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Content Tagged YCombinator
YCombinator Startup Creates A Better Download App Store For Windows (BaseShield)
When Microsoft opened up its own online store for software downloads earlier this month, it signaled that packaged software is not long for this world. The problem is that the store offers only Microsoft products. Patrick Swieskowski, co-founder of YCombinator startup Secure by Design, points out:
You can basically only download Office or Vista. Leave it to MS to pitch an app store that sells mice and keyboards and Zunes…
Swieskowski and his co-founder Sascha Kuzins, both serious open-source hackers, had a better idea: a download app store for Windows PCs that could distribute any third-party software, just like the iTunes App Store does for the iPhone. So they created the BaseShield App Store, which launched about an hour ago.
Once you download the BaseShield App Store to your Windows PC (no Mac or Linux versions), you can download and launch an app with a single click. The apps run on a virtualization layer on top of the OS, so there is less chance for malware to infect the rest of your PC. Each app can also be removed with a single click. The apps can take advantage of the full power of the PC, including 3D graphics chips, but BaseShield creates a sandbox for each one so that they can only access the files necessary to run the program.
BaseShield is not much more than a technology proof of concept at this point. At launch, it offers about two dozen free, open-source apps, including Neverball (open-source version of Super Monkey Ball), Inkscape (open-source version of Adobe Illustrator), AbiWord (word processor), Celestia (”like Google Earth for the universe”), and Frets On Fire (Guitar Hero clone). Developers who want to get their software in the store fill out a form and provide a link to their software, and BaseShield does the rest.
While the technology is intriguing, the company still hasn’t settled on its business model. But it will likely be similar to the iTunes App Store, where BaseShield takes a percentage of every app sold.
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Our Weekend Social Experiment
Our weekend social experiment: Upload a picture, win a TechCrunch Tshirt. You may have noticed our post on Picwing earlier today. While we’re waiting 6-8 weeks for the damn picture frame to arrive, I’ve decided to create a new album that allows anyone to upload photos. Email an image to TCR@picwing.com and it will appear in the widget below. See the whole album here.
Whoever submits the best picture, defined solely by me or more likely one of our interns that I assign this to, will win a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice (we have all womens and mens sizes except, alas, men’s medium). Go for interesting or funny, that’s the best way to win. The first picture in the album is our very own Dan Kimerling holding up a tshirt that with a little effort could soon be in your hands. We’ll notify the winner by emailing whatever email you use to submit the picture.
Anything disgusting or not safe for work will be removed immediately and you will be banned from TechCrunch for life.
Have fun! The winner will be chosen on Sunday. I’ll be shutting down submissions overnight as I sleep, then back on in the morning - no moderation mode.
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Picwing Debuts Their Social Digital Picture Frame
Y Combinator startup Picwing launches today (see our coverage yesterday of the other Y Combinator startups launching this summer). Think of it as a social photo site with an associated digital photo frame. Once you set up an account you can set options that let others view and/or add photos as well. Photos are uploaded to the site via a unique email address.
Photos can be viewed on the site, on the desktop via Windows or Mac software, embedded into other sites (I’ve embedded a few sample images below) and there is also a Chumby widget option. But the big use is to have them sent wirelessly to the photo frame that they are also selling.
Here’s the downside. The photo frames are $249, which compares badly to competing products that are in the $100-$200 range. The screen is 7 inches, which is on the small side. And for now you can’t even get them. Orders now will be fulfilled in 6-8 weeks, as the team builds the first batch by hand.
On the upside, the team is focusing on the software, particularly the social opportunities that have largely been ignored in the digital photo frame market until now. Once a lot of people have these in their living rooms, there are plenty of opportunities to drive additional services. The frame is running Flash on Linux, so it is also a fully functional PC.
Digital photo frames are already a half billion dollar market, and is expected to grow 4x over the next few years. This is a good space to innovate in. I pre-ordered a frame, and it will sit proudly next to my Chumby on my desk. I’ll also give out the email address for the device, so you can all send me whatever pictures you like.
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Hacker News Bans Valleywag
Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.”
After 20 hours of voting, 60% of the 400+ people who voted said yes to the ban. One commenter writes “Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man.”
Based on the voting, Hacker News then banned them from the site.
Hacker News is still in the honeymoon period - it hasn’t yet attracted such a large readership that the trolls have taken up permanent residence. After mentioning them a couple of times and seeing comments asking me to please stop writing about them, I asked the community if they’d prefer I didn’t mention them. The responses were mixed.
It’s clear that the site is aiming for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, so it’s no surprise that they are thinking of banning the toxic wasteland known as Valleywag. The question is, will larger sites, hoping to avoid the Valleywag trolls, begin to ban them, too?
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Slice and Dice Online Videos with Omnisio
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother.
Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content.
As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem.
The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube.
Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around.
Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video.
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Songkick Launches “Alexa For Bands”
London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”
It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.
Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.
Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.
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Dropbox: The Online Storage Solution We’ve Been Waiting For?
Dropbox was one of the most impressive startups I saw at Y Combinator’s demo day this past August, not because they’ve built anything terribly prescient or awe-inspiring, but because they’ve come up with an online storage product that I might actually use regularly.
The idea behind Dropbox, which officially enters into private beta today (with 200 invitations available for TechCrunch readers, each of which provides a free 5GB of storage), is that little to no effort should be put into keeping your desktop files synced with “the cloud”. So the three founders have built a Python-based desktop client (available for both PCs and Macs) that acts like a regular folder on your machine. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s Amazon S3-backed storage, and very quickly at that. See a screencast here.
At the very least, you can use Dropbox to automatically backup a subset of your files, and to access them when traveling. You can also use the service to easily share files with friends and coworkers. Just right click on a folder and select “Share”. You’ll be taken to a webpage where you can enter the email addresses of who you want to share the folder with. When your friends add files to that shared folder, they will automatically get downloaded to your machine in addition to getting backed up online. If you have Growl installed on the Mac, it’s quite impressive to see your friends’ files magically show up.
This should sound a lot like Microsoft FolderShare, which had it own set of minor announcements yesterday. That’s because FolderShare has been providing a desktop client that syncs local folders to online storage across computers for years now. But it’s a bit like comparing Vista to MacOS; both get the job done but only the latter is actually pleasurable to use and appears designed for maximum customer satisfaction. (Update: As a commenter points out, FolderShare doesn’t actually back up your files online, just facilitates syncing between computers, so this is a big difference too).
Dropbox tops FolderShare in a number of ways beyond simple ease of use matters. You can access your files through the web browser in addition to the desktop client. All files are version controlled so you can revert to an earlier version of a document, or restore it completely when lost. There are also two special folders within the local Dropbox folder: one for publicly sharing files (via distinct URL) and one for sharing photos (which also get distinct URLs for particular galleries, which have been formatted online for easy viewing).
Dropbox is obviously just breaking into a market with other well-established and competent players like Box.net and Mozy, among several others. But I can’t help but feel as though Dropbox has finally come up with a solution that the casual consumer will enjoy using on a daily basis.
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Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass
OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right?
Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are redirected to a sign in page. And it’s worse for people who already have an account at a website but want to start using their OpenID instead. Linking those two accounts isn’t easy.
That’s where new startup Clickpass comes in, which launches today. We first heard of them last year at a Y Combinator demo day, but the founders, Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund weren’t saying much at the time.
They are an OpenID issuer first. But they are also trying to make using OpenID much simpler for the user. First, they are partnering with sites like Plaxo, GetSatisfaction, Pownce and many of the Y Combinator startups. Those sites will show the ClickPass button, and users can sign in via OpenID with a single click (and they don’t need to remember their OpenID URL). If it’s your first time with OpenID, Clickpass will ask you if you have an existing account at the service you are trying to log into, and pass that information back to the site to join the accounts.
As you add sites to your ClickPass OpenID, you’ll see them listed on the Clickpass site. You are given a distinct OpenID URL for each site that you can use to manage multiple identities, all tied together on ClickPass. And if you choose to fill out profile information on ClickPass, they’ll autofill that information on new sites you join. Clickpass also ensures privacy controls by letting you choose what kind of information you want to share with the site. Conceivably the service could serve as a node for your personal data, connecting it between different website accounts.
In short, ClickPass takes the technical transparency and openness of OpenID and adds a layer of simplicity and familiarity.
Vidoop is approaching OpenID in a similar way, and PassPack is a non-OpenID solution. For launch they’ll be active on hacker news, Plaxo, Disqus, and through a Wordpress plugin.
The user experience is clean. After you sign in to Clickpass, you can sign in to any OpenID-enabled site with a single click of their button.
If you don’t want to use Clickpass as your ID provider, you can link it to any other OpenID provider, but it would really defeat the purpose. If the site has OpenID but not Clickpass you can still sign in using their Firefox plugin or OpenID url from Clickpass.
Naturally some concerns arise with any centralized login system. Doesn’t this mean a thief only has to steal one password, your Clickpass password? Co-founder Peter Nixey says we already have this problem, though. Most services will forward forgotten passwords to your email account making Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail (especially now) the Achilles heel.
As for the more probable phishing attacks, Clickpass plans to implement unique visual or textual cues (photos or quotes) to let you know if you’ve been had. But overall, Clickpass doesn’t aim to start protecting your bank account, rather that plethora of useful services the provide a great deal of personal utility, but little value to hackers (logging in to my news.yc account can’t do much damage).
It’s clear that OpenID really needs a system like this to gain widespread adoption. That’s probably one of the reasons OpenID’s chair, Scott Kveton, joined Clickpass’ board. It’s also clear that the web needs something like Clickpass too.
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Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning
Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.
Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.
Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer - see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.
Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.”
Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost.
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Biographicon Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses
Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).
New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.
Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.
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8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction
New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.
Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet.
The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright.
8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.
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MySpacers Will Love This AddHer Widget Thingy
Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman - I didn’t pick that picture though).
Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details.
This is the first product of Addmired, Inc., which is a Y Combinator startup. More on the Addmired CrunchBase page.
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TipJoy - A Better Tip Jar For Content
The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier.
New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.
If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.
The TipJoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill.
If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.
I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.
The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.
TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin. The company blog is here.
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Reble, Reble, I Like Your Playlist
In the old days, when people had stereos (remember those), if you wanted to listen to a friend’s music collection, you had to go to their house. Today, you check out their iLike playlists on Facebook, their Last.fm profile, or any of dozens of other social music sharing widgets and Websites. Now you can add Reble.FM to that list. Reble.FM is free software you download to your desktop that lets you stream songs from any friend’s PC that is also online and is running the Reble.FM client. It just launched in public beta today. Says founder and key-coder Nick Meyer:
Playing music on my friend’s computer should feel just like playing a song on my hard-drive, and you should be able to add any of your friends’ music to playlists. That’s what we’re going for with Reble.
Reble is a scrappy YCombinator startup. The software is built on the Jabber open-source instant messaging platform You are basically IMing with your friends and hooking into their iTunes or other music library. You can only see the music of friends on your contact list, and can only stream a song if no one else is listening to it at the same moment. It is a one-to-one system.
But the more friends you invite, the bigger the music library that you can access. The software only works on Windows machines right now, and only streams DRM-free MP3s. Eventually, it will let you buy songs that you like from digital music stores like iTunes or Amazon.
The download-only client will be a nonstarter for some users, especially since there are many other Web-based options for sharing your playlists with your friends. It does beat uploading all your songs to some Website, or only being able to listen to a random shuffle of your friends’ songs. But even the Web-based music sharing services are making on-demand music streaming possible. Last.fm, for instance, now lets you stream any song three times in full before reverting to its default random shuffle. For those of you who try out Reble, please tell us your impressions in comments.
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