Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3 | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3

techcrunch.com

100 pointsTheMakeA31 comments

CoreOS.com sounds super promising. I'm gonna be rooting for them. It's been a while since I last saw a real CS startup come out of Silicon Valley, much less YC. The action in this space seems to all be happening in Boston.

What companies in Boston are you referring to?

My field is data analytics, and the companies that come to mind are Vertica, Tokutek, Hadapt, Autonomy. Clearly Palo Alto has Cloudera, Hortonworks, Trifacta, and I'm sure countless others. I was generalizing incorrectly.

The point I was really making was that most YC startups are focused on solving for inefficiencies in various verticals (inspired by AirBnB I guess). Very few are focused on core CS. So I was pleasantly surprised to read about CoreOS.

Sorry to toot our own horn, but RethinkDB is a YC startup which is about as hardcore CS as you can get. Clustrix too (though you wouldn't normally hear about them since they're not too focused on the open source community). There are a couple of others but I can't think of them now off the top of my head.

Core CS/systems startups are definitely a minority in YC, but there are more than a few!

I wasn't even aware CoreOS is a Y Combinator company, I wonder what the monetization strategy is.

I added a poll to predict top performers for summer 13 batch of YC companies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141

... consulting and "enterprise" support?

Go Lumoid - so happy to see them finally out in the open! Disclosure - I'm married to one of the founders :).

The landing page is very confusing. I kept trying to find a way to close the modal box before realizing that it's not really a modal box.

Interestingly enough, the product appears to be entirely functional once that modal is circumvented. I'm not sure why they would direct the user to a functional product when they are ostensibly not open for public use.

I wasn't able to get by the modal box. Can't I actually browse the site without having to put in an email address? Not the best first impression. The idea seems very cool.

If you are using Chrome, Go to dev tools and delete the modal dialog part using "Edit as HTML". You will be able to navigate through the site.

For those struggling with the modal, their twitter profile has an invite link: http://www.lumoid.com/friends

Also, as much as I love a good Canon v. Nikon flamewar, there's a huge comparison-shopping unmet need in the CSC (compact system camera) space: Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji X, Sony NEX, Nikon J/V, Canon M, etc.

Aka please send me a X100S, X-pro1, and a EP-5/VF-4 to test :)

Lumoid founders, if you haven't yet reached out to Mike Johnston, Steve Huff, Ken Rockwell, Michael Reichmann, Kirk Tuck, et.al, hop to it! They have huge audiences of photo enthusiasts who'd be receptive to the model.

Also, how do you differentiate yourselves from rentglass, lensrentals, lensprotogo, etc.?

The design's obviously a work in progress, this was my quick attempt to clean up the kit page a bit http://i.imgur.com/DuwlqPO.png

There is a variant of this 'try before you buy' that was discussed on Firespotting some time back -

http://firespotting.com/item?id=1127

Lumoid is more of a 'rent to buy' equivalent though. My bet is that this would 'pivot' to be the AirBnB for gadgets.

More like the Zappos of consumer electronics.

Could work well for headphones? Definitely something people would be keen to try with their own equipment and music.

I'd have health concerns about that; what if someone has an ear infection and then returns a pair?

Either they'd be cleaning them (and cameras) too or might you have similar issues of cleanliness there?

I have no problems with sharing a camera though -- I have bacteria on my hands all the time from handshakes; etc., and well-established mitigating practices (washing my hands).

I suppose you could clean the headphones with rubbing alcohol...

Most of these websites look nearly identical (twitter bootstrap anyone?), across all three batches. As a visual learner and someone who is (unfortunately) inclined to judge a book by its cover, it's hard for me to get excited about any of these companies by visiting their sites. Frankly they look generic. The cynical part of me wonders if these companies afraid of taking risks and doing something bold with their online presentation.

Also looking forward to the next era of web company names -- let's call it post-skeunameism (Crowdery and Apptimize I'm looking at you). This batch has actually been much improved in that regard from what I remember over the past few years.

What "risk" should a new company incur with the landing page? Slick design won't get you return users, if the meat of the product isn't there.

Happy to see Panorama Education here, definitely a bright group :) Also refreshing to see that they are profitable, given that these days profitability is frequently, though not always, left out of the equation for young startups.

Panorama and Casetext are both solid.

HackerMeter is an interesting concept. Curious to try it out

edit: Logged in, I'm on the very first basic Fibonacci question and there's no support to submit my answer in JavaScript, seriously? I can understand not being to account for all the different server-side languages out there but this is a website and all browsers support Javascript. There's nothing in their "about us" that says they are targeted to a specific type of developer so hopefully they'll add this in the future.

Reebee sounds like a sure winner. Who hasn't said "gee, I sure could use more opportunities for people to market at me"?

Pretty odd seeing buttercoin transition from a kind of group coding project on reddit into a massively funded start up.

Contrast: http://buttercoin.net/ and http://buttercoin.com/

I'll bite -- improved twitter bootstrap theme! The new design is more like the traditional "fundable" SV-startup-bootstrap theme.

In all seriousness, I think it is rather bold that they include a polarizing substance (butter) in their name. Personally I'd probably avoid the issue and go with something a bit less controversial. To be quite honest, even though I eat and enjoy butter the name "Buttercoin" is a slight turnoff -- I can only imagine how the less dairy inclined feel about it.

i find it interesting that the three links, one for each batch, stay very close together in the ranks on HN...

wow, senic - I just pre-ordered one, my wife is absolutely going to love it, christmas present == sorted.

Wow they all suck except for Senic & CoreOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com