Software is moving to the web and as it does, tech companies are becoming easier than ever to launch. One of the most notable changes to the tech industry of late has been the emergence of a significant number of startups that have succeeded after raising only hundreds of thousands of dollars. Joe Kraus, CEO of recently acquired JotSpot was able to bring them to market on $100,000. Reddit took even less money and were just acquired by Conde Nast. Reddit’s primary backer, Paul Graham’s fund Y Combinator, has become the poster child for making a successful startup with only tens of thousands of dollars in funding. Charles River has also scaled back the size of some of their investments as entrepreneurs are willing to take less money in exchange for more control.

Y Combinator primarily invests in software and web services. Twice a year (Fall and Spring), teams submit applications about their ideas, focusing less on business models and more on vision and the founders themselves. Summer teams interview during the Spring in San Francisco, while Winter teams interview during the Fall in Cambridge. If selected, the Summer teams work in Cambridge, while the Winter teams work out of the Bay Area. The last application drive was Oct 18th, with interviews happening this past weekend. Startups are usually funded 3 months living expenses, or $6,000 a person. Y Combinator’s investment is not so much in money as it is in the experience and connections the group provides to the teams, often shared over their weekly dinners. The money teams get is a bare minimum, often stretched by living and working in an apartment or moving in with friends and family. The young teams (usually around 23 yrs. old) may be under-funded compared to investments by other funds, but companies such as Thinkature and JumpChat have shown themselves formidable competitors to larger startups.

While the Y Combinator team ponders what they saw in last weekend’s interviews for the next round of funding, we thought now would be a good time to take a look at the last batch of Y Combinator companies. Many of these companies are still in heavy development, but if you’re wondering what kinds of services are receiving funding from this innovative fund – here are some short introductions.

JamGlue – An online application to mix and share music tracks online. The site features an online audio editor that allows you to clip tracks, control their speed and volume, and nest tracks in other mashups. They are currently in private beta.

JumpChat – A platform bridging mobile text messages, email, and IM communication without needing to download anything. Users can send mass messages on any of the platforms and JumpChat will send it to the platform the receiver activates. They are currently focusing on mass mobile messaging, where users can shoot off mass messages to the groups they define.

LikeBetter – An online personality test game, where you look at two photos and choose which one you “Like Better”. After a few responses, Like Better makes some guesses about your personality, ranging from political preferences to your income bracket. They also have a “bizzaro” version called HateMore.

Pollground – A social polling site. Pollground allows you to easily create surveys and allow the “wisdom of the crowd” to answer your questions. Questions and comments can be posted anonymously.

Shoutfit – A “fashion related community”. More to come in the future.

Talkito – A service that enables its users to meet and chat when they visit the same websites.

Thinkature – This recently launched online collaboration environment allows users to chat and draw diagrams on a shared whiteboard. See our review of Thinkature yesterday.

Xobni – An Outlook plugin that tracks all kinds of email analytics. They’ll track all kinds of email time and quantity analytics tied to specific contacts, threads, or times of day.

“Social Documents” (name TBA) – A site that promises to be the YouTube of documents. They allow you to transcode doc, text, and html files into pdfs, and share an embeddable version online. They will be launching within the next couple of weeks.

Collaboration between distributed users online is widely recognized as one of the key next steps in software development. The products available for collaboration are becoming increasingly light weight, powerful and easy to use. Two companies that we’ve found entering into this market with compelling, but markedly different, products are ConceptShare and Thinkature.

Both products let users create shared visual workspaces that can be marked up and chatted in. If you are a visual designer, someone planning events or otherwise looking to stop emailing or faxing visual objects back and forth – one of these two services might be just what you are looking for. Thinkature is simpler, free and available now. ConceptShare is more powerful, subscription based and due to come to market in a few weeks.

Adobe, Microsoft and other large companies offer collaboration tools, but these two small companies provide something faster, simpler and less expensive. Tools like Conceptshare and Thinkature serve a different purpose than systems like WebEx because they allow for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Since they are entirely browser based, they should also work cross platform.

ConceptShare

ConceptShare did a demo at TechCrunch Party #7 and is now nearly ready for launch. People who have requested beta accounts will be given access next week and the product will be available commercially in about two weeks. It’s a very impressive tool aimed primarily at visual designers.

The product is built in Flash and the three person company has taken about half a million dollars from a local angel investor.

Conceptshare workspaces can include multiple concept pages, comments appear in individual threads that can be clicked through one at a time so they don’t become overwhelming, images can be drawn on and zoomed into. Screen captures can be imported by simply providing a URL. All the modules of the workspace can be resized by dragging their borders; so if I want to see the last 15 lines of chat instead of having the image being discussed taking up the bulk of my screen I can easily make that change.

Prices haven’t been absolutely determined yet, but a single workspace with up to 5MB of storage will likely be free, there will be a number of intermediary offerings and enterprise subscriptions will start at $200 per month. High end subscriptions will include the ability to fully brand your workspaces.

Another feature that Conceptshare is offering is an expert directory. In time the company hopes that topical experts will offer their design consulting services for a fee inside the system. I’m a little skeptical of how viable this will be, but visual designers may be among the most viable markets for online one time paid consulting.

Conceptshare is very pleasing to use, but it’s usefulness is largely limited to visual design. It’s clearly the most powerful of these two services, but if you’re looking for something free, fast and simple then Conceptshare may not be what you’re looking for. The following is a demonstration video from the Conceptshare team.

Thinkature

Thinkature is a YCombinator startup started by two recent Olin College graduates. They’ve probably taken 10% as much funding as Conceptshare. The Thinkature product is free and available now. The company formally launched in October.

Rather than Conceptshare’s Flash interface, Thinkature is built entirely of HTML and Javascript and uses a persistent http connection for synchronous communication. You can place images and text in the workspaces, connect boxes and chat in real time. Only the most recent chat messages are visible unless you click a tab to pop up a box with the full chat history.

Thinkature works best for communicating thought processes visually. You can resize images but you cannot zoom as you can in Conceptshare. The company’s business model wasn’t something they were willing to discuss with me, but they said that they were looking beyond the subscription and storage model. Thinkature’s target users are anyone who appreciates wikis, the company told me. Education and product design are among the different uses they have seen so far.

If you’re looking for a fast and free way to collaborate around a design proccess, Thinkature may serve you well.

I think it’s interesting that the market for collaboration software is large enough that both of these companies will probably be able to find more than enough users. They’ve taken very different approaches to building similar products; but those products will likely appeal to very different users.

Other products to look at in this space include GE’s Imagination Cubed and Vyew.