Details about 10 startups that have been selected in Y Combinator


    Greetings to our readers. Today I want to talk about one event that would have been lost in the abyss of similar ones, if not for a bit even the scandalous fame and politics of its culprit. Internet Startup Incubator Y CombinatorHe professes an interesting and even in many ways original model of attraction and development - he offers a small initial funding and the team will move to the premises with the entire infrastructure for the duration of the development. Of course, ordinary business incubators work in a similar way (often), but in this version it is a temporary move for a short time, so that, probably, you can directly manage and control the work of the company, and besides, this approach allows you to very much unite the team the startup itself, but also all those united under the roof, which means to achieve a synergistic effect already at the design and development stage. And this is often much more important than even money and connections.

    And so, the incubator selected ten projects that it will promote and bring to the market. What are these lucky projects? After all, there were a lot of applications, but here they managed to win the fight for money, and then fame (and much more money) is possible. Let's take a closer look, at the same time analyze it.

    Deluux- It’s very, honestly, a mysterious startup about which almost nothing is known, and what is known is only promises, rumors and assumptions. But probably investors were shown enough to be taken into action. Nevertheless, it is known that the project is developing some mechanism (most likely in the form of a widget or hosted appliaction / web-service) that allows you to add social elements and functions similar to facebook (probably as a de facto standard for social projects) on any site and any page. In principle, this idea is in the air and at the same DEMO'08 conference, which we already wrote about, there were several projects with approximately similar ideas.

    8aweek- already from another area, and in some ways even the opposite of the previous project. They are developing (or rather, have already created and testing) an application that helps you and your employees to devote more time to work and necessary tasks, instead of “hanging” on social sites and other “time burners”. You set a list of sites and set time limits, more than which the system will not allow you to view pages, politely hinting that it is time to work. The name, apparently, should mean that with this program (of course, correctly configured), you can make an eight-day one from a regular five-day work week, which is very good. By the way, a really good and necessary program, watch out, "office plankton" ... The first page contains statistics of "saved" hours, at this point it is already more than 16241 hours, and this is almost two years!

    WundrbarIt works in the now highly competitive Internet search market, offering a fairly smart search engine with command-line search syntax, for example, the search phrase “wikipedia software” will lead us directly to the desired Wikipedia page. Other commands are also supported, which are essentially pointers to where to search for what the user has requested, or to do something with him (if the service allows, for example, integration with Twitter is more tight, it allows you to immediately send the search phrase as a message). In some ways, the creators of the project are right, and such a search is good, especially for beginners, although stop, because you need to know where to look, and therefore already be familiar with these resources. So in many ways it is ambiguous - it’s both convenient and convenient, and everything in one place, and from the technical side it’s fine, because he’s not looking, but rather as an intelligent proxy for other systems (by the way, in the light of the open search format Open Search from Yahoo! this may be interesting). But still, something is wrong with him, honestly, an adequate business model of the project is not seen. But in itself it is interesting and well-made - and web search, and various toolbars and plug-ins, it is worth learning from Western startups.

    280 North is a startup developing an office presentation web application. There is not much available information, but in my opinion, this market is already so occupied, and by giants like Google and Microsoft itself, there are already well-established players with wide functionality and a user base, such as Zoho, and many smaller companies that work in this niche. Therefore, such a project is immediately in a difficult environment - there are many competitors, often a poorly prepared user base, and high development and support complexity. But if you have a real business idea and you know how to translate it into a working service, be sure to try and do it!

    Snaptalent- This is an interesting and no doubt promising project working in the field of advertising and promotion of recruiting advertisements. They offer to create and precisely target job advertisements, and these are not only static banners or text ads, but also rich-media. A distinctive feature is the precise targeting, so the job announcement for the PHP developer will appear on sites thematically related to development on the PHP, and not in the Ruby community, and vice versa. By the way, this is the first, according to the incubator, project, which had already been funded before coming to the incubator. In my opinion, this is an excellent project with a clear and promising business model, although the market is also quite dense, but if you come up with and introduce something new, it is quite attractive and profitable.

    Chatterous- He is engaged in the fashionable direction of unified communications, about which the pillars of the market speak so much, both “iron” ones like Cisco and Microsoft. This project offers to configure each of the parties a convenient way of communication, for example, ICQ, Jabber or SMS, while your interlocutor can receive and communicate in a convenient way. Moreover, the service acts as a universal hub, router, and converter of all messages. An interesting idea in the light of creating small closed communities, within which different people can participate and by all means available to them - for example, virtual meetings between geographically dispersed interlocutors or just communication between friends. Of course, modern technology allows you to put the same ICQ or jabber on any device that can connect to the Internet, but often it’s too complicated,

    Omnisio is aimed at the online video market, which is now considered the main trend, and allows you to share videos on various sites, edit and comment on it, while the video itself, as I understand it, is stored on ordinary video hosting servers like Youtube, and Omnisio provides only tools and the ability to edit, insert images, text in the video and comment on it by other users. Honestly, while I understand very vaguely what kind of service it is and what model it seems to me, the video market, as well as photo hosting sites, is already pretty overloaded with various companies, and here it is especially difficult for a young startup.

    Insoshi- a project behind which there are serious developers in the circles on the RubyOnRail platform who have written a book about creating social networks on this system. And of course, their project is an open system for building a social network, focused on self-installation on their own server, in contrast to the pioneer Ning, who probably set a whole direction in this area. It is likely that this platform will be successful for building narrow, closed or just professional communities, however, market analysis shows that soon the interest of users fed up with general topic projects will switch to more interesting and useful networks. Therefore, investors are already investing in this direction so as not to miss the second facebook or LinkedIn.

    Mixwit- a startup in the field of music, adding a widget to a web page that can play your favorite tracks from various sites, there is also a facebook application for sharing music between friends. An attractive feature of the company is the ability to create your own playlists (Mixtapes), as well as a stylish online player that allows you to flexibly and diversely customize its appearance. But the prospects ... the music business in the network in general seems complicated and very difficult for it, even to giants, so you can only hope that this project will show excellent results. It is quite likely that the outcome is a complete purchase of one of the social networks - after all, such a service and functionality will be most in demand in the social network environment, therefore the initial focus of the project on integration with Facebook is very correct.

    Uff, that's it for the project. Honestly, I did not find a truly revolutionary or innovative one among them, although they all bring fresh ideas and developments to existing markets or their underserved areas, which, apparently, is a model that is more appreciated by investors. No one is canceling the opportunity to offer a completely new approach or concept, to create an unprecedented dos platform, only this is such a difficult decision that you are likely to take up this either a madman or a genius. Just make your investor believe it!

    PS Cross-post from my personal blog . The original is here.

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