Details about the 10 startups that were selected in the Y Combinator

Greetings to our readers. Today I want to talk about one event, which would have been lost in the depths of similar, if not even scandalous, fame and policies of its culprit. The Internet startup startup incubator Y Combinator professes an interesting and even in many ways original model of attraction and development - it offers a small initial funding and team relocation for the period of development for them in a room with all the infrastructure. Of course, ordinary business incubators work in a similar way (often), but in this variant it is a temporary move for a short time in order to probably be able to directly lead and control the company's work, and besides, this approach allows to unite the team not only the startup itself, and all united under the roof, and therefore achieve a synergistic effect 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 market. What are these lucky projects? After all, there were a lot of applications, but then they managed to win in a fight for money, and then perhaps fame (and much more money). Let's take a closer look and analyze at the same time.

Deluux is 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 “accepted into action.” Nevertheless, it is known that the project is developing a certain mechanism (most likely in the form of a widget or hosted appliaction / web-service), which allows adding social elements and functions by analogy with facebook (probably as a de facto standard for social projects already) on any website. and any page. In principle, this idea is in the air and at the same conference DEMO'08, about which we have already written, there were several projects with approximately similar ideas.

8aweek - from another area, and in some ways even opposite to the previous project. They are developing (or rather, have already created and tested) an application that helps you and your employees to devote more time to work and the right things, instead of “hanging on” on social sites and other “timers”. You specify a list of sites and set time limits, more than which the system will not allow you to view the pages, politely hinting that it is time to work. The name, apparently, should mean that with this program (of course, properly tuned), it is possible to make an eight-day one from the usual five-day working week, which is very good. By the way, really good and necessary program, beware, “office plankton” ... On the first page, the statistics of the “saved” hours are kept, for this moment it is already more than 16241 hours, and this is almost two years!
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Wundrbar works on the highly competitive Internet search market now, offering a fairly smart search engine with a command line-like search syntax, for example, the search phrase “wikipedia software” will lead us to the right wikipedia page right away. Other commands are also supported, which in fact are pointers to where to look for the user’s requested, or do something with it (if the service allows, for example, integration with Twitter, is closer, then you can immediately send the search phrase as a message). In some ways, the creators of the project are right, and this search is good, especially for beginners, although stop, because you need to know where to look, which means to be familiar with these resources. So in many ways it is ambiguous - it seems to be convenient, and everything is in one place, and from the technical side it seems to be excellent, because he is not looking for himself, but rather as an intelligent proxy for other systems (by the way, in light of the open search format Open Search from Yahoo this may be interesting). But still something is wrong in it, honestly, an adequate business model of the project is not seen. But by itself it is interesting and well done - and a web search, and various toolbars and plugins, this is worth learning from Western startups.

280 North is a startup developing an office web application for presentations. There is little information available, but in my opinion, this market is already so busy, and with giants like Google and Microsoft itself, there are already well-established players with broad functionality and user base, like Zoho, and many smaller companies that work in this niche. Therefore, such a project is immediately in a difficult situation - there are many competitors, often a poorly prepared user base, high complexity of development and support. 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 is an interesting and undoubtedly promising project that works in the field of advertising and promotion of recruitment announcements. They offer to create and accurately target job ads, and this is not only static banners or text ads, but also rich-media. A distinctive feature is the exact targeting, so the job advertisement for a PHP developer will appear on sites that are thematically related to PHP development, and not in the Ruby community, and vice versa. By the way, this is the first project, according to the application of the incubator, which was already funded before arriving at 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 - is engaged in fashionable direction of unified communications, about which pillars of the market speak so much, like "iron" like Cisco, and Microsoft. This project proposes to configure each of the parties with a convenient way to communicate, for example, ICQ, Jabber or SMS, while your partner can receive and communicate in a way that is convenient for him. In this service serves as a universal hub, router and converter of all messages. An interesting idea in the light of creating a small closed community, within which different people can participate in all the ways available to them - for example, virtual meetings between geographically dispersed interlocutors or simply 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 this is too complicated, and sometimes not trivial, if these developers make everything much easier and support all major networks and communication methods (including By the way, social networks - you often need to contact a person from there, but all his contact details are for registered users only), then the project will occupy a decent niche and most likely can be bought by another company.

Omnisio is aimed at the online video market, which is now considered the main trend, and allows you to share videos on various websites, edit and comment it, while the video itself, as I understand it, is stored on servers of regular video hosting sites like Youtube, and Omnisio provides only tools and possibilities for editing, inserting images, text and commenting on video by other users. Honestly, I still very vaguely understand what kind of service it is, and what its model, I think, the video market, like photohosting, is already pretty overloaded by various companies, and here the young startup is especially hard.

Insoshi is a project behind which there are serious developers in the circles on the RubyOnRail platform who wrote 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 its own server, unlike the pioneer Ning, who asked, probably the whole direction in this area. It is likely that this platform will be a success for building narrow, closed or just professional communities, however, analysis of the market shows that soon the interest of users who are jaded with general mathematical projects will switch to more interesting and useful networks. Therefore, investors are already investing money in this area in order not to miss the second facebook or LinkedIn.

MixWit is a music startup that adds a widget to a web page that can play your favorite tracks from various sites. Facebook is also available for sharing music with 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 customize its appearance in a flexible and diverse way. But the prospects ... the music business in the network in general seems complicated to me and very difficult in it, even to the giants, so one can only hope that this project will show excellent results. It is quite probable, as an outcome, the 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 Facebook integration is very correct.

Uff, that's all the project. Honestly, I didn’t find a truly revolutionary or innovative one among them, although all of them introduce fresh ideas and developments to existing markets or their under-covered areas, which seems to be a more valued investor model. Nobody cancels the opportunity to offer a completely new approach or concept, to create an unprecedented platform, only this is such a difficult decision that you are likely to undertake it, either a madman or a genius. Just make believe your investor!

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