The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch and have launched already.
TicketStumbler
TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”.
People and Pages
While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place.
MeetCast
MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity.
CO2Stats
For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today.
Youlicit
Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google.
Job Alchemist
Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, and a new job affiliate network called JobSyndicate that launches today. Publishers can place JobSyndicate’s widgets on their sites and earn half the bounty set by employers when visitors click through and get hired.
Frogmetrics
Frogmetrics isn’t a pure web venture: the company wants to place touch screens in restaurants, stores, and other brick and mortar establishments that can be used to collect customer feedback on the spot. The devices ask customers a few questions at the point of sale about their experience and can collect contact information about customers to generate leads. The information gathered across physical locations is aggregated and analyzed for trends and other statistics.
Snipd
Snipd appears to be another web annotation service, one that allows users to “snip” page content such as images, videos, and text to share them with others and save for later. These snips are also used to generate so-called heat maps of pages that help users find the best content on a page. The service has yet to launch.
BackType
BackType is a search engine for comments that crawls the internet for blogs and indexes their user generated content regardless of the platform (WordPress, Moveable Type, etc). These comments are not only keyword searchable but can be followed by author, allowing you to keep track of what your friends are saying online.
no youtube or facebook innovation in the bunch
but i do see some good niche sites
I like the idea behind Posterous … really cool concept. I dunno about the others, popcuts seemed kind of interesting –sort of allowing people to “invest” in songs early on. I don’t know how successful it will be, since most of the music consumption isn’t in the long tail … it’s the top hits that make the largest volume of sales at places like iTunes.
hehe
The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”.
agreed!
what’s the r trend about anyway? i’m painfully ignorant
We bought the one without the E just in case. It redirects.
Snipd and BackType would be great for my blog….Both sides don’y have much content (snipd, has a registration page which I completed)- any idea on when they will launch?
We’d be happy to get you setup. Shoot us an email…
Is it just me or does it seem like almost all those logos were designed by the same person? It there a Y Combinator logo dude? I like their model, which provides very modest funding and high quality advice in exchange for a fair percentage.
nothing to see here. I like the YC concept but the output seems to be off a little, maybe there should be better guidance before the projects are begun.
these domains are horrendous. bubble startups are fun to watch. keep’em coming.
It will be interesting to see where these companies go. Keep it up TC.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Any of these look promising to anyone? Seems there are so many startups that are neat ideas but with no business model.
I was at Demo Day live in Cambridge, MA today. I think several of the startups are promising.
Also, this year’s batch seemed to have more going in the way of business models than prior batches I’ve seen.
The only problem I have with so many folks from India interested in TC/ startups/etc is that there is no understanding of the culture. The needs, wants, and pain points of an average american.
Even the ABCDs seem to far removed to comprehend and deliver. No clue what may be of interest in the market. It’s like a dart board!
Very good at execution however. No issues there. Then the “glove is on the other hand”.
@Phil — what in the world are you talking about? “The needs, wants, and pain points of an average american.” You’ve got to be joking.
I think we’re better off leaving our view of startups as colorblind. Race is essentially irrelevant online, when it comes to understanding and creating great user experiences.
One of these mimics what i’m doing. in the process of having the proposal draft proofread and sent to facebook for the ff grant. the fact that it’s got funded by a bunch of MIT guys is greater confidence
Are any of the YC folks from MIT?
Let me know if you want help with the fbFund grant process.
Could you be any more elitist? Are you that proud of where you did your undergrad?
MITs are usually experts at one thing, most entrepreneurs are never experts at one thing. Those that are get acquired and become corporate drowns, albeit a but richer.
One hires MIT folk to execute, not innovate.
posterus is my fav so far, a straight forward and well executed concept, ticketstumbler is also pretty exciting.
anyvite looks good but when I tried it out it was so flat, just for kicks I fired up evite and while I’m no raving fan I don’t see it as horribly cluttered or hard to use, so I don’t see legions of frustrated users rushing for a new tool, but its a solid niche and they are far from being done.
backtype sounds interesting i’ll check it out.
I have a hard time believing there are any Y Combinator startups that you haven’t covered yet. But I’m glad you got them all out of the way in one post. Now hopefully we won’t have to hear about anymore of them until next summer.
I think it’s important for TechCrunch to stay close to it’s root of covering startups. If you see the Q&A section of Mike’s talk at Startup School, he notes that it’s very important to him to cover startups like this. Y-Combinator just happens to create the types of stories that TC used to write about all the time.
Youlicit looks interesting… I used their old toolbar with the ‘Youlicit more’ functionality, and it was awesome. I hope they still remain true to some of their existing technology, which was actually useful. One of the few plugins I use. Good luck to them.
Shafqat, thanks! We are absolutely keeping the existing technology and will still have the toolbar available on the site. Will keep you posted on our launch.
Thanks Shafqat and Ken. For a startup, Youlicit definitely has a long history! We’ve got a new version of our toolbar that I think you’ll find a lot more useful. I personally find myself using it instead of search to do 70% of my market research, and it’s always good to eat your own dogfood
We just wanted to open up our results to people w/o our toolbars… but if there are any toolbar fiends out there who spend a lot of time reading blogs and such, and you want a sneak peak at our new kickass firefox extension, just drop me a line: toufique at youlicit. I think you’ll find it very useful.
I am new in blog and i like your blog (http://tipsirfan.blogspot.com)
Sorry to break this to you Sean, but there are actually *two* rounds of Y-Combinator funding per year, and the winter round is probably going to be even bigger than this one. Also, there are another 7 in this batch you haven’t seen yet, and several in stealth mode from previous rounds that are probably cool enough to get covered when they release. So don’t expect Y-Combinator to stop making headlines any time soon.
Doh!
Youlicit rocks. Used to be called ‘taskcue’.
Really? I thought it used to be called “StumbleUpon”. Maybe my memory is foggy, though.
Different company. Different functionality too. The core tech works well and is very useful.
these are BORING… what happened to innovation?
and what a horrendous bunch of dull logos… only job syndicate is remotely interesting
Frogmetrics, now that’s a good idea. Putting in a little bit of hardware in a Web 2.0 world makes you that much harder to compete with.
That is a lot of companies. Did anybody see the news on http://www.goth...te.blogspot.com ????????
Quit promoting your trash blog and engage in some worthwhile convo.
Cool stuff. Hope they got all their legal docs sorted out…
Frogmetrics will be the winner in the group. Real application for real businesses. I’ve been telling my cousin to collect info/data at POS in all of his surfshops across Florida but the solution was placing a laptop on every counter.
Now, this is the solution. If it works, it will win big.
Regards,
George
i like popcuts’s site and idea. havent checked out others
TicketStumbler stands the best chance for sure. A Kayak UI with the ability to scour tickets is a bomb lead gen site for tickets and I would invest in this. The rest of these sites are just functions missing from prominent web sites that already are famous. Don’t build businesses out of missing features, ever….ever
Thank you! Still not sure if we’re taking any investment though
.
Another post about YCombinator??
You want innovation? Check out FreeMD at http://www.freemd.com
An interactive video symptom checker…a virtual doctor, if you will.
Thoughts?
I looked at FreeMD and it is pretty cool. I am working with a public company called Wellness360 and their service would be a good addition to what we are doing.
Hightechexec-
Why dont we talk? How can I reach you? You can reach me via my firm, Q. Wild & Co.
http://www.qwildandco.com
Yes, these sites are all horribly boring! They all follow the same template, and they have similar logos, and 90%+ of them will be forgotten in 6 months.
What about an online air traffic control simulator: http://www.atc-sim.com ? And I’m also playing with a new site to provide nav data: http://www.opennav.com .
Does anyone want to go in on *that*?
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