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Pitch Us - Y Combinator Lays Out The Startup Ideas They'd Like To Fund

2008-07-21T00:43:58-07:00

I've been a big fan of Paul Graham's Y Combinator for a while now. Ryan Junee and his team at Omnisio (Y Combinator Jan-Mar '08) had great things to say about their time at the quasi-incubator. While they haven't yet had their blowout hit from an investment standpoint, Y-Comb alumni firms are quickly becoming names in the social web landscape: Disqus, iminlikewithyou, Justin.tv, and Reddit to name a few.

Now Paul is laying out what he'd like to to have pitched, aptly dubbing his list, "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund." It's a refreshing and pretty candid post. Take for example #11 on the list:

11. Web Office apps. We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that.

One common theme throughout the list is the need for not only the killer idea complete with its disruptive tendencies, but the ability to identify why it hasn't been done before. It's one thing to spot the market that is rife with bloat, but it's not always so easy to spell out why.

On my end, I'm still looking for startups that fill the 5 Web 2.0 Services I'd Like to See (and I'd acutually pay for.) Though I have to give a nod out to Brian McConnell for pointing me to his firm, worldwidelexcion .org for blog translation services. More on this in another post, but it sounds promising. It is, as he calls it, a "suite of collaborative translation tools for publishers and bloggers that combine machine translation, volunteers (from your readership) and if desired professionals."

11 Startups Show-Off at Twiistup 4 Tonight in Santa Monica

2008-07-17T16:45:49-07:00

Heading over to Twiistup 4 tonight in Santa Monica and looking forward to catching up with some fellow entrepreneurs. I'll second Brady Brim-DeForest in saying a big congrats to Mike Macadaan for pulling this all together and showing that the LA Tech community is alive and well.

Some intriguing startups showing off tonight, including Twiddla, which I wrote up a few months back.

From the Twiistup site:

Showing Off at Twiistup 4

Keeping with Twiistup tradition, we were going to select ten local start-ups. Due to the overwhelming interest, we expanded the list of featured companies to 11, including seven of Southern California’s best and brightest and four ‘crashers’ from Texas, Vancouver and the Bay Area.

South Pasadena - Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, emails, social networks and more - instantly.

San Jose - BookRenter is the first online book rental service. BookRenter.com replaces traditional bookstore sales with online book rentals for students at schools throughout the nation.

Venice - Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of an individual’s design. Users can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything imaginable.

Los Angeles - The LOUD3R Enthusiast Network is made up of in-depth, topic-oriented Web sites that are designed for the enthusiast and the curious who want to quickly find the best, richest content about a specific topic.

Austin, Texas - Minggl is a social interaction manager. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication and navigation across social networks.

Los Angeles - Musicshake is the world’s first online UGM (User Generated Music) creation service that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public (a.k.a. music dummies) without previous musical knowledge or expertise.

San Jose - Phonevite is the new, fun and simple way to send announcements and reminders over the phone, in the user’s own voice.

Los Angeles - Seethroo’s smart targeting technology allows advertisers to connect with individual social website users, creating more relevant ads and higher revenues for everyone.

Vancouver, BC - From grassroots scrappers to all star pros, Strutta brings players together from around the world in the spirit of true competition.

Santa Monica - Tools To Life is the world’s first free online self-help social network with real programs and community-driven support networks.

Los Angeles - Twiddla is a free, real-time online collaboration tool that offers simplicity and accessibility. It doesn’t require plug-ins, installs or downloads, and users don’t have to work around complex firewalls or advanced scheduling.

Discovery Is The New Cocaine - Going Beyond Engagement

2008-07-11T17:53:09-07:00

Excellent slides on the value of discovery as a critical component of your site. It's human nature.

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Rolf Skyberg and the Web 2.0 Petri Dish

2008-07-02T10:11:50-07:00

For those who haven't caught this one yet, here are Rolf Skyberg's slides from his eBay Developer’s Conference ‘08 presentation, “Web 2.0: Lies, Mystery and Opportunity.”

Key takeaway: solve problems that your potential customers have and they won't look at paying for your service as a cost, but as an investment.

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And here are Rolf's slides from last year in case you missed those too.

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5 Web 2.0 Services I'd Like to See (and I'd actually pay for)

2008-06-30T02:13:26-07:00

Some more thinking about Fred Wilson's musings that he's Bored with Web 2.0. While I certainly get excited when I find a new tool or site that becomes part of my web ecosystem, there's sadly a glut of tools that really have no role in making my life any better. There's a lot of me-too lately, and not a lot of actual problem solving. I can think of at least five problems that haven't been solved yet for me on the web. Figure out a way to do so, and you'll have me not only as a loyal customer but a loyal evangelist.
(To the best of my knowledge these don't exist, or at least haven't launched in any real way yet. If you know of a team working on them, please let me know.)

1. Human Blog Translation Network

We're all aware of the echo chamber effect in the blogosphere, especially in tech. A lot of reasons why, though I think some of that has to do with the fact that most of us only read and write our blogs in English. I would love to have my blog posts translated by native speakers into Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin and Japanese, to name a few. The machine translation tools (Babelfish, Google Translate, Wordpress Global Translator) can't really convey the tone and meaning behind our words that make up our voices. But multi-lingual people can.

I'd like to see a network of distributed human translators who get paid per post that they translate. I could elect to sign up for a 3-language monthly package that gave me say, 25 posts per month translated and shared in those languages. Blog publishers looking to extend their reach and engage a more global audience would pay for the level of reach they desire. Blog readers could use the service to freely search the translated content from blogs around the world, giving us a glimpse into non-English discussions we might have otherwise missed.

2. "Big Red Button" - disaster planning and action

Let's face it, some of us are just not that prepared when disaster strikes. We all know we should be, but sometimes we just don't even know what that would entail. The government's made a decent effort with its ready.gov site, but it still reads like a lenghty brochure. I want a Web 2.0 service where I can set up a series of "Big Red Buttons," each tailored to possible disaster scenarios I might face. Some might be small, like losing my wallet, where one click (or encoded SMS) would set of a pre-selected chain of events that cancel my credit and bank cards, request a new driver's license, etc. Others might be much larger, like notifying family and friends after a massive earthquake or medical evacuation in a foreign country. This would need to be a service I trust implicitly and hopefully use sparingly.

3. Painless Photo Management

It still baffles me that with how pervasive digital camera usage is today, we still haven't found the killer app in photo management. Seriously, it's a mess out there. I love Flickr, it's social photography. But what I'm missing is one ubiquitous depository of photos that is permanent, private and owned entirely by me. There's really no reason I have to back up my photos from my Mac to my external hard drive every week.

There's been an endless stream of photo sharing sites (Snapfish, ~~ImageStation~~ , Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Picasa, Picturetrail, Photobucket) but none has reached the point of actually making photo management painless. After every large group event with friends or family (weddings, reunions, trips, etc.), I inevtiably receive three or four different 'albums' in my email a few days later. I end up looking at the photos, and maybe downloading a few of the lower resolution prints if I have time. Then I pretty much never see those photos again mostly because I can't stand most of those commercial print sites.

Really, I think what I want is already there in terms of the site itself, but what's missing is the interaction between this gaggle of sites. There needs to be some open, smart sharing between sites, rather than the walled garden approach at the mainstream sites. So if I want Picasa to be my home online for photos, my Aunt in Connecticut should be able to publish them whichever site she chooses, while it simultaneously shares them with the site I've chosen to use. And all the photos end up in my vault, backed up and mine for life. And yes, I would pay for this too.

4. Open Platform for our Data Breadcrumbs

There's been a good deal of talk around the growing data breadcrumbs that we're leaving around the web. This digital exhaust, as Josh Kopelman calls it, is becoming cheaper to store, share and mine for the patterns that make up what we do both on and offline. As the tools and companies grow to harness all of the little pieces of our web tracks, there's in effect a discussion that occurs between all those data sources. What I want to see is a service that allows us to be a part of that discussion about, well, ourselves.

If I'm going to accept the idea that I have to live with a certain level of advertising on the web, I at least want it to be relevant to me. I'd like to know what exactly the picture of me is that is told from my data droppings. Who better to ask about what is accurate about me than me?

The service itself might not be from an upstart, and could more likely be pulled off by Google. I've already handed over a great deal of trust to Google with my personal information, conversations and habits. I think it would be reasonable to ask that I can be an active partner in making sure that information is reliable.

5. SocialMeme

This one grew out of a post by Duncan Riley about Techmeme and the Noise Problem, where the discussion centered around finding the smaller, less discovered tech stories. I'm actually intrigued by Duncan's new QMeme over at The Inquisitr, which effectively does just that with the topics people are discussing over at the site.

What I'd really like to see is a more language-intelligent, broad meme that tracks social converstaions across many platforms - Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus, Blogs, News sites - and pulls the social issues that are generating a lot of heat. So for example, after the recent California ruling allowing same-sex marriage, I would expect to see this issue reaching the SocialMeme for a little while. We're starting to see this idea implemented in smaller communities, like QMeme is for the web set. There's value in knowing what makes a GenYMeme or a EducatorMeme, if you're part of those communities or are interested in what they are discussing. And perhaps we have a general SocialMeme that spans all sub-groupings, which is where political and value issues would probably dominate. Who knows? It would certainly be interesting to see.

Twitter's Origins on a Piece of Note Paper

2008-06-29T18:26:47-07:00

via bryc3:

Very cool post on the hand drawn beginnings of some of the web’s favorite services. This particular picture was that of Jack Dorsey’s concept for a service called Stat.us, which later became twttr and is now Twitter. There’s something powerful about beginning a project or capturing an idea by putting pen to paper.

There are plenty of other sketches to explore here.

Thanks to newly-appointed Twitter Board member (and recent investor) Bijan Sibet for posting this. Sketching out a new idea is one of the most important tasks in the evolutuion of an idea into a model and ultimately into a startup. A clear outline is a lauchpad for discussion and feedback which can quite literally bring a team on the same page very early on. For all the new collaborative tools we have out there, a good sheet of note paper is still priceless. Check out this early sketch of Vimeo's profile page by Sockyung ‘Sox’ Hong.

Sunday fun with Wordle

2008-06-29T15:10:30-07:00

Had a little fun with Wordle today, a java applet that builds a word map out of a chunk of text or someone's del.icio.us tags. I used the seedWatcher blogroll and post categories to whip this one up (font is called Gnuolane Free):

It's a nifty little Java applet, outsourcing the CPU-intensive work to your local machine, rather than bog down the server of what is essentially a side project of IBM Research developer Jonathan Feinberg. In fact, though it's free to use and the images are yours to do whatever with, the code isn't open source and is actually owned by IBM.

Raising the video quality bar: Vusion's WARP video player delivers

2008-06-26T18:55:46-07:00

Online video is on fire these days. I'll once again cite the recent numbers out from Ipsos MediaCT, showing that 19% of all video watched anywhere, including traditional TV and DVD is now done online. With YouTube commanding about a 70% market share of all online video viewing, it means we've pretty much just accepted the lower picture quality for web video, at least for now. YouTube of course now offers higher-quality streams of videos where the publisher's have uploaded the larger versions. Still, it's not TV quality.

But true HD quality video is coming. We've seen a leap forward from Hulu with their HD content, along with blip.tv and Veoh setting a higher standard in terms of picture quality. What's the next step? Vusion (formerly Jittr) provides what they call "instant-on, full-screen, high quality streaming video." The Milpitas, CA-based company recently snagged the prestigious “Judges Choice” award in the video section of Under the Radar 2008.

Right now, they just have a handful of demo videos on their site to show off their next-gen WARP player. The player requires the WARP plug-in and is well worth the minute or two it takes to ge it setup. Since they don't yet allow embedding of their demos , I've posted a screen shot from Kanye West's "Stronger" video. Click on the image to watch it on their site. I recommend the full-screen version which is really what the WARP player is all about. It enables a TV-like full screen viewing experience while eliminating buffering and pausing so common with other streaming media players. It's basically a bit of hybrid between pure streaming video and downloaded video since it temporarily stores video chunks on your hard drive to enhance the streaming performance, without fully downloading the video to your machine.

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Vusion

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Time for Action - Join the seedWatcher Team on Carbonrally!

2008-06-25T21:24:52-07:00

Following up on this week's post on Carbonrally, I've set up TEAM SEEDWATCHER where readers, friends, fans and other nice folks can join together in reducing our combined carbon footprints. When you add up our efforts, we're going to have a sizable chunk of CO2 emissions cut out of our daily routines. The challenges are simple, and signup is free and painless. Choose whichever challenges you think you can honestly stick to. My first three challenges,

1. "Power Shower" - knock 2 minutes of my daily shower time for one week.
Reducing your shower from 8 minutes to 6 for one month will reduce your CO2 emissions by a total of 15.3 lbs.

2. "Right Now, Less Cow" - don't eat meat for two days this week.
By not eating meat two days this week, you will reduce your carbon dioxide emissions by 13.2 lbs.

3. "Leave Your Car At Home" - Pick one day this week to leave your car at home.
By not driving just one day this week, you will reduce your CO2 emissions by a whopping 30 lbs!

Join the team!

Jeff Bezos and Bijan Sabet back Twitter

2008-06-24T14:43:12-07:00

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the info, Twitter today announced that Amazon Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions, is one of the investors in Twitter's latest funding round, estaimated at around $15 million. Also participating is Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, who is very active in the Twitter-verse. Bijan will grab a seat on the Twitter board as well. Congrats to Twitter for scoring these two guys. Jeff's expertise in scaling a rapidly growing startup will be priceless to the growing-pained Twitter.

It should be worth noting that sometimes even Bezos' golden touch may not be enough to save the day. SMS messaging service ChaCha, which he invested in just last January, hit the deadpool a little over a year later.

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Jeff Bezos

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Bijan Sabet

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Going Green + Competition = Carbonrally

2008-06-24T00:19:16-07:00

This past weekend I re-read an old issue (April 20) of the NYT Magazine I had kept around. It was their Green issue, which incidentally sparked a little controversy in that it was not in fact printed on any recycled paper. In it, Michael Pollan's "Why Bother?" essay really piqued something in me. Pollan alludes to the ending credits of Al Gore's acclaimed-enviro-doc "An Inconvenient Truth," where after 90 minutes of spelling out the sheer magnitude and urgency of the global environmental crisis, we are asked to change our light bulbs. It almost sounds like the cry of the defeated, saying "Why Bother?" The scale of the damage is so large that one individual's modest changes to his or her regime will have scantly the effect of a drop in the bucket.

Pollan goes on to challenge the idea that the only real change will come from legislation, money and policy reform. It's precisely our mirco-choices that will affect change.

"Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences."

Cambridge, MA-based startup Carbonrally brings a little friendly competition to the carbon reductions effort, allowing individuals or teams to compete in weekly green challenges. The simple and specific nature of the challenges, like, "Power Shower," reducing your shower time from 8 to 6 minutes, let's you visibly measure your carbon emission reduction. That two-minute shave off your morning shower can reduce CO2 emissions by 15.3 lbs over one month. Amongst the whole Carbonrally community, 1222 people have reduced CO2 emissions by 6.42 tons by completing this challenge so far, which apparently is equal to turning off the electricity of 5 homes for about 1 month.

The social features of the Carbonrally site allow teams to complete challenges together, vying for top billing in the community's leaderboard. GOOD Magazine featured the site a few months ago, noting that Google had a few departments square off in head-to-head competition. As of now the site appears to be not only paper-free but also revenue-free, operating as it calls "a web based activism platform." Encouraging, especially given my recent post about startups needing to push themselves to find better uses for these emerging web tools. I'm encouraged, and hope this can sustain momentum (read: active users) after this "green press" wave dies down.

You can help them out by voting for the site in Time Magazine's Top 100 new web sites of 2008. Currently, they're sitting low on the list with a dismal 32 out of a possible 100. Give them a little help.

ABC takes baby step into sharing content, signs deal with Veoh

2008-06-23T10:40:53-07:00

ABC runs one of the last true walled gardens in online video content, preferring to keep eyeballs on one of their properties instead of letting them stray to sites that embed their shows. If you want to watch an episode, or even clips, of their hit show LOST, you have to navigate over to ABC.com's full episode player.

Could it be that the Mouse-House is finally thinking about setting sail on the high seas of distributed online video? Well call it dipping a toe in the water perhaps. Today ABC announced that full episodes of its hit shows (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty) along with sports content from ESPN will be available exclusively through video startup Veoh's site. The catch of course is that the videos won't be embeddable, and in fact just link directly back to the ABC or ESPN sites. On top of that you have to install a plug-in for the Move Networks player just to get it working.

NBC, which backed video site Hulu as a joint venture with rival News Corp., took the approach of wrapping it's content in a premium player with pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and setting it free. CBS's shows can be found on numerous video sites, including Joost, Veoh, MSN, Comcast.com, and others. This feels a bit like a "me-too" from ABC, realizing that getting traffic to ABC.com is much more expensive than letting your content go to where the traffic already is. Time will tell. When you have hit shows that are destinations in themselves, ala LOST, you can afford to be a little guarded. But with more and more video conent getting watched online - currenty 19% of all video conent is watched on a personal computer according to Ipsos MediaCT, the changing habits of viewers means to launch the next hit shows, you'll need to go where they are, not where you are.

Technorati adds $7.5M more with Series D

2008-06-13T23:56:53-07:00

Staying on the theme of blog search engines (see: Twingly), today Technorati announced closing $7.5 million of a $10 million Series D round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) with Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation (operator of Technorati Japan) in as well. That brings total funding for the San Francisco-based company to just over $30 million since its founding in 2002.

From the looks of it, things seem to been stalling with the long-running authority on the blogosphere. Unique visitors to the site seem to be trending downward over the past year, one in which both the number of bloggers and blog readers has grown significantly. (see: Sifry's State of the Blogosphere report.) Not a good sign.

Interesting to note that there are no new investors in this round, another possible point of wary. VentureBeat reports that according to the regulatory filing, several of members of the senior management team and board, led by Founder/CEO David L. Sifry, including Richard Jalichandra, Sanford Robertson, Joi Ito, Peter Hirshberg, Ryan McIntyre and Andreas Stavropoulos have all invested personally in the Series D. Interesting indeed. Sure can be tough to compete with Google once it decided to get into the Blogsearch game.

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Spam-free blog searching for everyone - Twingly goes live!

2008-06-12T02:07:32-07:00

Sweden-based blog search engine Twingly goes live today for the general public after a 3000-strong beta user base pounded on the servers for a few months. They even had us all load test it a few weeks ago asking us to take it down in the international Twingly Server Meltdown Hour, which apparently went off with little performance slowing at all. The blog search service aims to filter out the spam blogs, delivering just the content you're looking for and nothing more.

There's also their nifty way of getting more traffic for your blog by using their link sharing tool called Blogstream. Twingly's Blogstream has become "a huge hit in Europe" with reportedly 45 Twingly Partners (mostly Swedish) using the Blogstream Widget, including the country's two largest print publications, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet.

The social search features of the site are intriguing, with Digg-like buttons on each search result allowing users to "link/like" the most relevant results. This is something I still don't understand why Google Blog Search hasn't yet adopted. Technorati of course has a weighting of relevancy using its authority score for each blog result, which is derived from how many links the blog has received on the web. Twingly's social angle could prove more useful once a real user base develops over there. As of now, most results have at most one or two "likes" which doesn't really help at this point.

They are also featuring a "What's Hot Now" stream of popular keywords, though I think they're not even close to how effective Technorati is in that regard. In the end, Twingly's worth a look, and could end up a strong #3 or 4 player in the blog search game behind Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Sphere.