Y Combinator presents 26 new startups
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Perhaps my expectations are too high.
Also, a bunch of these startups are still under embargo so they aren't even being written about. Give it a year or so and then start complaining.
Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.
And although I'll regret being negative myself I will just say - Zenedy, really? I think if wanted to write a startup style description of a affiliate marketing site that'd be it.
As for Zenedy. I think they are following the Demand Media model, and that has proven to be a business that generates a lot of money.
Do not discount affiliate marketers. If you look at startups that operate affiliate businesses they tend to become quickly profitable (frugalmechanic, ticketstumbler etc..)
There's nothing wrong with affiliate marketing, I'm just a little surprised to see the YC funding the old "pick area, get low quality freelance content, build search rank, sell affiliates" model.
Pardon if that's a downer of a comment I do wish all best of luck!
I was stating an opinion. You don't know when I came to know Google or Microsoft and you don't know what my opinion of them was. You also don't know how good a judge I am of very early stage startups, which is largely irrelevant, because hardly anyone is a good judge of startups at this stage. Almost everyone knows that. In fact, I asked how to predict startup viability right here and well, see for yourself, no one really knows: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 At least I admit it.
That isn't even what I was saying, I was saying I'm not impressed with them. When I say impressed I mean in the "Do what is hard" sense. I mean in the blue ocean sense of creating markets. Building a product in an existing market and relying on a mastery of networking, pr, and marketing to make it successful simply doesn't impress me. It has nothing to do with the viability of the startup. The least impressive startups are often the most successful.
I can go into more detail for you. Granted I don't know the founders, I only have a 2/3 sentence explanation, but here goes...
LaunchHear -- This can be accomplished with a database of bloggers and the types of products they review and a list of companies that make that kind of product. When a company wants to send a product, they enter the type and get a list of addresses to send it to. It's a fairly simple app. It's not a technical problem, it's a sales and marketing problem. Plus the manpower to find the blogs and even that can be automated.
NewsLabs -- Basically a blog with some SEO and Ad tools built in. How many journalists are doing this on their own right now?
Seeing Interactive -- Plenty of startups, some of which are run by hn'ers are doing this now. I know of one out of austin, but can't remember the name. It's been done over and over -- not to say SI won't succeed -- it just isn't impressive. EDIT: You know what is hilarious? Seeing Interactive is the company I was thinking of from Austin. I was mistaken -- they're out of College Station, but I can be forgiven for that because it was many months ago when I saw them and haven't seen them sense.
Notifo -- apparently a lot of people like this one, but still, there are lots of SMS api's and text messages can be sent via email address too. I don't know exactly how notifo differentiates itself from those methods, but it's basically sending messages to people's phones and that's not impressive.
Zencoder -- This is old hat. It's an ffmpeg cluster with a queue. Put the file on your server, send the url to zencoder, it downloads the file, encodes it, then makes a callback to another url to let the requester know where to get the encoded files. I built one of these by myself 3 years ago. You could even edit the video online cropping out certain sections or adding different audio tracks.
Nowmov -- Is it difficult to search twitter for links to movies and see who has retweeted them the most? While one is playing, find another one and change the innerHTML of a div to another embed tag.
Crocodoc -- This one is actually fairly impressive. This type of marking up and editing is hard and I'd like to see what becomes of it.
Gamador -- Really? Social gaming? Is it impressive? I just don't think so. How many social gaming companies are there now? Hundreds? Thousands? Why is Gamador better? It'll be a tough pitch, but if Kevin and Dan are badasses maybe that's all you need to make a great social games company.
Cardpool -- a CRUD app like launchhear. A dating site for people with cards and people who want to buy them. This is a matter of trust mostly -- not technology, but trust has been established. It'll be hard here because how often do people get cards like this? Is it really worth it to go trade them on a website? Why not just spend it at the store? You don't like the store? Lots of gift cards can be used at multiple stores. It's a "gift" card -- get yourself a gift.
Tweetflow -- I am almost never impressed by a company that creates another company wholely dependent on the survival of another company whose survival is also in question. That said, natural language processing can be difficult, but in this case, a list of positive words and negative words and some searching is sufficient. It's neat and people will probably use it and may even pay for it.
CHROMAom, Inc. -- I love colourlovers, but it's a community about color. It's neat and it's a big community and there are lots of great color patterns there, but it's not impressive in the pg do what is hard sense.
Answerly.com -- tons of these exist already. I can't count them on two hands. People go to the internet to ask questions -- that's what they do. SEO on the question and there you go. Not impressive.
Zenedy -- just watch google trends and see where there is a dirth of content for the keywords. Finding untapped markets is a neat idea, but this is mostly a horsepower problem. If you have the money to pay for the content, you can make money. Lots of companies do this. How many domains does the guy who started MySpace have? He's been doing this for a long time. Search for hiking trails and you'll get one of his sites. I'm not sure about the revenue for the foreseeable future though, because once you've found the market people know there's little competition there. Just watch what you are doing and then copy or steal the content. It's unethical, but even Mahalo does it!
Data Marketplace -- This is a neat idea -- but not impressive. It's an online store for people with data. This model exists already -- like http://www.freebase.com/ with a pay wall.
Embedster -- Others have already commented on this one. You're adding monetization on top of embedded stuff that is often already monetized. It's kind of leechy in a way. I wonder how you're going to get past adblock plus.
Etacts -- People seem to like this one too, but it's a CRM mashup with widgets.
Embedly -- Is embeddability the goal? I got to video.bing.com and I can find all kinds of videos to embed. It's a web crawler looking for an embed tag -- it isn't special. It isn't impressive.
500Friends -- I'm not a big fan of popularity contests -- too introverted for that, so I just don't even care about this at all. I think sites like this devalue word of mouth advertising and tarnish trust relationships between people. If I tell you about a product, it's because it is a good product, not because someone paid me to tell you. Any amount of impressed I am by a few of the others here gets dinged for bing in the same list as these kinds of sites. Again, my opinion and many, I am sure, think I'm wrong. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money from companies who want to pay people to advertise for them.
Infoharmoni -- Already mentione twitter before, I wish bit.ly didn't exist (another ding). Never heard of gowalla or used foursquare -- perhaps I'm a square.
140Bets -- I think sports is a net negative for society. I'm opinionated. We waste so much time on and money on stadiums that are built with lies and tax dollars and promises of jobs and increased economic activity -- and they are a horrible waste of space. Have you ever walked in a stadium neighborhood when there is no game going on? It's dead. It's wasted space that could be used for a park. Take the fence down and let people use the space -- they paid for it! Instead, 99% of the time it is unused or used by a minority of people to play a game. I love George Carlin's take on it. Give all the golf courses to the homeless people. Another ding.
Greplin -- More social scraping? Really? I suppose by this point, I'm just kind of tired of reading all the references to twitter and social networks and yada yada. Where's the innovation?
It makes me wonder how many really hard problems were submitted and how many candidates are shaking their heads right now having gone through this whole list wondering why some of these are on here and they aren't. I'm not a rich man and I'm not motivated by money so I'll probably never have enough to invest $25k or whatever in hundreds of companies, so we'll never know how good I am at picking early stage startups, but if I simply said every one of them will fail, I'll be about 99% accurate.
But I never said these companies won't succeed or the teams aren't brilliant or your ability to pick early stage companies is crap. I'm simply not impressed by them -- it's nothing personal. I am not impressed by 99% of web startups.
But I wanted to be impressed with your list and I wasn't, so perhaps I was too glibly open about my opinion. I expected a -4 for the comment and was extremely shocked by the amount of agreement.
What's the rush? Why don't you learn more about these companies before deciding about them?
I'm not digging myself into a hole, I'm making an assessment based on incomplete information, which is all that can be expected of me here and now.
Why don't you stop using all the logical fallacies and insults?
If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies.
There were only seven minutes for you to have read my long review of them and then compose your thoughts and reply. You put thoughts in my head without knowing me. You don't know what I know or what kinds of predictions I've made. You're doing the same thing to me that you are blasting me for doing to your selections.
This thread has gone way beyond where I wanted. I was just posting a quick comment, man. I didn't want it to blow up like this. It was just an opinion and I don't know how to underail it. Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do.
IMO, the three major problems I have with your opinion are:
1) You assume startups should be tackling new problems. I don't know if you noticed, but "me too" companies win more often than grand new ideas with deep technical problems on the web. Google, Facebook, Zynga, YouTube, Groupon and the iPod were me-too plays.
2) You assume startups should be (or look) technically impressive. There are plenty of great startups that aren't really deep technology problems (until they need to scale).
3) You're looking at 3-5 month old companies, for the most part. Craigslist at that age was a mailing list in SFO. You'd look smarter if you were talking about things like "total addressable market" and "scalability of customer acquisition" than how impressive the companies look right now. Startups of this age are still mostly just potential.
The amount of time you invested in this screams "Troll" to me. The fact that you have had this happen enough that you say, "Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do" seems to support that assessment. PG shouldn't be feeding you and neither should I, I guess. I'm mostly disappointed that your initial comment (devoid of any actual content) was upvoted by as many people as it was.
I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.
Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.
If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.
Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.
There's a new batch of YC startups every 6 months. The startups were about the same quality a year ago. And yet after demo day a year ago the top comment on HN wasn't a content-free dismissal with 86 points. I know both HN and the startups very well, and what's changing here is HN, not the startups. The site has grown so much that the median user is significantly dumber and meaner than a year ago.
I've been thinking a lot over the last several months about how to deal with this. One of the solutions I'm considering is to get rid of points on comments, and that would have worked well here. Fnid2's comment, as he more or less admitted himself, was just a throwaway remark. But displaying points transformed it into a rallying cry leading a mob.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522675
2008 Summer Demo Day - 587 days ago (First comment = snarky remark about the company logos... sound familiar?):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276333
2007 Demo Day - 957 days ago (Half the thread is [dead] and full of bickering similar to this one):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269
So no, HN did not ever do better. It only seems worse because instead of 2 complaints about company logos, HN is now 10x the size and you see 20 complaints. There's still a lot of great articles posted, HN "Ask/Tell" discussions, and it's still full of intelligent people. However, it takes wisdom to know when to shut one's mouth, and intelligence != wisdom.
I've been here about 3 years myself, and that's why I try to stay logged out and make my bookmark to HN = /best. It's just gotten far too noisy and I was wasting tons of time keeping up with the sheer volume of (both good and bad) comments.
I could go on but I hope you get the idea. Word of advice - stop being so negative about stuff in life.
I'll bet when Bump came out you thought "Who needs a new way to transfer contact info?" Now they have a partnership with PayPal, and it's clear that their vision is to build the platform for information transfer.
Think bigger. You're judging these companies by their first step on a very long journey.
Revisit this list in a year or so and I'm sure you'll have some different opinions and wish you hadn't been so short-sighted.
And for the record, I've built electronic circuits with push buttons and had to accommodate the bounce of the button on the switch, so I do know just a little bit about the difficultly. Compound that with countless phones bumping into each other, perhaps at the same time and the problem is hard.
That's why I am impressed by Bump. It has nothing to do with their potential success then or their current success now. It's an innovative and simple idea. It makes you think, "Wow, why didn't I think of that."
In 2 or three sentences about Bump, it's obvious how difficult the problem is and that someone solved it is impressive.
I remember commenting to someone and then someone else coming in and saying, "I'm the business partner." And your name, Lloyd is very familiar.
Anyway, I suggested to talk to the employer and see if you/he could take a day off a week and focus on sales during business hours and see if you could build up enough revenue.
Unfortunately, the person felt insecure about that idea because lots of concessions had been made by the employer already and it was doubtful that more were available and there was a lot of tension.
So I looked up the company and you had three or four products that you were selling to traditional news papers and you were really passionate about saving local news and I was too and I thought it was good idea and I wanted you to succeed, so congratulations! I think you are on your way! :)
EDIT: Yep, here's the thread. I was just fnid then, but I lost the password: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916035
The other companies in the list you actually gave reasons, but with us you just keep referring to this previous conversation and I do not understand your point.
First, I didn't remember that SI was your company and I was impressed with your company, so my thought was, why is this company in the list better than the company I remember chatting with a few months back that was struggling, yet passionate and interested in saving local news. I was disappointed that companies like yours weren't represented in the list. It just so happens that the company I was reading about was your company.
So you're an interesting case, because I knew about you and knowing about you was why I wasn't impressed with the SI I was reading about, simply because I knew of an impressive other company in the space. It supports what pg is saying, that with deeper investigation, some of the unimpressive companies become impressive, because I had done deeper investigation on you months before and was impressed.
I'm pretty sure a couple of them, too, will bottom out quite quickly because they either don't appear to fit their market or understand it.
fnid2 is being silly in latter posts though; interestingly he trivialized/picked holes in the ones I think might do ok and sort of passed over the ones I think have major flaws.
However going back and forth about his opinion seems unnecessary. Even if all these companies became successful it does not take away from the fact that he and some other people were not impressed with it. His opinion is just that, an opinion.
Actually I would go further and say, you guys should chat privately. I am sure you have lots of people agreeing with you, so someone saying "Nah PG" could be helpful if he cared to elaborate. "When two people always agree, one of them is not needed in the room".
Cheers.
Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating.
(I admit it's a bit ad hominem, but putting other people's stuff down for being derivative when your thing is the epitome of that seems lame to me.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6392191576577272336...
"Embedly is a single source for embeddable of content on the web."
And rather than mockery it was an expression of regret, that it's 2010 and these are the best startup ideas you got. I think the names do a good job mocking themselves without any additional help.
Impressive weaseling, though!
Data Marketplace is promising: market research firms charge ridiculous fees for their reports which are usually overkill for what you are looking for. Data Marketplace could solve this problem.
Greplin sounds cool. 500Friends sounds like it'll generate revenue straight off the bat.
The list sounds good. I'd add Notifo to the most promising ones (going just by this short description of course!).
"Our goal is to do what Gmail did to Outlook: replace a popular desktop application with a better online version."
is badly begging the question. I'd be surprised if gmail + Google calendar had more active users than Outlook.
Gmail came in at only 5.5%.
They are tracking these based on loaded images, which means Gmail users by default aren't counted. Some versions of Outlook (at least 2000) autoload images. Lots of mobile devices don't load images, which makes BlackBerry users undercounted.
Not to mention sample bias--I also don't sign up for email newsletters.
tl;dr those stats are a hot steaming pile
Outlook 2000 is 4 (maybe 5) versions old. At least 2010, 2007 and 2003 don't load images by default, I wouldn't be surprised if Outlook XP didn't either.
More to the point: no large organization is using Outlook 2000 anymore. It's unsupported and you can get 2010, 2007, 2003 or even XP on your current license agreement.
And many people have more than one email address and in a corporate environment, it shouldn't be surprising Gmail falls below 10%.
- what percentage of GMail users regularly schedule more than one event a week?
- what percentage of Gmail users use reminders?
- How much of their day is spent with GMail open?
- How often do they search Google contacts for phone numbers and other data?
If you include Outlook Express, then you have to consider that it had the same tying advantages that IE had over other browsers. Even so, it's been months since I ran across someone who uses Outlook or Outlook Express for personal email. Thunderbird and Apple Mail are somewhat more common among the people I deal with, but the majority of people I deal with use some kind of web mail for their personal email, with GMail completely dominating among those who are at least slightly technical and among kids.
Outlook is pretty much the de facto mail client amongst my clients, even those that aren't in business environments. My largest business client is email-program-agnostic, and still the vast majority of users are asking for Outlook.
Among webmail users, most usage is either Comcast's site, Yahoo's (a result of the SBC partnership), or their internet service provider's.
Actually, I think this might help put it in perspective: more of my clients have email addresses at their own domain versus having Gmail accounts.
A user could, if he so chose, have email addresses at their own domain, on Gmail, AND use Outlook to access it. There's a VERY blurry line between the usage patterns of the average mail user.
That said, I agree with you in thinking the parent was underestimating Outlook's prevalence.
Programming smarts != market smarts.
These companies need time to develop/morph/mature before anyone will have any real clue as to their prospects for innovation or success.
like...
"Google.com: A search engine that looks at link popularity to find the best search results. It's going to revolutionize search."
Talk to investors from the starting days of Google, and they'll cite you a dozen examples of similar sounding pitches. It's hard to tell from few liners about the future of a company.
(Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)
Similarly, just because they are "me too" product doesn't mean they won't succeed. It seems that "me too" product is too often played as a trump card to discard new startups.
www.nutmegsearch.com
Daniel Gross, if you are out there - let's talk.
I started creating Nutmeg Search just so that I could find my own stuff, but the idea seemed useful so I'm trying to make it available to the world.
Zencoder Zenedy
The rest are very under promising.
Still, there are some very interesting companies in this batch that are not particularly sexy but might have great potential.
Call me a cynic, but it may be more of a case of "built for investors/acquirers in SV".
And more critically: I realize that this is your baby, and you have had a large amount of involvement and personal investment in these projects over the last several months. However, you're coming off as both very defensive, and very dismissive of the criticism so far.
It's surprising to me that YC would unveil its next batch of startups, and get such a "meh" reaction from the audience. That indicates a problem worth investigating, either in the community here, or in the specific projects that were funded this time 'round, or in YC's goals (specifically whether those goals might be diverging from those of the HN community).
In fact, I explicitly tell YC startups to explain themselves to investors as "the x of y" whenever possible. See point 14:
http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html
The reason I've been so contemptuous of some of the comments on this thread is that I've been seeing the identical comments on web forums for 5 years. That's how I can be sure they're not a sign of a problem. They're just the same type of people making the same type of comments that always get made about newly launched startups.
I'd love to see more ideas around PG's list of things he'd like to fund being presented instead of yet another "social collaboration because what else is there?" startup.
We make social games.
a social data request and fulfillment system
adding social data
leveraging social media
identify active social networkers
Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web
social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications
"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
They're not using "social" as a buzzword indicating a passing fad. They're using it because, as JWZ points out, that's part of what software is today.
get on the train or get off it. social, realtime, location etc. are the new technologies of this generation.
We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better.
"Use metrics better"? I guess that one wasn't crafted with consumers in mind.
That is exactly right. These descriptions were written for investors.
In so many words. I trust their second sentence is relevant and makes more sense to investors, but I imagined it being their slogan. "Gamador: We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better" just sounds humorous (hence the giggling). To me, as a Joe-average user, it sounds more like That Guy from Futurama than "we make a lot of really addicting games".
Why don't you just wait and see how they do?
I'm more disappointed; I don't really feel twitter and like applications really add any value in the long term. Their sphere of influence barely extends outside of a very vocal and visible extended SV community.
I respect and value both YC and all your applicants. Everything I've seen highlights the enormous amount of intelligence, creativity, and 'shutzpah' that you all have.
Because of that, I find it very disturbing that a lot of your collective effort goes into problems that are 1) barely issues for 90% of computer users and 2) are insular to SV and the particularities of that community.
There are a whole host of areas where YC and those it funds can make huge inroads. I just find it disappointing that I see one or two offerings to 80% of the market while the majority of funded focus on the 20% - albeit a very investor friendly 20%, perhaps making my disappointed grow - that an insular community has dictated to be the "trend".
ADDED: I'm your typical customer. It's views like mine you should be listening to, not discarding. If I say "Meh, no value add" your response should not be "You simply don't understand how wonderful we are". That's a failure in your message delivery.
In 2000, everyone thought they were an Amazon. A boatload of people were wrong about that.
"..first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising, and finally contracting out the creation of that content to qualified freelance writers."
That's pretty much Demand Media in one sentence.
A VC was being told about a new web startup in the 1990's. The startup involved people putting their goods up for sale, where people would bid for them, then exchange the goods and money.
The VC said "People who've never seen each other, sending goods and money to one another, sight unseen? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard!".
The startup was obviously eBay, and I keep that story in mind every time I hear someone's business idea that I think is less than brilliant. After all, what do I know?
(I read that anecdote somewhere, but have lost the URL - if anyone knows it, I'd love to have a reference)
I'd like to see a start-up find a way to monetize my lack of desire to have my digital information monetized, maybe by obfuscating or deleting my information, and then I buy from their partners to say thanks.
Seems to me you can do this just as well on server side, and work more on ensuring Server<->Client interface security. Crypto tokens would be a start.
The way to tackle this would be to make index creation on the client incremental: any new messages are downloaded, decrypted, indexed, the index encrypted and uploaded back to the server. I'm not good enough with either search/indexing or crypto to know how you'd use such an incremental encrypted index to perform an actual search without having to decrypt (and therefore download) the entire index first. In fairness, I haven't researched this yet.
Securing the client-server comms is a solved problem, I'm not aware of any problems with SSL/TLS as long as the server also authenticates itself (which current browsers don't permit, but is easy to do with SSL directly).
Caveat: I'm neither cperciva nor tptacek (let alone Bruce Schneier) so there's a high probability I made some factual mistakes in this post.
There has also been a lot of theoretical work in topics like predicate- and functional-encryption which could eventually be used for richer queries.
Question for you - how much would you be willing to pay for your name, user accounts, and other specific information to never come up on the first page of Google, Pipl, or other search engines?
ReputationDefender.com/MyPrivacy
It appears to be very cheap. I have no connection with this company or anyone who works for it, ttbomk.
MyPrivacy protects you from stalkers, scam artists and direct marketers, by continually tracking down your personal information and removing it from databases on the Internet. MyPrivacy removes your name, address, age, phone number, past addresses, and names of relatives from websites that sell or give away your personally identifiable information without your permission.
Don't give up in the face of competition. It just validates the marketplace.
For instance - Dropbox went up against many other cloud storage systems and is winning.
There a couple of surprises: (i) there are two single founders, and (ii) there are a couple of pairs that seem to be in the same space. Obviously embedster and embedly seem to be doing something similar, but there was also a couple of search engines that do something similar as well. I wonder what Paul thinks about that. Won't the competition cause bad vibes in the meetings, etc.
Of course it is possible that I was mislead by the short descriptions and the companies do not really compete.
There's a half-dozen or more of these guys that I'd put my own money into if I were an accredited investor (some that are still embargoed). The three sentences are really insufficient, I think.
But then again, I'm biased.
I wonder if quality or customer satisfaction will be an issue. I imagine there could be some datasets that don't quite meet up to the expectation of the buyer. But there isn't a real good way to refund money since there's nothing to return.
For example, how do you verify that the dataset really contains 'Every Target Store' in the US?
Perhaps they have an ebay-like seller rating feature planned?
Sounds like MFA spam. So much for make something that people want.
The ideas on this list might not be pie in the sky, but they are most likely something people can get their head around, and are fairly polished.
This makes sense as the next step for many of these teams is going to be to try to raise capital. The more pie in the sky, the harder it is to get buy in from an investor, unless you have the goods. In three months I'd bet these groups have something pretty nice to show for their time spent in YC and inching toward an even larger goal that might not be evident from their 3 line description.
- Notifo
- Zencoder (If they drop their prices. Those prices are horrendous for the REAL market they are targeting)
- Nowmov (with name change)
- Crocodoc (will sell, but will not have too many users)
- Gamador
- Cardpool
- Chromaom
- Answerly
- Zenedy
- Data Marketplace
- 140Bets
That's what I mean - it will be big within the crowd of people who take time to understand it, but the other people just won't get it.
But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.
- encode multiple resolutions for silverlight's smoothhd streaming and generate the metadata file (http://www.cmstream.net/ used to provide an opensource way to do this but they pulled the src for some reason -- I have a src snapshot if you want)
- encode mp4/ogv for use with html5 video players like sublime (http://jilion.com/sublime/video)
- support mp3/ogg for html5 audio
- support imaging (like autorotating batches of images based on exif)
Pricing does seem a tad expensive. 6cents/minute versus ~9cents/hour for EC2. I'd probably be more likely to build my own solution just because it's cheaper.
For me, it seems at first glance to be a good mix. A few pretty obvious starting business models for some, really good synergy between the groups with their ideas, and in general it seems to reflect the scope intended for seed stage start ups.
Sure not all of them are at first glance overly ambitious in trying to change the world, but I'm also not convinced that a good majority of them can't end up doing just that.
Many of them fit perfectly with YC's philosophy of "intuitive hacks" that a group could bang out and try to build traction for in a three/four month incubator time frame.
I'm a fan of http://colourlovers.com.
Maybe they'll make affordable... long lasting... PANTONE books.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...
Corrections (particularly in early years of YC) welcome!
Of course it probably all makes good business sense and I wish them all luck and to be happily bought out.
I just wish there was something original - X because it's a good idea and will bring great good, rather than X because Y...
SMS?