the first YC batch in 2005. → Read More
As smartphone adoption rises and technology companies embrace the technology, QR Codes are becoming more of a mainstream product for businesses, products and brands. QR Codes, which is short for Quick Response, are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. Today, Y Combinator-backed Paperlinks is launching a new way for businesses to engage consumers with QR codes.
Essentially, Paperlinks creates QR codes for businesses and brands but with a particular focus on the design of the code itself. The actual code can incorporate the logo of a brand or business. → Read More
Consumers are engaging retailers on Facebook and Twitter now more than ever. Whether it is Liking a deal, Tweeting the link to a product, or even participating in a contest, shoppers are mentioning and interacting with these e-commerce sites on a daily basis. The problem with traditional online loyalty programs mirror offline programs, they only focus on rewarding users for simply their purchases. The challenge for retailers is not only how to track online mentions, but also how to meaningfully reward consumers for these mentions. Enter Y Combinator-backed 500Friends, which offers a platform called Loyalty Plus, which allows retailers to reward their customers for social actions.
The SaaS allows retailers to track users Tweeting their purchases, Liking the Facebook page and referring friends. It also allows merchants to reward other actions such as writing product reviews, entering sweepstakes or signing up to newsletters. Each action gives the user points, which can be used towards discounts, or even put towards charity donations. → Read More
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