Automatically cut videos down to the best parts: HighlightCam releases API
Y Combinator-backed HighlightCam, a startup that automatically cuts videos down to the most interesting parts, released an application programming interface today to make it easier for parents, pet owners and people with security cameras to edit recordings.
HighlightCam works by assigning two ratings to frames in a video — one for motion and another for changes in sound. It will take the percentage of a video with the highest ratings and condense it down to that…. Continue Reading
reMail brings better email search to the iPhone
Apple’s Mail application for the iPhone has been getting better, but it’s still less than fantastic. Downloading or searching emails that are on the server (rather than on your phone) can be a pretty painful experience, especially given the continuing spottiness of AT&T’s mobile network. Now an iPhone application called reMail wants to end your suffering by downloading all your emails onto your phone.
A beta test version of reMail was released earlier this year, but… Continue Reading
Berkeley Ventures kicks off with four new startups
Berkeley Ventures, the new Bay Area incubator for early-stage tech startups, has announced its first four portfolio companies — all set to take up residence in the firm’s 8,400 square-foot office space. The firm says it handpicked each of the recipients based on their disruptive potential in each of their sectors.
Power2Switch, for example, aims to set up the first retail marketplace for electricity online — an innovative idea that fits roughly in the cleantech space…. Continue Reading
Scribd to sell 5,000 e-books from Simon & Schuster
Scribd, the site that lets users upload, share and embed documents, first launched its e-books store back in May as a potential competitor to Amazon. Now it has inched closer to its goal with a deal to sell 5,000 titles from major publishing house Simon & Schuster in the form of digital e-books.
Many publishing houses are shopping around for new online distribution opportunities. E-books may have only generated $100 million in revenue last year, but… Continue Reading
Y Combinator Demo Day: Simple cloud management, real-time energy monitoring, and more
If anyone’s feeling depressed about the future of Silicon Valley innovation, I’d suggest sneaking into the demo day tomorrow at incubator Y Combinator’s Mountain View, Calif. office. Watching a bunch of smart, ambitious entrepreneurs show off what they’re working on is a good cure for the “nothing cool is happening” blues — and I saw a strong batch of startups at today’s event. (The same presentations repeat tomorrow.)
For the most part, there weren’t many “wow”… Continue Reading
Y Combinator gets a $2M shot in the arm from Sequoia, angels
Seed-stage venture firm Y Combinator is branching out in its funding strategy today, raising about $2 million from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors. Previously, the firm was funded solely by founders Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell.
The money from Sequoia will be funneled into a new investment arm of Y Combinator, which will increase the number of companies it can fund each year from 40 to about 60. With… Continue Reading
Live: Y Combinator’s AngelConf on how to invest (in a bad economy)
Seed-stage venture firm Y Combinator is hosting AngelConf, an angel investor conference, today at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Cofounder Paul Graham and company have brought together would-be investors with Silicon Valley pros in the hopes of getting more people with money to explore the wild and sometimes extremely profitable world of startups and innovation.
The place is packed, despite a bad economy and widespread fear about the country and world’s economic future. A long… Continue Reading
Cut your legal fees using Y Combinator’s funding documents
Updated
Startup incubator Y Combinator may have just saved your company a big pile of money in legal fees. The firm just published a set of standardized legal documents that startups can use when raising angel rounds of funding.
Y Combinator apparently developed the documents with its attorneys Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and has been giving these documents to the companies it incubates. That has been successful enough that Y Combinator “open-sourcing” them, i.e., making the… Continue Reading
Rails developers showing love for Heroku
San Francisco startup Heroku has found a fresh approach to helping developers build and deploy applications from the popular Ruby on Rails programming framework. It’s the only company to combine automated deployment — in other words, you just upload the code onto your browser and it will go live on the web — with an exclusive focus on Rails, says co-founder James Lindenbaum. Even more exciting is a recently released feature that moves Rails development… Continue Reading
Ten Y Combinator companies that want to revolutionize social networking, search, databases and anything else you can think of
VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall and I attended the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday, where we were both pretty blown away.
Okay, so I’m easy to impress, but Matt’s a tougher nut to crack — just ask some of the start-ups who’ve been on the receiving end of his criticism. Yesterday, however, both of us found ourselves constantly saying, “Wow, that looks cool.”
Y Combinator is a Mountain View-based incubator company that funds and nurtures early-stage… Continue Reading
Songkick’s concert recommendation engine: It goes to 11
Behind the online service Songkick is a simple motivation: To make going to a concert as easy as going to a movie.
Some 70 percent of U.S adults did not go to a concert last year, according to Songkick chief executive and co-founder Ian Hogarth, who I met in Austin, TX last week. Does that mean they don’t like music? No, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t like some form of music. Instead,… Continue Reading
Roundup: Smaller social networks growing, Stage6, Sandvine and more
1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once
Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US… Continue Reading
Buxfer is giving Mint, other personal finance sites, a run for their money
A number of well-executed personal finance management web startups have been in the spotlight in recent months, including Mint — which won the Techcrunch 40 startup competition — Wesabe and Geezeo. Buxfer, however, has been flying under the radar, and it shouldn’t be.
Beyond a clean interface for tracking your purchases, payments and trends in your spending habits (see screenshot, below), the company has been developing some impressive new features. One is a use of Google… Continue Reading
Auctomatic launches better tools for eBay powersellers
Auctomatic wants to make it easier for eBay’s most active sellers to manage sales. The San Francisco-based company launched its public beta yesterday.
So-called “powersellers” range from self-employed individuals to large firms like Dell. EBay doesn’t offer all the tools needed to manage the process of selling a lot of merchandise at once.
A range of third parties provide software tools designed to streamline the process. The largest, ChannelAdvisor, raised $30 million in May from New Enterprise… Continue Reading
iJigg, Digg for music, growing despite competition
iJigg is what it sounds like: A social media ranking site like Digg, but for finding great music.
The site’s front page features the most popular tracks and newest tracks from other users, that you can listen to with a click of a button without having to sign up.
If you register, you can vote on your favorite tracks, upload your own music files — currently only mp3 files — comment on what you’re listening to, edit… Continue Reading
Disqus to launch new commenting features
Updated
Disqus is going to launch two features to help blog readers track the most interesting comments on a blog or other web site.
Forum and blogging software has been around for many years, but there’s still no easy way to find the best comments within a web site or from across web sites.
Disqus has a two-part answer to this problem. It provides an advanced commenting system that can be added to a blog article page. Features… Continue Reading
Virtualmin: Better sys-admin for your growing web site
Virtualmin is making it easier for web hosting companies to set up and maintain web sites, a process that can be mind-numbingly mundane and tedious.
The Mountain View, Calif. company offers open-source and commercial software designed to automate many tasks of modern web-based systems administration, like making sure the servers are running (sample below).
Less than a year old, the company now has over 500 web host providers using its software. As the number of new internet… Continue Reading
Y Combinator continued
Some readers took issue with VentureBeat’s recent assessment that Y Combinator had successfully “nailed” the start-up incubator model. There’s one particular critique we should address.
In return for its advice and money, Y Combinator does take its pound of flesh, in the form of six percent of a company’s stock, on average, which some people think is excessive. In our earlier, favorable assessment of Y Combinator, we were referring mainly to the vibrancy of the start-ups… Continue Reading
Xobni raises $4.26M to let you improve your email habits
Xobni, a San Francisco company that seeks to improve your productivity in email usage, has raised $4.26 million in a first round of funding from Khosla Ventures, according to PE Wire, citing regulatory filings.
Xobni is yet to launch. Its name is “inbox” spelled backwards, referring to the company’s mission of letting users take control of their inbox — it provides data on things like how much time spend on email, how long it takes for… Continue Reading