Demo Day: Y Combinator's Spring Chicks | Hacker News Reader

Demo Day: Y Combinator's Spring Chicks

techcrunch.com

36 pointszaidf19 comments

Looks awesome! My favorite are,

Writewith: Google docs is a great application. But it is very limiting when it comes to collaboration. I have recently setup an article with an editor and 6 contributing authors; I know the collaboration on Google docs for such a project is going to be hell.

Octopart: I love vertical search engines since they have the potential to compete with mainstream search engines. Moreover, as an engineer and electronics enthusiast, I've always had trouble locating components, so Octopart will certainly come in handy. In fact, I am going to go ahead and recommend it to my EE friends.

Auctomatic: I am not a power user on eBay, but from the sound of it, this startup really has something going for them. There is a definite need for streamlining the process of listing on eBay. The downside is that their exit strategy is limited to eBay and perhaps a few other smaller companies.

With auctomatic thats not the only string to their bow. Go Kul & Harj..!

I'm very curious about this tsumobi thing, as it's basically exactly what Hecl is ( http://www.hecl.org ). I'd sort of abbandoned it as an idea for making any money with directly, though, figuring the advantage was just to be able to develop applications a lot faster. I was able to prototype ShopList ( http://shoplist.dedasys.com ) in a few minutes with it, for example.

Edit: BTW, I'd certainly be interested in chatting with the Tsumobi folks. It's a good idea - perhaps there are elements in common that can be reused from/added to Hecl, which is open source under a very liberal license, meaning you can take it and include it even in 'commercial' apps.

I really think that the 'common' bits in a space like that have to be either free or open source (think about browsers, html, javascript, java applets, etc...), and that that's not where the money is.

It sounds a lot like the idea I was going to apply to YC with, bugger.

If you want fast prototyping for mobile I'd recommend using python on a nokia S60. Theres pretty much a full hardware api allowing you to access the camera, phone book, etc.

Hecl doesn't require Symbian, though - you can run it even on cheaper phones like my Nokia 3100.

True, getting stuff running on 'dumb' phones like the razr is crucial. Wonder if python could run on top of javame? I would anticipate it be very slow.

There was once upon a time a bit of rumbling about getting Jython going on javame. I don't think anything ever came of it, and if standard Jython is any indication, it would have been, as you said, /very/ slow.

You really have to start with a *small* core language, or you will end up with something on your phone that's "sort of" Python/Tcl/Ruby/whatever. Hecl isn't a speed demon on a slow phone, but it is still usable.

View3 is one that I'm particularly looking out for. The premise just sounds completely awesome.

I've tried Microsoft's Photosynth and I was pretty impressed. I can't wait to see what the team behind View3 has come up with.

i'd just like to say it's great to read actual thoughtful comments about YC companies for once. i'm fed up of reading pathetic comments on Techcrunch from people who were rejected by YC and still like to claim they are into the startup scene without having anything to show for it.

i hope to meet some more of you guys at startup school this month.

Will you be joining our after school yc.news meetup, or do you YC alums have your own exclusive event?

If anyone's willing to participate, I would love to set up something where current YC founders and potential YC applicants can gather, chat, and pick each others' brains.

that sounds cool. we've all been so wrapped up in investor day we've not organized anything for startup school by way of meetups. keep me posted on what you plan.

"Like Photosynth, View3 will let you walk into and explore 3D images of photos, but will let you use as little as one photo to get started." This sounds very interesting. Maybe this is related work?

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dhoiem/projects/popup/

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pubs/pub_5164.html

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mukta/cvpr06/1123_Prasad_M.pdf

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed. I have to say some of the Y companies have tapped into my cynicism in the past.

Which ones are you referring to? Not all of the previous companies have appealed to me as a user, but they've all peaked my interest as a hacker.

Does YC offer $5K per founder for ~6% or 6% for $10K?

Some of these apps are very cool though!

They offer $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of founders. The percentage claim ranges between 1-10%, with the reported median at about 6%.

Thanks Daniel!

Very cool. This new crop of ventures is definitely the best yet.

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