Y Combinator's Demo Day Gets Supersized | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator's Demo Day Gets Supersized

allthingsd.com

36 pointsil12 comments

After getting cut off (and testing my brakes; they work nicely) this morning by two idiots on cellphones at the same time, I wish everyone would use sonalight (the voice SMS thing). It probably has te highest external benefit of a large group of startups, even bigger than the personal beefit to a user.

Are they coming out with an iPhone version anytime soon? This seems useful.

Hopefully they figure out something that works on the iPhone. It can't work exactly like Sonalight on Android works, because the iPhone doesn't yet support launching a third party app based on just a voice command. (Even Siri, a native app, requires you to hold down a button to activate). Sonalight works just by having you just start talking even if the phone is in your pocket.

It seems like launching the app with a button push on iOS would be a good enough trade-off to get the benefits of the rest of the app.

The iOS market for this is going to be huge and someone is going to do it eventually regardless of whether you need to push a button.

Or just turn it on before you drive.

My car has a steering wheel push button to do make a call; I should test how it works with an iPhone 4s and Siri.

I wonder if a bluetooth 4.0 low energy steering wheel slipcover would make sense. You could have a bunch of buttons to do chorded input.

The main problem I have now is that my iPhone locks after a few minutes, even in the dock. I want my phone to remain unlocked while in the car, since entering a long pass phrase on the screen is quite unsafe.

Yep. The Sonalight founders are seriously awesome so I'm confident they'll figure something out on iOS and kill it - I'm just speculating as to why they've been focusing on Android up until now. Controlling the whole app without touching your phone makes for an awesome demo.

What you want is called wavedeck, and it's awesome, and live in the AppStore now.

If I wanted voice, I'd just call. The reason I like SMS on the receive side is I can read it while in a meeting without disrupting people, or when in an open-plan office.

What I really want is a system which takes incoming voice, text, email, etc., and filters/transmogrifies based on rules I set into voice, text, email, etc., which might change based on context. While driving, I input voice; while in a meeting, I receive text. Keep the initial/canonical input in case there is an error, but let me try my preferred format first.

I use Google Voice for this now, but as with all non-core Google products, it's badly maintained and kind of crap.

Sorry, link: http://www.wavedeck.com/

After looking at the venturebeat.com list, I am always excited whenever I gain a new awareness of some of the innovative ideas of other upstarts. As for the All Things Digital article, the opportunities coming together for the Y Combinator groups of the future are growing. It's nice to know that there is a real hunger out there among investors to invest in the advancement of innovation.

As demo day grows, it no doubt provides evidence that Y Combinator is giving investors comfort in knowing that those individuals in which they are investing have been first selected and then have taken them through the process of mentoring them for several months in a tech company "graduate school" type of training. I am sure that an added benefit to investors is also knowing that those in which they invest will also receive an ongoing mentorship support that can only serve to aid stability and growth. That's a win-win for everyone involved.

Some of the companies presenting are listed here: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/y-combinator-demo-day-marc...

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