Once called Airbed and Breakfast in full, AirBnB aims to provide a secure online marketplace for these types of transactions and make people ‘travel like humans’ again.

Now the startup, which came out of Y Combinator’s winter 2009 class, is making it easier for people who share interests (e.g. photography) or have another connection with each other (e.g. alumni who’ve attended the same university) to share travel accommodation and recommendations thanks to the addition of Groups.

Basically, the groups feature lets travelers form virtual tribes made up of peers, and exchange rental space among each other through the AirBnB system. The idea behind that is that connecting to someone with similar interests or lifestyle improves the chances of coming to a mutual agreement, and traveling that much more fun. Amusing factoid: there’s also a Y Combinator and Hacker News group, whose members regularly host each other when traveling the country to go pitch somewhere, meet up with partners or attend industry events.

AirBnB is also expanding geographically: it now lists properties in over 100 countries and more than 1,700 cities. In case you’re interested, the most popular is New York City with 1,500 listings, and the most popular international city is Paris (hint: Le Web). Since its soft launch, over 2,500 people have joined 53 groups.

One of the startup’s founders who we spoke to, Brian Chesky, declined to share specifics but informs us that revenue has gone up 10% every month since its April launch.

Which group are you going to join for your next trip? I picked mine:

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The idea led Graham to delay the application deadline for YC Winter 2010 startups for two days, so they could release two new Requests For Startups (RFS), YC’s recently announced program that gives applicants basic big picture ideas from which to form startups around. One of these new RFSes is obviously to build something on top of Twitter. Here’s the description:

RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. Each one of those protocols has spawned many successful companies. Twitter will too.

We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to built stuff on top of it. So together we came up with a plan: anyone YC funds to do a startup based on Twitter will get priority access to the Twitter stream, and to people at Twitter.

Twitter hasn’t specified exactly what type of access to its stream YC startups will get (there are a number of levels with various call rate limits). But the assumption is that these startups will get the type of access that Twitter gives to its preferred third-party developers.

And the access to the Twitter team may be even more vital. Twitter is in the process of rolling out several new APIs for new features it is working on like Lists, Retweets, and Geolocation. Having face time with Twitter’s team for these types of things could certainly help YC startup build some great tools on top of the platform.

On the flip-side, Twitter will see a group of hand-selected startups that at the very least have interesting ideas for what to do with the platform.

Alongside the new Twitter RFS, Y Combinator is also announcing a RFS for live video. This is the result of a similar partnership (as the Twitter one) with Justin.TV that will give YC startups that work on this RFS the best access to Justin.TV’s stream, as well as access to the company’s founders and engineers.

The new Winter 2010 deadline for YC will be October 28 at 10 pm Pacific.

[photo: flickr/JChetan]

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Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

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Wiping out your data is one thing, but you’ll also need to install all your applications from scratch again once you get Windows 7 up and running on your computer. The same goes, of course, for people who buy a new PC and start with only a few pre-installed programs – or none at all.

Installing multiple software applications can be quite a painstaking, time-consuming chore, but a Y Combinator-funded startup has just pushed a tool that aims to make the process very, very easy. And free of charge on top of that.

Meet Ninite, a multi-app installer tool that’s as useful as it is simple.

Ninite has aggregated a bunch of popular PC applications in a range of categories on its website, and allows you to check multiple software programs and run the setup process for each of them in one go. No installation of additional software required, and Ninite will even automatically refrain from including toolbars and whatnot with the software you’ve opted to install. The only disadvantage I can see is actually a feature: default settings for software programs you’ve chosen to install will automatically be selected, so there’s little customization you can perform during the set-up process.

Once you’ve selected all the apps you want, you’ll get a single executable file which will run all installations in one go while you go have an espresso.

Ninite, which was called Volery while in private beta, is a product from Secure by Design, a YC-funded startup which discovered people were yearning for this type of tool when marketing the BaseShield App Store, essentially an app store for Windows apps.

The company aims to make money off Ninite by offering premium features like local download caching, network share download caching and a silent mode to paying users.

(Via Hacker News)

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Obviously, Plurchase thinks it has what it takes to succeed in the space with a new method of doing things. In the past, social shopping sites have either required you to have a browser plug-in to converse with friends while on shopping sites, or they have been entirely new sites that everyone had to go to. Plurchase simply offers a social overlay to the sites you already use, and makes it easy to invite friends to join you.

Say you want to shop for something on Zappos, you visit Plurchase’s site then hit the button to take you to Zappos. You will see the Zappos site just as you normally would, but with the addition of a Plurchase panel on the right hand side of your web browser. On this panel you will see your buddy list of other Plurchase users, which includes what sites they are currently shopping on. There’s also a link to invite other friends to join you in shopping with Plurchase via email. And below that is a chat area to talk to your online friends as you shop.

If you find an item you like while shopping and want to show a friend, you can bookmark the item and leave a comment. You can also note whether you “like” it, “dislike” it, or note that it’s “cool.” Your friends can do this as well. Anytime you bookmark an item, it shows up in the chat area with a link, so your online friends will see it and can see what you’re looking at.

And if you hook up Plurchase through Facebook Connect, you can also ask you Facebook friends what they think about items by sending them to your Facebook page.

One interesting thing about Plurchase is that although the site just has Zappos, Amazon, and Craigslist integration right now, the plan is to eventually roll it out to all the big online retailers. And when that happens, you will be able to chat with friends while you’re shopping at Zappos even if they’re shopping somewhere else, like Amazon.

“Plurchase requires no download/install/plugin for users, and no sign-up. There’s zero integration work required by the merchants. Plurchase uses some clever technology. We use a custom proxy server to ‘wrap’ our functionality around the retailer site, and that includes proxifying their JavaScript and Flash code,” co-founder Tom Saffell tells us.

The core idea behind Plurchase is that while online retailers are great at selling items, creating their own social integration won’t work well because it is limited to just that one site. “We see Plurchase as part of a broader trend: the distribution of social features across all types of websites,” Saffell notes. He’s written more about that idea here.

The plan is to extend Plurchase’s social feature to include Twitter integration soon as well, we’re told.

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FlightCaster
FlightCaster, which launched yesterday, is a new startup that lets you check if your flight is delayed hours before the airline will tell you. The company says that 25% of all flights are delayed, and oftentimes passengers aren’t notified about the delays until the very last minute. The startup says that more established travel sites don’t offer this information because they often have relationships with the airlines, and they aren’t willing to disrupt those partnerships. In the future, the company plans to offer a list of alternative flights so you can quickly rebook once you learn of a delay.

RethinkDB
RethinkDB is a new kind of database that’s built from the ground up for solid state storage (the same kind you’ll find in an iPhone or thumbdrive). The company launched last month, and says that all existing databases were designed for traditional, platter based hard drives and the constraints associated with them. The startup says that solid state drives change these assumptions (they’re already ten times faster than MySQL), and that the space is about to explode, explaining “we’ll have lots of competitors so we have to move fast”.

DailyBooth
DailyBooth, which we covered yesterday, is a “Twitter for pictures”. The site invites users to upload photos to the site on a regular basis, at which point the community is free to leave comments both in the form of text and their own photos. The company will soon be rolling out ‘push’ functionality, so users will be able to send out their photos to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and other social sites.

JobPic
JobPic is a new marketplace that allows users to sell their services, allowing users to “shop for services the way you shop for goods”. JobPic brings the shopping cart model we’re familiar with at sites like Amazon to service providers — people who might offer things like one-on-one lessons, or haircuts. In other online service markets, buyers submit a service request to providers (Guru, Elance). This works well for some things, but not others. JobPic wants to be an ‘eBay for services’, where the seller specifies what they have to offer.

Mixpanel
Mixpanel, which launched last month is a realtime analytics platform that allows developers to track more advanced metrics than what they could typically track using services like Google Analytics. The platform allows developers to track pain points in their apps, which allows them to further streamline things like signups and payments. The company will process 100 million events this month and will be profitable this month.

JobSpice
JobSpice, which launched last Monday, is an online resume editor. The site allows users to quickly generate highly stylized, web-friendly resumes with a minimum amount of effort, and also lets users swap between styles with one click (jumping between templates using programs like Word can be much more frustrating).

HighlightCam
HighlightCam, which we covered last month, is a service that can look through hours of video footage and identify when something happens. The company’s first product involves security cameras — it can take many hours of security footage and then identify the few moments when things out of the ordinary are happening, cutting down the footage to only a few minutes of important content. Soon the company will be releasing its API, which will allow developers to tap into the software to shorten a variety of different kinds of content (including things like wedding videos). The software can produce 20-30 second trailers automatically for any kind of video.

Olark
Olark is a new site that launched moments ago and allows you to easily integrate a chat widget on your website. When a visitor is browsing your site, you can track their browsing in IM clients like iChat, and any time they attempt to contact an operator through the chat widget, you can have the conversation automatically relayed to your chat client.

Bump Technologies
Bump is smartphone application that allows users to quickly exchange contact information simply by tapping their phones together. It has already been featured by Apple in an iPhone commercial and is seeing strong growth (you can see our post here). But contact information exchange is only the beginning for the startup: The company is working to become cross platform with support for a variety of smartphones, and will also open an API/Platform “Powered by Bump” that allows developers to transfer other types of data.

RentHop
RentHop is a housing marketplace, without the broker fee. The company says that Craigslist is bad for renters, because it’s often overloaded with fake listings. RentHop is currently focused on the NYC market, offering rich search and structure to ensure quality. Both founders are engineers, but they’ve put the time in to get real estate licenses too.

FanChatter
FanChatter, which launched earlier this month, is a platform for sports teams, television networks, colleges, and corporate sponsors that allows them to deploy social-media powered products to new mediums, like the billboard of a baseball stadium. One of the site’s products includes a photo sharing feature that lets fans at a stadium submit their pictures from a ball game to a designated Email address for the chance to have it shown on the stadium’s Jumbotron later in the game. Other products include a social media chatterbox which pulls in content from sites like Twitter. NBC Universal is using the FanChatter ChatterBox for homepage for a show called GhostHunters.

Listia
Listia is an “eBay for free stuff“. While you’ve always been able to give away free items on Craigslist, that comes with many problems like mountains of Email. To work around these issues, Listia uses an eBay auction-like system, in which you use on-site ‘credits’ to bid on getting these free items. You can earn credits either by selling your own items or by buying them. Because these credits have some value, you can unload things on Listia without having to worry as much about an endless number of queries from people who aren’t genuinely interested in what you’re giving away.

DirectedEdge
DirectedEdge says that the web is soon going to see an Amazonification — you’ll see Amazon-like recommendations in a variety of other spaces. DirectedEdge is looking to lead this trend by providing a recommendation engine for any site. Since launching two weeks ago, the site has gotten dozens of customers.

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The ability to chat live with visitors is an incredibly useful marketing tool for site owners. Whether a site owner operates an e-commerce or consumer or business service site, live chat is increasingly becoming the norm for engaging with visitors in real time. Olark, a Y Combinator-funded startup (re)launching today at Demo Day (it was previously branded hab.la), has made the ability to embed chat into a site incredibly simple.

For free, site owners can embed the widget into their site with just a few lines of javascript. One useful feature that Olark offers is the ability to add one-to-one chat to any website without editing any code. Olark’s short link service lets website owners create a link to any site they would like to chat with a visitor about. When a customer/user clicks on the link, the Olark widget will float over to the visited webpage. The site owner can use an existing IM client, such as GChat or AIM, and each customer will show up in the buddy list. So site owners can interact with visitors from their preferred chat program. Visitors show up on a website owner’s buddy list as soon as they hit the site (with an anonymous ID like Web User 1), with the name of the page they’re on. Basically, you can watch everyone’s progress through the site even when they don’t talk to you.

While Olark has a free offering, you can add different functionality to the chat widget starting at $5 per month. One paid feature is the ability to hide the widget on the site when the site owner isn’t available to chat. You can also implement chat in certain pages while restricting chat on others. While most customers will use the free version of the widget, paid clients have been doubling every month and the startup is in line to hit profitability next month. Olark is already being used already on 4000 sites, including SurveyGizmo.com and HonestIdeas.co.uk.

Of course, there are many competitors to this product out there on the market, including chat offerings by Meebo, Digsby and AOL all with the same functionality. But Olark’s co-founder, Ben Congleton says the beauty of Olark’s widget and short link service is in its extreme simplicity, allowing even a non-tech savvy site owner to be able to implement live chat on a site easily. Plus, Olark lets owners customize the widgets to resemble the look and feel of the site in which its embedded. Olark, which was originally a side project of its founders before the startup entered Y Combinator’s program, was rebranded from hab.la during the program. Congleton says that the decision was based on a few considerations, including confusion around the spelling and pronunciation of “Habla” as well as the advantage of having a .com domain versus the .la domain from Hab.la.

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What is it? It’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is pictures. You can send pictures of anything you want, though most users tend to send images of themselves, photo booth-style, and attach messages to them. The result is a crazy amount of interaction in the community. And interestingly enough, unlike Twitter, it seems to be a hotbed for teenage activity.

While there have been no shortage of startups that have launched picture services for Twitter, the Y Combinator-backed DailyBooth is a little different in that it tries to stand on its own by emphasizing its own social stream (though there is Twitter tie-in as well). In that regard it’s more like Radar than TwitPic or some of the other standard Twitter photo services. But Radar places an emphasis on cameraphone pictures, as I said, DailyBooth seems to be populated more by photos of people taking pictures of themselves, sitting at their computers. Though you can upload pictures from a mobile device as well.

And DailyBooth’s growth has been pretty amazing. As you can see in the chart below, since its launch in January, DailyBooth has grown to over 3 million unique visitors a month. And they have a growth rate now of about 35% a month, which means they should easily hit 4 million uniques this month, founder Jon Wheatley tells us.

One reason for this growth has to be the active community. I uploaded one picture last night around 2 AM, just my standard profile icon, and it almost immediately got 8 comments even though no one was explicitly following me. This morning, my inbox was bombarded by notifications from DailyBooth, new pictures notifications, new follower notifications, recent activity on my pictures, etc. Sure, that was a little annoying (you can change the email alerts in your settings), but also nice to see such a new community with that kind of activity.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says that at one point they had considered a name change for DailyBooth, but then realized just how engaged the community already was with the service (the picture at the top is just one example), and that a name change may have caused a revolt.

The service recently added a bunch of new features including the ability to send DailyBooth images to many of the major social networks. And you can automatically set your latest DailyBooth picture to be your MySpace or Facebook profile picture.

I often find myself clicking on pictures posted to Twitter even if I don’t really know the person. And one of the main features I’ve liked of FriendFeed and now newer services like Brizzly is that they put pictures sent to Twitter inline, so you don’t have to click anywhere to see them. DailyBooth takes that one step farther and makes it all about the pictures. And it does so in a simpler and more social atmosphere than a site like Flickr. The results seem to speak for themselves in their growth.

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Now, to be clear, Y Combinator will not be forgoing its usual method of combing over any and all startup pitches outside of the ones they lay out. “We don’t expect responses to RFSes will ever be more than a fraction of the applications we accept. We wouldn’t want them to be. Most good ideas should be ones that surprise us, not ones we’re waiting for,” Paul Graham writes on the site today. The hope is that this will help guide some new startups without solid ideas in the direction of something that is missing in the market. Or encourage ones that already have a similar idea to apply.

Y Combinator’s RFSes won’t describe exactly what Y Combinator is looking for, but rather will give a general idea, with the hopes that the startups can come up with even better plans than Y Combinator is thinking of, Graham says.

So what is the first RFS? Well, it’s something near and dear to our hearts: The Future Of Journalism. Y Combinator is wondering what the online content sites will look like in the future when print publications are gone. Certainly some, like TechCrunch, have gotten large enough to support themselves now, but most content sites are still built on the notion of content first, monetization later. Y Combinator notes that in the heyday of print media, the approach was often the opposite, there was a business plan in place before the launch. It believes that approach can still work, and has laid out a rough outline of what it’s looking for from startups that want to do this:

Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one writer who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who’s reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it’s even better if they are. Xooglers would be particularly well suited to this project.

This RFS is just the first of 3 to 5 that Y Combinator hopes to get out there before the October 26 Winter 2010 class application deadline, Graham tells us. Startups applying specifically for these RFS ideas will be able to indicate that on their applications.

Graham notes that Y Combinator has sort of passively given ideas to startups in the past, like this, but thinks this new explicit call will lead to some interesting things.

We asked Graham if this new approach means these types of startups will get different financial deals from Y Combinator. “Not significantly,” Graham says. “Execution matters so much more than the idea that even if we supplied the entire idea we wouldn’t be entitled to more than 10% of the company,” he notes. On his post he gives a bit more:

We might ask for a little more equity from startups responding to an RFS, because we’d expect to contribute more to them. But at most a percent or two, and often nothing. Ideas count for something, but execution matters far more.

[photo: flickr/eran finkle]

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JobSpice comes with a good pedigree: it is part of the latest batch of Y Combinator funded startups, and is co-founded by Andrew McCollum — a Facebook co-founder who served as the social network’s original designer.

Of course, there are already plenty of ways to build your resume — aside from Word, there are a number of online services that will do it for a price, though founders McCollum and Dane Hurtubise say that these generally can be pricey, going for upwards of $100.

In contrast, JobSpice is free, and it goes a long way toward making resumes visually appealing with a minimum amount of effort. To do this, the site takes advantage of the naturally structured formatting of resumes and optimizes it for the web. JobSpice uses CSS to style the resumes it generates, which means you can totally rework the appearance of your resume with a minimal amount of effort (and experienced web designers will be able to tweak their resumes to their hearts’ content).

At launch JobSpice only has around ten designs available, but it’s allowing users and graphic designers to submit their own designs to the library, which will then be shared with everyone. For now all of these designs will remain free, through the company hasn’t ruled out offering premium designs at some point in the future.

Because of the modular design of each resume built by the service, JobSpice makes it easy to customize resumes for each person you send them to. Simply check off which sections you’d like to include in your resume depending on what an employer is interested in, and the site will generate a unique URL for that version of the resume. You can also easily export your resume to PDF.

To monetize, JobSpice has a few strategies in mind. In the short term, they’re going to offer premium features like custom domains. Further down the line, the company is hoping to use its service to streamline the hiring process, allowing employers to more effectively search through candidates and to help candidates find jobs. Given that there are obviously some very established sites in this space like Monster and CareerBuilder this is likely going to be quite challenging, though there is certainly still plenty of room for improvement on these.

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That quote, by Greg Linden, the man behind Amazon’s recommendation system, is the dogma of Directed Edge, a new Y Combinator-backed startup in the recommendation space. Amazon, of course does product comparisons, but there’s no reason recommendations shouldn’t be a part of news consumption, music consumption, social networking, basically everything we do on the web. And while there are no shortage of companies out there that focus on some of these different fields specifically, Directed Edge has developed a system that can be plugged into all kinds of different sites.

And for sites that implement its system, it does the recommendations in real-time. “We can take data sets with millions and millions of data points and figure out what’s related to a given item in a few milliseconds. Most recommendations engines pre-compute stuff rather than generating the recommendations in real-time like we do,” Directed Edge co-founder Scott Wheeler tells us.

Wheeler claims they can do this because of the graph database they created in-house after they realized the off-the-shelf options just weren’t good enough for what they wanted to do. And much like Linden’s quote, Directed Edge truly believes that we’re about to see a shift on the web away from search and towards recommendations. And real-time is crucial to that. While we’re starting to see that trend take off in the social space right now, Wheeler believes it will spread to the rest of the web shortly. “Fundamentally we believe that shift is coming, and we want to be a big part of it,” Wheeler says.

Despite the recommendation system being fairly complex, they claim that a person running a site can get Directed Edge’s service up and running in just 15 minutes. And obviously, to be useful such a system would have to work with the data you already have, and that’s exactly what Directed Edge does thanks to its binding system that recognizes a wide range of web languages.

It may be hard to imagine a web where search isn’t the utterly dominant way we interact with everything, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that something like recommendations could become a big part of it. We’re seeing large sites like Digg also putting a lot of focus on recommendations. And then obviously there’s the Netflix Challenge, which just ended. That’s the web Directed Edge wants to see.

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We tend to give away a lot of the random stuff people send us at TechCrunch. Some of it is trivial – stickers, tshirts, etc. But sometimes it’s decent electronic stuff – we get a lot of iPod touches with demo apps to review, for example, and usually the company doesn’t want them back so we give them away to people. Earlier this week I gave away a wireless Google-branded mouse on Twitter, and pondered setting up a Twitter account just to give away all the test stuff cluttering our office.

Often people list free things on Craigslist or donate it to Goodwill, charities or churches.

But Craigslist isn’t a perfect solution, since you will get a mass of emails and need to deal with everyone. And often the winner doesn’t show up. And most charities and churches aren’t really interested in getting actual stuff that they then need to sell for cash. They’d rather just get the cash.

Listia makes it all a lot better. Users don’t bid cash for items, rather they bid points that they get for free for signing up, listing items and referring friends. That means the winner is the person who wanted the item the most and was willing to bid the most points. The lister doesn’t have to deal with a lot of emails, and the no-show risk is minimized.

And if a user really wants an item but doesn’t have enough points, they can buy more. That’s where the business model comes in, and the value to charities.

Points can be purchased at a rate of $5 for 50 points. And if a lister decides to donate the proceeds to charity, the charity gets 60% of any paid for points used by the winner.

If it sounds complicated, just see this listing that I created this morning giving away a Nokia N95 phone and donating the proceeds to the American Red Cross (yes, you can get that phone for free if you hurry).

The service is fully working now but a lot of features are still baking. The selection of charities is very limited (more being added soon, the company says). And soon Listia will let you add other charities, give accumulated points to charity, etc. It’s a no brainer for charities to encourage their supporters to use something like this to donate actual items, and Listia says they are busy creating features to accommodate that.

The company was founded by Gee Chuang and James Fong

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FanChatter, a Y Combinator funded company that’s launching today, is a startup that’s looking to help fix this problem. The company is focused on helping major sports teams increase engagement both during and after games using user-submitted content, Twitter, and other social services. And while the company is still quite new, it’s already got some major customers, including the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the University of Oaklahoma.

One of the site’s core features is its photo gallery. During games, fans are encouraged to Email photos taken from their cell phones to a designated Email address, for the chance to have their photos appear on the stadium’s Jumbotron. Teams receive the photos in real-time and build photo galleries from them, which they can then use in place of the candid video shots we’ve all seen so many times between innings or during a time-out. Obviously teams aren’t able to display every photo submitted, but FanChatter also takes these photos and builds a shared photo album — one for each game — which can then be accessed by fans from the team’s home page. You can see what these albums look like by checking out the Twins’ page here. Fans will also soon be able to share their videos taken at the game, though these likely won’t be appearing on the Jumbotron as they take too long to filter through.

Another of the company’s features is the ChatterBox, a widget that can display a stream of tweets relevant to a particular hashtag or topic (the Timberwolves have one that shows tweets with the tag #twolves). Fans can use this to communicate during the game, and to follow the latest news from home. The widget is similar to one that’s offered by Tinker, which launched earlier this year.

FanChatter licenses its technology with fees set on a case-by-case basis, and has plans to extend its technology beyond sports to include other major events, like concerts. It also has plans to roll out iPhone applications, which would give fans a better way to interact with each other while they’re still at the game.

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It does this by watching for changes in video streams, which is to say that it looks for motion happening within the video. When it senses something, it knows to remember that portion of the video. And, if you set it up to do so, it can also send an email to you to let you know there is activity currently happening on the video stream. You can probably dream up a bunch of uses for something like this, but the obvious ones are monitoring babies from other room, watching your pets when you’re away, and yes, watching to make sure no one is breaking into your house.

This sort of technology has only existed up until now in high-end security systems for big commercial buildings, we’re told. But HighlightCam does this at a fraction of the cost. To use it, you simply have to set up a webcam and then visit the HighlightCam site. The service is entirely browser-based. And you don’t even need an account to start using it (though you will need one to access recordings later).

If you want to see it in action, Justin.tv has been using it for their pets section, and it was a part of their recent API launch.

The Y Combinator-funded HighlighCam makes use of the freemium model. With the free version you get the core features including the ability to use any webcam and e-mail notifications. But the main limitation is that your recorded videos are only stored for 24 hours. With the premium version (which is $8.99 a month), videos are archived for 2 weeks, and you get higher resolution recordings, no ads on the site and the ability to download recorded videos.

I think we definitely need to set this up for the TechCrunch CrunchCam. Most of the time when I’m not in the office and I tune in, I just see Jason and Leena diligently typing away with absolutely no perceivable motion occuring. It’d be great to get an alert for the 15 minutes a day when there is actually something going on, like Segway jousting.

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The company, which is part of the latest batch of Y Combinator-funded startups, is in fairly early stages (it started developing the product only two months ago), but it’s already making some substantial headway in the features it can offer. Among these are live schema changes, which allow developers to make significant modifications to their database structure without having to go through complex sync and backup procedures. It also offers lock-free concurrency, which means users will be able to read from the database even while other users are writing to it. And it’s an append-only database, which means developers can quickly recover in the event of a system failure.

RethinkDB is also taking a relatively novel approach to its development, at least as far as database storage is concerned. It’s following the “release early, release often” mantra, which it’s kicking off with the release of an early developer pre-alpha, which you can download and try out for free (the company says that implementing the software is quite easy because of the way MySQL handles storage engines). However, given that you’re going to be using this to manage your data, it is absolutely vital that you use this for testing purposes only — make sure you have any crucial data stored elsewhere. The company hopes to use developer input over the next few months to improve the product up until its release.

RethinkDB plans to have its commercial product out the door in the next six months, with an enterprise-level pricing structure that charges on a per-CPU basis (with support included).

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Founder Suhail Doshi says that most significantly large companies, like Slide for example, have entire teams dedicated to tracking user behavior. If you throw a virtual sheep at your friend using one of Slide’s apps, you can be sure that every element of that action — including who the sheep’s receipient was, the time you threw the sheep, and even what prompted you to throw the sheep in the first place — is being tracked.

Unfortunately, most fledgling companies simply don’t have the resources to put together this kind of analytics tracking. Mixpanel solves this problem by giving developers a library of stat tracking functions that they can quickly integrate with their code, saving them the development costs that would have been required to build their own analytics tools. Doshi says this can take as little as ten minutes to integrate, requiring only a line of code wherever there’s something you want to track.

After implementing these functions in their code, companies can track stats from the Mixpanel control panel, which updates in real time. Beyond tracking stats like the number of times a certain song is played or a given feature is used, Mixpanel can also do funnel analysis, which allows startups to measure when in a signup flow users begin to drop off (this allows them to figure out the pain points and lower barriers to entry as much as possible).

Mixpanel’s pricing is based on usage, which it measures by looking at the number of ‘points’ of data the service tracks. The company is already in use by a number of other startups (many of them fellow YC alumni) including Posterous and HeyZap.

Analytics and stat tracking is extremely important to the growth of any company, especially one that’s trying to gain users for the first time. Mixpanel is definitely honing in on a large market — its ultimate success will be decided by how useful the data it collects really is, and in how many datapoints it can track that free services can’t.

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Picurio, a Y Combinator startup from its Winter ‘09 session that makes photo sharing between large groups incredibly easy, has taken the beta label off. While there are an innumerable amount of photo sharing sites and applications out there, Picurio is focused on making photo sharing simple and user-friendly between groups of people.

Picurio’s site has a similar user interface to Apple’s iPhoto, except Picurio is on the web and cloud-based. The idea behind Picurio is that you upload photos to a “room” (which has around 2 GB of storage) where you can then create subfolders of different groups of photos and then invite as many people as you want to see the photos. In order to allow others to see the site, you send them a link, (that can be password-protected for privacy) and then they can upload photos of their own to the “room.” As a user, you can share some collections of photos with certain friends and share other rooms with a different set of friends.

Picurio also lets you publish and download photos directly to and from Facebook. Ad you can download any pictures from a room into a zip file while you are viewing the page. Picurio is free if you keep adding friends to your rooms. For every friend who joins a room, Picurio will add another two weeks on to the lifetime of a room. There is no limit on the number of albums you can create, or the number of people who can use the room. You can also pay for rooms to be extended; $4.95 adds 30 days to the lifetime of a room.

In essence, Picurio is a subset of photo sharing sites like Divvyshot, Photobucket, Flickr etc. which all let you share a basic album. Picurio rooms allows for multiple albums within one room and selective sharing of rooms. Of course, Picurio also features the ability to drag and drop photos, create slideshows and more. It seems that Picurio would ideal for large events where many attendees are taking pictures and need a central, and potentially private online space to store and share photos.

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The game was put together by pocketfungames, a Y Combinator startup that specializes in iPhone games. The company originally planned to focus on dating-based applications, but has since shifted gears, looking to take advantage of the fact that many iPhone games still fail to leverage the phone’s Network Effect and integrate social features. In some senses this is a return to the company’s roots, as it was was previously a developer of social games on Facebook.

The game is a fairly basic online RPG that lets you boost your stats through brief training games as well as duels with other wizards. You interact with other players through social features like messaging and guilds, and can choose to battle wizards worldwide or only those who live nearby. It also features a number of elements obviously inspired by the Harry Potter series, including placement into a certain class of wizards (i.e. a ‘house’) depending on your personality traits.

By far my favorite part of the app is the way it handles battles. Whenever you go to cast a certain spell, the application presents you with a motion you need to make with the phone (standing in for your wand), and the incantation you have to speak aloud. Movements can include things like jerking your hand swiftly above your head and waving it in a semicircle, which makes you look ridiculous but also makes the game feel a bit more ‘authentic’. After casting your spell, the game rates you on your performance which determines how much damage is inflicted on your opponent. In my testing I had trouble ever reaching a spell’s maximum potential, though I can’t tell if this is because the app’s sensitivity is off or if I’m just not very good at it.

But while the gameplay is surprisingly fun, the app could really use some work — some parts of it look fairly polished, while others simply look like generic buttons (the developers should strongly consider getting some more professional art assets in the game given the demographic it’s targeting). Still, it’s a good start.

Lewis says that the application launched three weeks ago and is now pulling 2,000 downloads a day. The game offers a free version, but it’s also going to offer “booster packs” for its virtual currency, which allows players to increase the number of spells they can perform. The company also has a number of other games in the works, though Lewis declined to reveal any details (I suspect the new games will have a bigger focus on the iPhone’s GPS capabilities).

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Bump Technologies is a mobile application developer that’s looking to offer a solution, allowing users to transfer their contact information simply by tapping their phones together. And things are looking bright for the small startup — the company has just raised a seed funding round from Y Combinator, and is quickly building up a sizable user base.

Bump currently offers an application on the iPhone, with plans to release apps for Android and other mobile smart phones in the near future. Using the app is fairly straightforward: you launch Bump (as does the person who you’d like to swap information with) and tap your phones together. Once their accelerometers are activated, the phones both relay their current location data to the cloud, and Bump’s servers determine when there’s a match. Finally, a photo of the contact you’re pairing with shows up on your screen, and you confirm that you’d like to exchange data. It may sound a bit complicated, but it only takes a few seconds. Bump isn’t the first application to do this (Tapulous’s Friend Book has been doing this since soon after the App Store’s launch), but it’s a good idea nonetheless.

At this point there are some obvious flaws — if you don’t have a cellular connection, it won’t work, though Bump plans to fix this is an upcoming version by also allowing users to transfer data using the iPhone’s Peer-to-Peer Bluetooth functionality. And for the time being you can only share data with users that have an iPhone and have the Bump app installed, which leads to a classic chicken-and-the-egg problem.

That said, Bump is off to a good start. The app currently has 940k users, and 140k of them have already upgraded to the new update in the two days since its release, which means a significant number of them are very active. The latest version adds the ability to transfer photos along with contact info, and Bump will eventually allow you to transfer any kind of data — eventually, it will even allow you to transfer money, which could be huge.

I’m glad Bump, as well a few other companies like Nameo and Me2, are seriously trying to solve this problem. But frankly it’s ridiculous that phone manufacturers can’t agree on a wireless standard for quick data transfer that just works, without any extra applications or an annoying pairing process (seriously, Palm worked this technology out ten years ago). It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon though, so Bump may well have a bright future ahead of it.

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Silicon Valley has Y Combinator. Boulder, Colorado (and now Boston) has TechStars. Boston also as of today has Start@Spark. Washington, D.C. has LaunchBox Digital. Philadelphia has DreamIT Ventures. And now Atlanta is joining the seed incubator movement with Shotput Ventures.

Started by a group of Atlanta tech entrepreneurs who want to attract and keep startup talent in the Southeast, Shotput Ventures is accepting applications from young, first-time founders for its summer program. The deadline is April 10.

Mitch Free, the founder of industrial marketplace MFG.com, is one of the backers. He explains in an email:

We are looking for “capital light” web startups. We think there is so much open source software, web services and cheap cloud computing capacity (like Amazon S3) that web business can be prototyped and launched very inexpensively.

There has been nothing like this in the Southeast. We have lots of great breeding grounds such as Georgia Tech but the people with the next big idea have had to reach out to the Northeast or West Coast to find seed capital and support. Our goal is to create an eco-system in the Southeast to encourage and support web startups. And once they are up and running we don’t want them having to relocate to Boston or San Jose

The first summer round is funded with $300,000. Who needs a summer job, when you can create a startup instead?

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The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital, a prolific investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark, and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas.

Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted to information technology companies but also periodically be granted to startups offering financial or educational services. Entrepreneurs who get into the program will have access to Spark’s partner network and legal counsel, and will also be prepared for a second, more formal round of funding at a later stage if progress is deemed satisfactory by the firm. You can apply here.

This is not the first program of this type we’ve seen. In fact, it seems like they’re popping up all over the place, conceivably thanks to independent initatives like Y Combinator and TechStars who’ve paved the way. Charles River Ventures debuted its “QuickStart” program back in November 2006, Sequoia simply invested $2 million of its own fund into Y Combinator to give them more runway, and other firms have set up platform-specific seeding funds in the past (e.g. Kleiner Perkins’ iFund and Bay Partners’ Facebook-apps only fund).

We should probably note Spark Capital in fact a partner to TechStars, and General Partner Bijan Sabet is listed as a mentor for the seed program, but undoubtedly they’ll be competing for the same investment sooner rather than later.

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Companies use exploding for a variety of reasons. But the goal is to put additional pressure on the company to accept the terms and quickly, without much further negotiation. In particular, they don’t want to see a deal “shopped,” which is when you take their term sheet and go to other buyers/investors looking for a better deal (which is exactly what you should be doing as soon as you get a term sheet from anyone).

But they are bad news for startups, who can’t take their time to find the best deal possible when presented with one. I’ve received a couple of these in the past and have always ignored the clauses. Generally speaking, the day after the explosion they’re still very happy to do business with you. If they’re not, they weren’t good partners anyway. (there are exceptions, such as when certain financial milestones or other important dates are coming up, but those situations are fairly obvious).

The Y Combinator letter is fairly straightforward in its advice. In particular, competitors (which are mainly TechStars and DreamIT, although they aren’t mentioned) are giving exploding term sheets that expire prior to Y Combinator getting a look at the companies. Lawsuits have also been threatened:

Advice to Summer Applicants
March 2009

If you’re also applying to one of the other YC-like organizations, you may find yourself in an awkward situation. Last summer several of them gave startups offers timed to expire before YC interviews.

At least one made groups who got offers sign something promising not to tell anyone. Another actually threatened to sue a startup if they didn’t show up for their program.

Using so-called “exploding termsheets” to pre-empt other offers is not uncommon in the VC world, though even there it’s considered a slightly dubious tactic. But VC funding happens asynchronously. Using this tactic in a stage where funding happens synchronously is not very ethical. It would be like colleges doing it.

(YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)

What can you do if you find yourself being pressured to decide before you’re ready? We advise approaching the situation with confidence. If your startup is going to succeed, you’re going to have to learn how to push back against people who try to take advantage of you. So try negotiating. The better you are, the more willing they’ll be to wait for your decision, no matter what they say about their deadlines or the number of “spots” they have.

If you really get into a pinch, let us know and maybe we’ll be able to figure out some way to interview you early.

Sorry about this. We started YC to make it less stressful to start a startup, not more. We never anticipated this sort of situation would arise.

There’s just one problem with the advisory, though. Y Combinator themselves ask companies to make a decision on the day they get their offer. So it’s somewhat hypocritical to complain about the same actions by their competitors. As they say, though, they are the last to interview new startups in each summer and winter class. So startups know who has accepted them by then, and the Y Combinator deal terms and even the contracts they’ll sign are on the website for review.

I’ve emailed both TechStars and DreamIT for a comment. TechStars Executive Director David Cohen writes:

No, TechStars does not ask the founders that it makes offers to not to disclose the offer. We do ask them to accept it quickly (usually in 24-48 hours) or we move on.

TechStars issues a letter of intent when it makes an offer. Once our offer is accepted and signed by both parties, it includes non-disclosure (but not before).

The reason for this is two-fold. First, we are by definition still making offers and we may have to move down the list if some are not accepted. We don’t make all offers at once – it happens over a period of about a week, usually in personal meetings. So we don’t want other applicants that we’re planning to make offers to thinking they won’t get one, etc. Second, we generally advise our startups not to make a bunch of noise on the way in to the program as this is typically too much publicity too early. So, if they enter into the letter of intent, we ask them for confidentiality until such time that we can coach them on working with the media. Then they decide what they want to do. Again, this only happens upon acceptance, and not before.

TechStars has never once threatened to sue a startup or applicant for any reason. I have heard this rumor about another program (not ours), but I have no idea if it’s true or not.

will also tell you that regardless of lots of random innuendo, we have never once set our application or offer deadlines based upon those of any other program. Our program historically sits in the exact dates of the University of Colorado summer break, in order to maximize the likelihood of available temporary housing. We set our dates completely around this, and not based on anything else. In Boston this year, we simply added a two week offset for logistical reasons.

We’ve also heard back from Michael Levinson, Managing Partner at DreamIt Ventures:

At DreamIt our focus is to help the entrepreneur. This is summed up in our mission statement which is “To help great people with great ideas build great companies.” We not only offer money and speakers, but we offer as part of our program (and at no charge) a dedicated “been there done that” mentor, accounting services and legal services from top notch firms, and a great community of shared office space.

Like Y Combinator and TechStars, DreamIt asks companies to accept our offer quickly or we move on. We ask our companies to let us know within 48 hours.

Our process is fully-described on our website, and is very similar to the process TechStars described in its comment. We make rolling offers. As we interview companies and find ones we think are a great fit with DreamIt, we make an offer. We have hundreds of applicants and scores of highly qualified candidates for a very few number of places. We need to know quickly whether a company is in or out so that other entrepreneurs are not denied an opportunity to participate in DreamIt (or for that matter any of the other programs, since an acceptance into one program might open up a spot for another entrepreneur in another program).

Each of these programs (YCombinator, TechStars, DreamIt) have different schedules based on a variety of factors. In our case, DreamIt officially starts with a Kick-Off weekend April 17-18 where we bring in all of the DreamIt `09 companies, introduce them to each other and to many of the resources at their disposal (e.g., each company’s dedicated law firm, accounting firm, mentor, and other support services), and start them on the process of accomplishing the milestones that they set to achieve by August. Not only does this enable companies to hit the ground running when they return for the immersion part of DreamIt from May through August, but with the DreamIt resources available to the companies starting in April, companies can make extraordinary progress from April to May.

Our acceptance cutoff is set without regard to other programs but instead so that the companies participating in DreamIt can participate in Kick-Off Weekend.

We have high regard for Y Combinator, TechStars and other accelerator programs. All are providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to launch new companies in exciting ways.

What would be best is if founders didn’t have to make decisions on any of these small incubators/investors until they’d pitched all of them. That’s unlikely to happen, since Y Combinator carries most of the brand weight and would likely get most of the best startups (like Stanford gets all the best students). My guess is we’ll be seeing more of this, not less, over time.

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Sequoia and the angel investors (Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit and Aydin Senkut) aren’t investing directly in Y Combinator. Instead, they are putting money into a new entity, managed by Y Combinator, that will make investments in new startups going forward. In other words, Y Combinator won’t just be investing their own capital any more, and they’ve got a larger war chest to expand operations.

In the past Y Combinator has invested in 40 or so new startups a year. Investments are small ($5,000 + $5,000/founder) in exchange for around 6% of equity, and the startups are typically very early, usually idea stage. Still, they’ve had some notable successes. Several of the startups have been acquired – Reddit (by Condé Nast), Omnisio (by YouTube), Zenter (by Google), ClickPass (by Synthasite) Auctomatic (by Communicate) and others.

A number of Y Combinator’s current startups are doing very well, too. Their publicly launched portfolio includes: Reddit, Loopt, Scribd, Justin.TV, OMGPOP, Xobni, Disqus, Heroku, Dropbox, Posterous, Backtype, Clustrix and ZumoDrive, among others. Sequoia has invested in three Y Combinator startups in the past (Loopt, Clustrix and Dropbox).

The $2 million in new capital will go a long way for Y Combinator. They say they’ll increase the number of startups they invest in, from around 40/year to 60. But at an average investment of only about $15,000 per startup, that $2 million will last for about two years.

Y Combinator startups get a big head start in the competitive tech world. The founders, often just out of school (or still in school), get enough money to pay the bills for a few months as they work on their projects. They also get mentoring and polish from the Y Combinator team and a chance to present to prominent angel investors and venture capitalists at twice-yearly demo days (example). A surprising percentage of the startups go on to raise bigger venture rounds and become real companies. Many of the founders that fail come back and try again.

Y Combinator says that the investment by Sequoia and the angels won’t change how they do business (other a projected increase in the number of investments). The new investors won’t get any special investment rights in the new startups, or have any obligation to invest further in them. But it is a seal of approval in the Y Combinator model. And dozens more young founders will now get the chance to build their first startup.

Update: Y Combinator announces the news here.

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Today some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs are coming together for AngelConf – a crash course in angel investing that is designed to get the many wealthy tech veterans littering the Valley involved in the startup scene. The event was put together by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, who believes that while there are many potential investors in Silicon Valley, most of them are unsure how to actually get started (he suggests there may be only one actual investor for every 100 would-be angels). AngelConf is designed to help these potential investors get on their feet, with tips on everything from the legal paperwork involved to picking out the best startups. For more details, check out our past coverage here.

The event is being streamed for free by Justin.tv.

Included among today’s speakers are:

Michael Arrington
Paul Buchheit
Jeff Clavier
Ron Conway
Michael Dearing
Paul Graham
Carolynn Levy
Dave McClure
Page Mailliard
Mike Maples
Ariel Poler
Naval Ravikant
Aydin Senkut
Jim Young
Andrea Zurek

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