seedWatcher

Pitch Us - Y Combinator Lays Out The Startup Ideas They'd Like To Fund

I've been a big fan of Paul Graham's Y Combinator for a while now. Ryan Junee and his team at Omnisio (Y Combinator Jan-Mar '08) had great things to say about their time at the quasi-incubator. While they haven't yet had their blowout hit from an investment standpoint, Y-Comb alumni firms are quickly becoming names in the social web landscape: Disqus, iminlikewithyou, Justin.tv, and Reddit to name a few.

Now Paul is laying out what he'd like to to have pitched, aptly dubbing his list, "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund." It's a refreshing and pretty candid post. Take for example #11 on the list:

11. Web Office apps.  We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software.  Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it.  A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy.  And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves.  Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that.

One common theme throughout the list is the need for not only the killer idea complete with its disruptive tendencies, but the ability to identify why it hasn't been done before. It's one thing to spot the market that is rife with bloat, but it's not always so easy to spell out why. 

On my end, I'm still looking for startups that fill the 5 Web 2.0 Services I'd Like to See (and I'd acutually pay for.) Though I have to give a nod out to Brian McConnell for pointing me to his firm, worldwidelexcion.org for blog translation services. More on this in another post, but it sounds promising.  It is, as he calls it, a "suite of collaborative translation tools for publishers and bloggers that combine machine translation, volunteers (from your readership) and if desired professionals."

11 Startups Show-Off at Twiistup 4 Tonight in Santa Monica

Heading over to Twiistup 4 tonight in Santa Monica and looking forward to catching up with some fellow entrepreneurs. I'll second Brady Brim-DeForest in saying a big congrats to Mike Macadaan for pulling this all together and showing that the LA Tech community is alive and well.

Some intriguing startups showing off tonight, including Twiddla, which I wrote up a few months back.

From the Twiistup site:

Showing Off at Twiistup 4

Keeping with Twiistup tradition, we were going to select ten local start-ups. Due to the overwhelming interest, we expanded the list of featured companies to 11, including seven of Southern California’s best and brightest and four ‘crashers’ from Texas, Vancouver and the Bay Area.

South Pasadena - Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, emails, social networks and more - instantly.

San Jose - BookRenter is the first online book rental service. BookRenter.com replaces traditional bookstore sales with online book rentals for students at schools throughout the nation.

Venice - Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of an individual’s design. Users can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything imaginable.

Los Angeles - The LOUD3R Enthusiast Network is made up of in-depth, topic-oriented Web sites that are designed for the enthusiast and the curious who want to quickly find the best, richest content about a specific topic.

Austin, Texas - Minggl is a social interaction manager. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication and navigation across social networks.

Los Angeles - Musicshake is the world’s first online UGM (User Generated Music) creation service that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public (a.k.a. music dummies) without previous musical knowledge or expertise.

San Jose - Phonevite is the new, fun and simple way to send announcements and reminders over the phone, in the user’s own voice.

Los Angeles - Seethroo’s smart targeting technology allows advertisers to connect with individual social website users, creating more relevant ads and higher revenues for everyone.

Vancouver, BC - From grassroots scrappers to all star pros, Strutta brings players together from around the world in the spirit of true competition.

Santa Monica - Tools To Life is the world’s first free online self-help social network with real programs and community-driven support networks.

Los Angeles - Twiddla is a free, real-time online collaboration tool that offers simplicity and accessibility. It doesn’t require plug-ins, installs or downloads, and users don’t have to work around complex firewalls or advanced scheduling.

Raising the video quality bar: Vusion's WARP video player delivers

Online video is on fire these days. I'll once again cite the recent numbers out from  Ipsos MediaCT, showing that 19% of all video watched anywhere, including traditional TV and DVD is now done online. With YouTube commanding about a 70% market share of all online video viewing, it means we've pretty much just accepted the lower picture quality for web video, at least for now. YouTube of course now offers higher-quality streams of videos where the publisher's have uploaded the larger versions. Still, it's not TV quality. 

But true HD quality video is coming. We've seen a leap forward from Hulu with their HD content, along with blip.tv and Veoh setting a higher standard in terms of picture quality. What's the next step?  Vusion (formerly Jittr) provides what they call "instant-on, full-screen, high quality streaming video." The Milpitas, CA-based company recently snagged the prestigious “Judges Choice” award in the video section of Under the Radar 2008.

Right now, they just have a handful of  demo videos on their site to show off their next-gen WARP player. The player requires the WARP plug-in and is well worth the minute or two it takes to ge it setup. Since they don't yet allow embedding of their demos , I've posted a screen shot from Kanye West's "Stronger" video. Click on the image to watch it on their site. I recommend the full-screen version which is really what the WARP player is all about. It  enables a TV-like full screen viewing experience while eliminating buffering and pausing so common with other streaming media players. It's basically a bit of hybrid between pure streaming video and downloaded video since it temporarily stores video chunks on your hard drive to enhance the streaming performance, without fully downloading the video to your machine.

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Vusion

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Viewzi goes live today

10,000 private beta users later and Viewzi is ready to tear down the walls and launch to the public today. We recently covered the visual search engine back in April and had some fun, Tom-Cruise-style, flipping, spinning and dragging around search results like solving an intricate picture puzzle.

Thanks to Viewzi's Giovanni Gallucci for keeping me updated on their progress. Techcrunch, amidst a sea of Apple's WWDC (iPhone) coverage today, found time to run the story before the Jobs live-blogging began. For more mirco updates, follow Viewzi on Twitter.

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Viewzi

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Fun with QR codes - Semapedia hearts Wikipedia

Semapedia.org wants you to create physical stickers of QR codes that link directly to Wikipedia articles. For fun, I made one that links to my father Dick Hustvedt's entry:

For those that don't have a 2D barcode reader for your phone, you can find one here. And for those who aren't yet up to speed on QR (Quick-Response) codes - they are essentially next-gen barcodes that serve as hardlinks/hyperlinks to some sort of content.  You snap a photo of them and the software on your phone recognizes the data, sending you directly to the desired destination. It isn't yet a native feature on the iPhone, and you have to jailbreak your phone to install the iMatrix app to read them. This should be taken care of with iPhone 2.0 this summer. The are huge in Japan (developed by Japan's Denso-Wave in 1994) and now all over the place in the UK.

You can create your own QR code over at Kaywa, like I did for the seedwatcher blog:

Remember Evernote? It's finally up to speed.

A lot of talk about the new Evernote beta release made me stop in for a little look-see and product test of this 'new' web productivity tool. Apparently some people forget that Evernote's been around since 2004, when it was simply a PC-based application that could sync notes to your PDA. It's now fully Mac-supported and let's you snap photos directly from your cameraphone/smartphone and sync them right up to your web-based depository of notes.

First impressions? Not horrible. I posted notes and photos to my site from several sources - my iPhone, my digital camera, web clipping, and even direct entry. They are all indexed and I can search them for keywords pulled directly from the notes or images. The text recognition (mock-OCR), that to me is one of the more appealing features, is a bit lacking, even allowing for the low quality of most smartphone cameras. This photo was snapped from my iPhone in low light which is typical for a non-flash cameraphone.

There are a number of good reviews out there with more elaborate test results, including one over at Wired's blog, and a great one on Replacing Business Cards with Evernote by Stowe Boyd.

You guys know I'm a big fan of product demo videos, which have become essential with the constant barrage of new web products coming our way. Evernote's is up to snuff:

Need an Invite?
They are still in a closed beta, but if you want an invite just email me and I'll set you up.

Interesting to note that they've raised $9M of purely Angel money, choosing to avoid the VC route. Could be because PayPal-founder Max Levchin is behind it. So far so good, as traffic seems to be picking up nicely.

Does Tom Cruise use Viewzi?

Remember the movie Minority Report? An eery feeling came over me when I poked around in the beta of Viewzi search. Suddenly search has a whole new graphical interface that makes Google (yes, i know) look old guard. It organizes search into a series of pre-set "views," each formatted to best serve that type of search. There's a Photo view, a Multisource view (Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.), an MP3 search view, a Shopping view, even a TechCrunch view. (Arrington will be proud.) You can easily drag photos and site thumbnails, which then expand seamlessly as previews. Very fresh and smooth. Someone even dubbed Viewzi "the iPhone of search."

Their "Viewzi 101" video is a nifty walkthrough of how it works - and is suspiciously familiar to the Twitter video I posted a little while back. The printed out pages of Google search is a clever touch and perhaps a subtle dig.

My first search on Viewzi was "Hollywood," which incidentally brought up Hollywood, Alabama under the weather view and then a series of young-Hollywood club shots in the photos view and series of songs with "Hollywood" in the title under the MP3 view.

Next search was Robert Scoble, since he hooked up the invite. I had a feeling of being at CTU on "24" and pulling up someone's whole identity in a matter of seconds. Quite a lot out there about him, and plenty of photos.

Definitely fun to play with, especially for photos and visual media. I'm just not sure it can replace Google as my goto search in terms of fast and reliable hits. Just not fast enough yet, but hey, it's still in beta.

Watching (web) TV

Been a busy few days. Watching a lot of channel content on Joost and it's open-source competitor of sorts, Miro. I'll have a more detailed review of these stand-alone web TV (IPTV) players. Both are pretty immersive and I've been looking at the current state of web TV content.

I think we're on the cusp of something very big in this space. When I boot up my web TV players and watch the latest from my chosen channel feeds, I get that strange feeling that I've seen something like this before. Oh wait, that's right - the rise of cable TV. I think where we are at now with web TV content and these nascent channels like Mahalo Daily, The Onion News Network (ONN), TEDtv, etc. is like where cable TV was in the 80's. You had the established networks and then these upstart fringe channels shaking things up. We're just getting started here, and it's going to be big.

Omnisio juices up video

Had a chance to sit down with Omnisio Co-founder Ryan Jubee last week, who along with his team have built quite a set of tools for next-gen online video. The Y-Combinator-backed site's been live now for about two weeks and has seen steady growth in both video content and visitors, with over 2500 video compilations so far. In a nutshell, Omnisio allows users to easily pull clips from videos hosted on the web at sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, and Google Video and create a single mashup video you can then play with. Take this Steve Ballmer meltdown mashup, for example:

The launch followed the idea that sometimes you have to let your product out there to fully understand its potential. So the team did just that, launching a consumer version of their tools which currently only allow for the mashups and in-video commenting. (You can toggle this somewhat distracting feature on/off.)

The real powerful tools are yet to be released to the general public, but several parter "channels" have been set up that make use of these gems. People-tagging and (powerpoint) slide sharing are the most powerful, in my opinion, and really can make remote learning a viable option. The Stanford/MIT Venture Lab is one of the early Omnisio adopters, really making use of the platform in this recent panel discussion on monetizing social networking. Try jumping ahead to a tagged person or specific slide. Check it out:

I'm starting to wish I could review my college lectures like this. There's definitely an opportunity here to leverage these tools - universities, online schools, internal corporate training - you name it. I commend the team on their ability to stay lean by allowing the external video hosts (YouTube, Blip.tv) to do the heavy lifting of file storage. One to watch in this space for sure.

25 Facebook Apps for Education

Great list of the 25 Facebook Apps for Education and Learning over at CollegeDegree.com

Heard great things about Courses which "display your courses on your profile for college or high school, find classmates, manage your schedule and assignments, create discussions, post notes, and form exclusive study groups. Welcome to Courses on Facebook." I don't currently have any courses, so I can't give it a first-hand review.

Also love the JSTOR Search app which lets you search scholarly journals directly from Facebook. You do have to add your school or public library proxy first, which means independent scholars may be able to access it if their library doesn't participate. The developers actually work at JSTOR which is an added bonus and seem to be very open to suggestions and feedback.