The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch… → Read More
Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such… → Read More
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother. Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. → Read More
London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.” It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete… → Read More
Dropbox was one of the most impressive startups I saw at Y Combinator’s demo day this past August, not because they’ve built anything terribly prescient or awe-inspiring, but because they’ve come up with an online storage product that I might actually use regularly. The idea behind Dropbox, which officially enters into private beta today (with 200 invitations available for… → Read More
OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right? Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are… → Read More
Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well. Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is… → Read More
Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion – and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia – sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as… → Read More
New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a… → Read More
http://addher.com/battle.swf?profileId=110 Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks… → Read More
The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier. New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers… → Read More
In the old days, when people had stereos (remember those), if you wanted to listen to a friend’s music collection, you had to go to their house. Today, you check out their iLike playlists on Facebook, their Last.fm profile, or any of dozens of other social music sharing widgets and Websites. Now you can add Reble.FM to that list. Reble.FM is free software you download to your desktop that… → Read More
A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something. Users can turn off recording at any time, and… → Read More
Tony Wright has been up to a new project since selling two-month-old Jobby to Jobster last May. It’s called RescueTime and it’s meant to help manage your time and stop you from ending up like this guy. We looked at the product previously, but they’ve now come out of private beta. Wright and his team have also taken funding from Y Combinator, and stand in stark contrast to the… → Read More
The internet is supposed to be a place of intense price competition, but you can’t always find the best deals on any one site. To solve the problem, online price comparison search engines were born. We’ve covered a few newer ones before, such as TheFind and Mpire, although these sites also include a variety of other features. Bountii is a new price search engine started by two founders… → Read More
Music lovers may be show a reluctance to pay for their tunes, but they’re turning up in droves for live shows — at least according to the latest box office numbers posted by eMarketer. Concert ticket sales are expected to $9 billion worldwide this year, up nearly 10% over 2006. Freshly launched Songkick is a startup looking to capitalize on that growing market by providing a simple way… → Read More
Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage – ten of them – to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring. Most of these companies are… → Read More
Y Combinator held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive. Paul Graham started off the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to… → Read More
We mentioned WriteWith in a roundup post last month on new Y Combinator startups. They’ve created a group writing platform that falls somewhere between a blogging platform, a wiki, and an online Word clone. The best part of it is that it works with the existing WordPress and Typepad blogging software. Current blogging software is rather kludgy when it comes to working with other writers on… → Read More
Paul Graham believes we’re not in a bubble, that startups shouldn’t worry about their business models and the best companies are the ones with potential to kill old monopolies. Graham is a partner at Y Combinator, a Mountain View firm that invests in very early tech startups. Companies that Y Combinator has funded include the social news site Reddit, online form creation tool Wufoo… → Read More
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