Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. → Read More
Y Combinator company Glassmap, a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon. A representative from Groupon has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has indeed acquired Glassmap and is ”excited to bring the team aboard.” This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re… → Read More
As kids head back to school this month and next, some will find a rather new arrangement greeting them: blended classrooms.
These don’t feel like the ways that many of us attended class, with a single teacher lecturing at students from front and center (“Bueller?”). As it’s difficult–if not impossible–for cash-strapped schools to develop their own original learning products in house, startups… → Read More
Paul Graham kicked off his accelerator Y Combinator‘s 15th Demo Day saying that though 75 startups will present today, this summer 2012 class has the “smallest percentage of applicants that we’ve ever accepted.” It’s clear that YC’s notoriety for getting founders in front of top investors is growing, and it’s becoming harder for startups to come out to succeed without support from accelerators… → Read More
Profig, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, just launched its instant virtual phone system for small and medium businesses. The service is geared toward companies and individuals looking for a professional phone solution without the cost and hassle of using legacy hardware and software solutions. For just $30 per month, Profig offers its users one toll-free number, two local numbers, 500 minutes of… → Read More
In response to a security breach, Dropbox promised to add an optional new layer of security known as two factor authentication. If you want to add two factor authentication to your own app but don’t know where to start, you’re in luck: Authy is a YCombinator backed startup launching today that makes it easy to add optional two factor authentication to your application. You just add some API calls… → Read More
FundersClub is going to change how companies get funded. Today it launches a website designed to let anyone with as little as $1000 make equity investments in startups and earn money if they succeed.
For now you have to be an accredited investor with a net worth over $1 million or yearly earnings over $200,000 to use FundersClub. But an industry source familiar with the Y Combinator startup… → Read More
Today, Y Combinator Summer 2012 startup Sponsorfied launches its tool that connects and manages the relationship between brands and the events or influencers they want to sponsor. See, we’re all trained to ignore ads, but get your product in our hands or enhance a real life experience for us and we won’t forget you.
Top brands like Red Bull, Task Rabbit, and popchips are the first clients in… → Read More
How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle? Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they’ve invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y Combinator winter 2012 startup. The seed round that shall be announced later today will go towards hiring front-end developers and back-end engineers to make the site beautiful but simple and beef up its… → Read More
“The series A is essentially dying. If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” This is Ark co-founder Patrick Riley’s reasoning for why instead of raising a Series A round, his people search engine just locked down a jaw-droppingly massive $4.2 million seed round. Ark will use the money from Andreessen Horowitz… → Read More
The startups that presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day last week were remarkable in their own right, but perhaps the most striking thing was the sheer number of them.
With 66 companies and 180 founders in this season’s batch, the auditorium at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum was practically bursting with angel investors and reps from every notable venture firm last week. And that was… → Read More
Google and Facebook can’t help you find which of your friends are single, or live in New York and like Radiohead, but Ark can. Today Y Combinator-backed Ark.com sails into open beta in hopes of becoming the best place on the web to do people searches. With a variety of layer-able filters, Ark lets you search through public profiles and the private data of your friends across Facebook, Google… → Read More
You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics. The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000… → Read More
As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals. In fact, one out of every five doctors in a private practice own an iPad. Enter DrChrono, a Y Combinator-backed startup that produces an iPad app and SaaS for… → Read More
Remember Start Fund, the investment vehicle established by DST’s Yuri Milner (as an individual) and Ron Conway’s angel fund, SV Angel?
A couple of weeks ago, we broke the news that the fund, which is managed by SV Angel partner David Lee, made a gutsy blanket investment offer to every single one of the 40 or so Y Combinator startups in the most recent batch. → Read More
For decades, my mother and grandmother have both religiously scanned the weekly coupon books and circulars that arrive in the weekend newspaper. While clipping coupons can be tedious, grocery stores’ weekly deals can often take out a significant chunk of change of the weekly food bill. Of course, as print couponing becomes obsolete, many consumers are looking to the web for deals at their local… → Read More
Y Combinator-backed startup ReadyForZero is announcing a $260,000 seed round of funding from a number of well-known angel investors including Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube; Dave McClure, Benjamin Ling, Nils Johnson, and Maneesh Arora.
Launched in private beta in September, ReadyForZero is an easy to use web-based platform to help guide consumers out of credit card debt. ReadyForZero is… → Read More
Hands across the water everyone! It appears that pulling together a combination of European and U.S. investors is creating some interesting synergies for young startups. UK-startup GroupSpaces, which recently announced new funding, has partnered with WePay, a former ycombinator startup billing itself as the “Paypal for groups”. With some deep API integration, GroupSpace users can now sign up to… → Read More
“Good on paper” just became “good on video” with the latest double launch from the Ycombinator crew. With Hirehive, founders Dave Albert and Nick Bergson-Shilcoc are attempting to replace at least some part of the unwieldy hiring process with browser based video questionnaires, on a web platform where applicants can submit video, text or image responses. → Read More
The Difference Engine is shaping up to be the kind of raw, Web 2.0 incubator the UK has lacked for some time.
Whereas Seedcamp tends to take more fully formed early stage startups on, The Difference Engine is closer to having a hacker mentality.
When you want to just go and build a product, this might be the kind of programme that appeals.
Word on the street is that the programme is sidling up… → Read More
There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard… → Read More
Qwisk, which is launching today at the Real-Time CrunchUp, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser. The site, which is a product of Y Combinator-funded company Socialbrowse, connects with you with your friends on Facebook and Twitter in real-time as you browse the web. We have 500 invites exclusively for TechCrunch users. You can redeem these invites simply by clicking … → Read More
Y combinator’s annual startup school event was held in Berkeley last Saturday and featured a stellar lineup of speakers including the founders of Twitter, Facebook and Zappos. The founders speaking were almost universally charming and funny, even Mark Zuckerberg who I was determined to dislike (he does look around 12 though). This reinforces my belief that charm goes a long way in business.
Jason… → Read More
Anyone who has tried to use the immensely popular ‘housing’ section of Craigslist to do some apartment hunting is well aware of its limitations: aside from breaking listings into basic neighborhoods, for the most part they lack any structure, which can make them a pain to browse through, especially when you’re trying to compare more than one apartment.
Y Combinator startup RentHop is looking to… → Read More
The founders of Inkling Markets, a prediction market platform and a Y Combinator alum, found that their staff needed a secure chat room every day to work together on private issues within their business but most of the collaboration apps send an email when they’re updated with a message, which while is convenient, is not necessarily secure. They also wanted an uber-simple email collaboration tool… → Read More
While many people in the tech world only make the trek to Austin, Texas once a year for SXSW, the city has a fairly sizable startup community. Now Austin is getting its own Y Combinator-esque program, dubbed Capital Factory.
As with other similar programs, Capital Factory offers entrepreneurs a modest amount of funding in exchange for equity (the program is offering ‘up to $20,000′ in exchange… → Read More
The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital, a prolific investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark, and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas.
Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted… → Read More
First we had Ning, which lets you build your own niche social network. Now we have Fliggo, which lets you build your own YouTube. Fliggo is the latest startup to come out of Y Combinator. It has been in private beta for a while, but is now open to the public.
Fliggo lets you create your own video-sharing site. It hosts and streams the videos, and provides “grandma-friendly” management tools to… → Read More
When Microsoft opened up its own online store for software downloads earlier this month, it signaled that packaged software is not long for this world. The problem is that the store offers only Microsoft products. Patrick Swieskowski, co-founder of YCombinator startup Secure by Design, points out:
You can basically only download Office or Vista. Leave it to MS to pitch an app store that sells… → Read More
Our weekend social experiment: Upload a picture, win a TechCrunch Tshirt. You may have noticed our post on Picwing earlier today. While we’re waiting 6-8 weeks for the damn picture frame to arrive, I’ve decided to create a new album that allows anyone to upload photos. Email an image to TCR@picwing.com and it will appear in the widget below. See the whole album here. Whoever submits… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
