App integration startup Zapier has launched a new API status dashboard, a free tool that can help developers and companies identify downtime for nearly 200 APIs.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company lets users streamline connections between about 200 different web apps and APIs. It was created in such a way that even non-coders can be build integrations between tools. Zapier recently grabbed a few headlines when it raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson after attracting attention from Y Combinator.

The company was already tracking all of these APIs and says it performs “hundreds of millions of API requests” each month, so it made sense to offer this new solution.

Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster told VentureBeat that this new solution is better than dashboards such as Amazon Web Services, Basecamp, and 37Signals because this gives status information for many services in one place.

“The way you [normally] find out about API downtime is by making a call to the API and realizing it’s busted, but usually people don’t think it’s busted right away,” Foster said via email. “They assume something must be wrong with their code and start investigating.”

Image via Zapier

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It’s that time of year in Silicon Valley: launches, demo days, and a consistent stream of startups getting funded.

This week, our reporters covered the coming out party for Y Combinator’s startups, and the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. Investors attended both events in their droves, and were ready to open their check books. 

In short, our deals team will have their hands full in the coming months. But we’re just at the beginning of a funding cycle. Today, we saw some scattered investments in the $4-10 million range:

Clean tech startup Choose Energy grabs $4M from Kleiner Perkins

Today Choose Energy announced it’s closed a new $4 million round of funding to help advance its web service that enables consumers to compare prices for all the retail electricity plans available in the area, educate on each type of energy, and enroll them into a plan. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Rev raises $4.5M for freelance marketplace from founders of similar service

Rev.com, a online marketplace to find freelancer work, launched today with $4.5 million in a 2012 funding round from oDesk creator Venky Ganesan and others. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

Language learning startup Babbel will try to translate $10M into global growth

Language learning startup Babbel has raised $10 million in its second round of funding with a goal to grow globally and help more people speak new languages. Founded in 2008, Babbel wants to make learning a new language as fun as a game. It claims to offer more than 6,500 learning hours to help people become fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and eight other languages. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

photo credit: gato-gato-gato via photopin cc

Ever watched the Food Network and felt inspired to hit the road in search of locally-sourced, homemade cuisine?

If you’re an adventurous eater, and the local takeout no longer appeals, a new website called Goldbely has you covered. On the site, you can order crab cakes from the Chesapeake, cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan, or a Chicago Deep Dish pizza.

The founders officially launched the company at the demo day for prestigious technology accelerator, Y Combinator. Founder Joe Ariel is the former chief executive of Delivery.com. In an earlier interview with VentureBeat, he said he started the site so people “can order rock star foods with no geographic limit.”

I first met the Goldbely team at a recent happy hour in San Francisco (as you would expect, they supplied the food.) The founders told me they will personally sample delicacies from all over the country, and ensure the food can hold up in the shipping and handling process.

The founders will only accept about three percent of all the food they try.

Ariel stressed that orders are personal and direct — that pie from Achatz Handmade Pie Company will be made for you to meet your specific dietary needs and tastes.

Once you’ve placed an order, the delivery will arrive overnight, but may take up to a week. However, you will need to pay shipping fees for about 50 percent of the items (some vendors will throw in free shipping.) Ariel said the product isn’t any more expensive than if you walked in the store and ordered it direct.

The company makes money by taking a marketing fee on every item. Vendors will offer Goldbely food at a discounted rate, and the company sells it at wholesale price.

The company has grown to 12,000 customers who have signed up to the email list, and recently broke $100,000 in sales. Goldbely’s team have raised investment from friends and family, and will be looking to raise a round of venture funding.

According to Ariel, the ultimate goal is to help local businesses connect them with foodies all around the country.

If you didn’t see a wide open market for custom T-shirts, I wouldn’t fault you.

But a startup called Teespring is generating a huge buzz at Y Combinator’s demo day. The company presented today to a roomful of investors and press, and announced that it pulled in $750,000 in revenues in a single month.

“We turn affinity into money,” said founder Walker Williams. The company has tapped into niche communities on social sites like Facebook or Reddit. For instance, a Facebook page with several thousand “likes” for dedicated fans of “big trucks and bonfires” might want to offer its community a custom T-shirt.

The company hopes its sales will eclipse chief competitor Threadless by the end of the year. Developer groups like Node.js and Hacker News are already customers, and the company intends to boost sales by lining up celebrity spokespeople.

As we reported earlier this month, Teespring was started at Brown University when the campus community reacted to a police raid at a local bar. The founders realized that a T-shirt would bring students together in a common cause.

The company has a unique model that caters to amateur marketers and merchandisers. A community group creates a T-shirt, uploads it to the Teespring website, and then hosts an embedded sales page on its own site. If enough are ordered, the shirt goes into production.

I was introduced to Teespring through Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who also serves as an advisor to Y Combinator’s startups on the East Coast. Ohanian said he’s a “huge fan” as it makes merchandising easier for startups and community groups.

“[Merchandising is] a huge pain for lots of reasons, and they’ve brilliantly solved it by making a solution that’s both economical and high-quality,” said Ohanian.

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Microryza is a crowdfunding platform to follow and fund scientific research projects. On stage at Y Combiantor’s Demo Day, founder Cindy Wu said that funding for research projects is short-sighted and only available to PhDs and professors. Microryza opens up the financing opportunities to people outside of these communities, and users are choosing this channel instead of applying for grants.

On the site, researchers set up a profile with their proposed project and raise money  to carry out the research. Backers projects can track the lab’s progress as experiments unfold and have the opportunity to interact directly with the researchers.

“This solution helps close the gap for potential and promising, but unfunded projects,” Bill Gates said about Microryza.

The types of projects are narrowed down into categories- education, biology, engineering, computer science, medicine, ecology and palentology. If you have a specific topic that interests you, like breast cancer research or biofuel, you can zero in on those opportunities. However, browsing yields some interesting findings, including a look at how lemurs can ensure their own survival, whether machine learning can ace tough tests, and searching for a cure for Alzheimers.

The caliber of researchers is high. A majority of the project owners are working on or have advanced degrees, and many already work with scientific or academic organizations, and just need an extra push to achieve their goals. Profiles include videos, biographical information about the scientists, and  answer the questions “What are the goals of this project?”, “Why is this research important?”, and “How will the funds be used?”

Wu said the site is doubling each week in terms of transactions, projects, and users. Her ultimate goal? To turn anyone with a credit card into a patron of science.

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A startup called Sift Science says it can help your website battle fraud in 30 minutes or less.

And the San Francisco-based company closed a $5.5 million funding round today from quite a list of high-profile tech investors.

The cofounders have developed an algorithm that pinpoints one million patterns that help predict, and potentially prevent, incidences of fraud. For instance, those who type text in all caps are almost five times more likely to be fraudsters.

Investors included Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, Expedia founder Richard Barton, Posterous’ Garry Tan, former Paypal CTO Max Levchin (who led the seed round), Tapjoy cofounder Lee Linden, Y Combinator, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Union Square Ventures, and Reddit’s Ohanian.

Fraud image via Blazej Lyjak// Shutterstock

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So Graham’s doing something about it.

From now on, Y Combinator companies will use a four-step protocol before assuming they have a handshake deal with an investor:

1. The investor indicates a desire to be in on a funding round at a certain valuation.
2. The startup agrees and verbally commits.
3. The startup sends the investor an email or text message asking for confirmation.
4. The investor replies and confirms.

The problem, Graham says, is that too many “handshake deals” are not really deals at all. Either an investor isn’t communicating clearly, or a founder is over-eager and reading too much into a very polite no, or something worse is happening. Investors who are new to the game — or simply dishonest — can cause startups huge issues:

The problem is compounded by the fact that some investors deliberately mislead startups about how interested they are in investing. Startups’ prospects can change rapidly. If investors say no in a way that sounds like yes, they can essentially take a free option to invest. They haven’t actually committed, so it costs them nothing, but if the startup turns out to be a hot one, they can retroactively claim that their almost-yes was an actual yes, and that the startup is morally obliged to let them invest.

The process that Graham outlines seems long and excessive, but he argues that with mobile phones, it can and should all happen in person, right away. The difference is that now there is a digital track that confirms what the founder hoped he or she heard and what the investor actually committed to.

But Graham didn’t just make these comments off-the-cuff. He checked with Valley super-angels and VCs Ron Conway, Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Marc Andreesen, among others, before publishing.

photo credit: Leonard John Matthews via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After a long day at work, you open your fridge and are greeted with a forlorn-looking piece of cheese and some rancid smelling milk. We have all experienced this pain and that weary reluctance to make a trip to the grocery store.

A startup called Instacart is fast becoming a favorite in the Bay Area for its mobile and web service that lets you order food and beverages in a snap. The app is available for free on Google Play and the App Store.

Since it launched in August 2012, Instacart has found a niche with busy, urban professionals — but it’s also used by office managers at local startups.

To make it easier for roommates or colleagues to order items for a shared kitchen, Instacart has launched a new feature called “Shop with Friends.”

Click the “Shop with Friends” button to access a communal shopping cart, which anyone can access by clicking a custom link. ”The idea is to give people the flexibility they have at the checkout counter,” said Instacart’s founder, Apoorva Mehta, in an interview. Mehta is a former supply chain management engineer for Amazon.com, who saw an opportunity to fast-track online grocery delivery.

The company plans to beat out the competition with its focus on customer service and user experience design. Simply login via Facebook or set up an account, open a shopping cart, add a few items, share the link if you’re shopping with friends, and tap to place the order.

Thousands of items are available and will be delivered by Instacart’s team of personnel at home or an office in under three hours.

Instacart recently partnered up with yuppie chains WholeFoods and Trader Joe’s, and also delivers groceries from Safeway. The startup makes its money by charging a convenience fee ($3.99 for orders over $30) and an additional $14.99 for one-hour delivery.

We first reported on Instacart at a recent demo day for Y Combinator, the highly competitive accelerator program. At the time, we described it as an “Uber for grocery deliveries.” Similarly to Uber, Instacart has butted heads with city regulators (in this case, over its ability to sell wine and spirits).

In future, Instacart plans to bring in new revenues by selling an enterprise subscription to larger companies. The company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding.

30 days later, several of “his” angels invested through our platform (they had heard of CircleUp through word of mouth). As it turned out, his angels loved us because we gave them access to quality dealflow they would not have otherwise seen.

Crowdfunding has the potential to dramatically increase the ~$23B Angel investment market in the US and the ~$25-50B informal investing market (basically friends and family). It will lower the cost, in time and minimum investment size, to make early-stage investments, and thus expand participation in early-stage investing.  Heads of angel groups, many of whom are responsible for providing the group’s “proprietary” dealflow, and so-called “Super-Angels” will likely need to adjust their model with the coming disruption.

Some in the media have questioned whether that disruption will be good for investors and companies.  It will be.  More information and more choice will benefit smart investors and make fundraising more efficient for entrepreneurs.  Others have hypothesized whether this disruption will also extend to venture capital firms as well.

Over the past decade there has been a dramatic shift in the early stage funding landscape.  VC funds have raised larger and larger funds.  According to Tom Grossi of CNNMoney, a significant trend over the past decade has seen limited partners (LPs) to the VC industry concentrate “ever more capital among fewer firms with larger funds.”  As fund sizes increase, investors face two challenges. The first is a challenge of expected investor returns: Typically larger fund sizes come hand-in-hand with larger equity checks and later-stage investments, when businesses are less likely to provide out-of-this-world returns. The second challenge of fund size growth is that minimum LP commitment to the fund increases in tandem. Individual LPs who historically would have been able to participate in a small early-stage focused VC are now excluded because they can’t meet minimum thresholds of participation.

Largely in response to these trends, angel investing has grown significantly. But a market where only angels swoop in to provide necessary seed and early-stage capital is problematic.

The angel market is much less efficient than established venture capital. According to the Angel Capital Association, most angel investments happen locally – sometimes because of a desire to be close to the entrepreneur, but often because the deal was sourced through word-of-mouth, or even to support their local community. Sourcing is very difficult, in part because of the historical ban on general solicitation (lifted by the JOBS Act but not yet effective).  Angel investments have historically been conducted through personal networks (something that will shift with the JOBS Act’s lift on the ban on general solicitation). The typical Angel process includes lots of meetings and introductions – without a central location for buyers and sellers to come together.  AngelList is making a big push to bring the stealthy world of seed investing out into the public. We applaud them for this. But proprietary deal flow is still a hallmark of the industry, and leaves newer funders with less established track records in a weak position.

To summarize, angel investing is inefficient and rewards established players.

Crowdfunding solves this, by making it more efficient for companies to generate interest and source capital, and providing better access and deal flow for the vast majority of the angel investors who have yet to build their name in the industry. By creating a simple and open marketplace for early-stage fundraising, crowdfunding sites (like CircleUp) attract entrepreneurs who would rather focus on growing their business than on shaking hands at networking events.

More specifically, they also help CEOs in industries that are notoriously underserved by existing angel investing networks or venture capital firms.  Crowdfunding will allow more businesses a larger public platform, and it will provide more investors access to opportunities across industries and geographies. And all the while, it will minimize inefficiency and the knowledge gap between buyers and sellers of equity.  Our view, and that of our largest investor, Clayton Christensen, is that a disruptive innovation is one that expands participation in a market by lowering the cost to participate in that market. Crowdfunding does that to the Angel industry.

So should VCs be as concerned about crowdfunding’s growth as angels?

Not really. Where crowdfunding threatens the traditional Angel model through increased competition for deals and weakened proprietary sourcing, it won’t have an impact on VCs. Venture capital firms are traditionally focused on certain industries. More than 30% of Venture Capital invested in 2011 went into the software industry, and large portions of the rest go to healthcare, and biotech. What do all of these sectors have in common? The huge contribution of technological sophistication and intellectual property core to the business model.

Technology is attractive to VCs because of its risk/return profile. With relatively small capital investments, high performing talent, and a short amount of time, these businesses can quickly create significant returns for the fund. VC firms are actively looking for the next best technology start-up, seeking to put a dent in the large capital overhang that still exists in the industry.  Because of their deep pockets, and because they provide value-added services to their portfolio (recruitment, strategic advice, etc), companies in relevant sectors will, and likely should, always pick taking money from a VC firm over a crowdfunding site.  These firms have more resources to continue to help companies post close.

If a company went through an incubator or is accepted by groups like Techstars or Y Combinator, that company has made its way around Sand Hill.  It likely has the attention of hundreds of VC firms and thousands of tech angels.  If it can’t raise money from that group, it sends a signal to the market that some of the smartest guys in the industry have passed.  Sure, a tech company can come limping to a crowdfunding site afterward hoping to have a successful raise, but smart individual investors understand adverse selection, and know that they should pass as well. That’s why you won’t see many A-list technology companies trying to crowdfund. It just doesn’t make sense to go head-to-head with VCs and expect to land the better deals.

The democratization of early-stage investing through crowdfunding has the potential to level the playing field, disrupt the Angel industry, and in the process provide huge new benefits to entrepreneurs and  investors. It will likely make early-stage investing more efficient, and increase the total funded capital of start-ups.

But when it comes to Venture Capital, those technology businesses that are interesting to VCs will always take their money. And those tech companies that can’t get VC funding likely won’t get it from crowdfunders either.

 This is a guest post by Ryan Caldbeck, CEO of CircleUp, the largest equity-based crowdfunding platform in the US.

photo credit: onkel_wart (thomas lieser) via photopin cc

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The days of chalkboards and workbooks may soon be a relic of times past. Teachers these days can supplement their curricula with interactive software and proctor tests without making hundreds of paper copies.

While new technology may enhance the learning process for students, it can be challenging for instructors to implement, which is why education startup Clever has raised $3 million to make this process easier.

Clever’s technology integrates data held in Student Information Systems (SIS) into educational software. If students use the internet to complete assignments or execute projects, teachers need this online activity to connect with overall tracking of their performance. This can be time-consuming and confusing for educators not trained in IT, which is where Clever comes in.

Founder Dan Carroll experienced this frustration first hand while working as the director of technology for a school district. He saw that educational software made things more complicated for teachers and set out with his two former Harvard classmates Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia to address this.

“One of the biggest changes in education is blended learning,” said Bosmeny. “There is so much innovation happening in software helping kids learn and boosting test scores, but when software isn’t integrated, data becomes siloed and out of date. We realized there was a data problem to helping schools fully use this software, and by making it faster and easier, we are transforming education.”

Clever works with developers of online learning applications so by the time the software arrives in schools, “it just works.” The information coming from these programs automatically updates student data, so teachers don’t have to. Since founding Clever in April and participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program, Clever has established partnerships with 40 ed tech companies, including DreamBox, Scientific Learning and MasteryConnect. Through these deals, the benefit of this technology reaches 2,000 schools and 650,000 students.

Bosmeny said that going through Y Combinator encouraged the team to iterate their product quickly and often, and to not only attract the attention of top tier investors, but also of influencers in the online learning space. A number of Y Combinator partners personally invested in this $3 million round, as well as SV Angel, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, and Ashton Kutcher. From the education world, John Katzman of the Princeton Review and 2tor, founder of Chegg Aayush Phumbhra, and Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis also provided support.

The funding will go towards growing the scale of the company and the number of partnerships so that one day, Bosmeny said, all education software will plug into Clever.

STANFORD, CA: With the highly public failure of its New York taxi beta, it has not been a great week for fancy car service, Uber.

To address concerns that the service is not scalable, the company’s CEO and cofounder, Travis Kalanick, made a public appearance to make one thing very clear. He is not worried. ”We know what we’re doing,” Kalanick addressed a roomful of young entrepreneurs at Startup School, Y Combinator‘s annual event at Stanford University.

At Saturday’s conference, Kalanick spoke immediately after Mark Zuckerberg took the stage.

Kalanick has been travelling around the world in an effort to launch the car service in cities like Sydney, Paris and London. “I don’t even remember the last time I spoke in San Francisco in front of an audience,” he said.

In the opening minutes of his talk, he pulled up revenue charts to show that his efforts have not been in vain. The company is making strides internationally. “More than half of our employees are not in San Francisco,” he said. “We are growing fast [at] 29 percent month-over-month.”

To succeed, Kalanick needs to prove that the company can succeed outside of San Francisco. The tech hub is the fertile testing-ground for Uber: it is always willing to adopt new services, it is notorious for a lack of cabs, and many of its inhabitants have money to burn and very little time to get from A to B.

Investors have long feared that the service will fail to resonate with people in cities which do not suffer from a dearth of cabs or public transportation. Critics like VentureBeat’s contributor Rocky Agarwal have argued there is no scarcity of yellow cabs in New York. You might see five or six empty cabs pass by while you wait for an Uber to arrive.

To make matters worse, Uber’s cab-hailing app was shut down in New York after a protracted dispute with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. Kalanick felt he was fighting the good fight, and that users were on his side.

“We are building an urban logistics fabric,” he said. “The older the industry you are tackling the more protected it is by government or by corruption or both.”

New Yorkers can still access Uber Black and the relatively lower-cost UberX offering. For Kalanick, the secret to success is to accelerate the time it takes for an Uber to arrive. When the company first rolled out its service, it took about 12 minutes. Today, the average wait time is less than five minutes.

The company has also received non-stop criticism for its dynamic pricing. Uber will increase the price of its fares as more people request them (when cabs are scarce, at rush hour, and so on).  Read more about the reaction to Uber’s “surge pricing” on New Years’ Eve here.

“Prices are a bit too high,” Kalanick conceded. “I know some of you have felt that sting.”

The entrepreneur ended his talk on an optimistic note. He stressed that the numbers don’t lie — Uber’s fast-growth and deepening user-engagement is impressive.

“Whenever I have a bad day,” he said, soliciting chuckles from the audience. “I just look at our overall revenue graph.”

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Founders Dwight Crow and Christopher Berner were acqui-hired by Facebook today. Terms were not disclosed, but what is clear is that Facebook is not getting into the business of helping you buy and sell cars. At least, not anymore than it already has via the Facebook Marketplace app, powered by Oodle.

The founders announced their new jobs on the Carsabi blog:

We created Carsabi back in Oct 2011 with the goal of easing the process of purchasing a used car and providing a service that aims to index every automotive vehicle and connect more users to their car of choice each day.

But now it’s time for us to take a different turn. We want to take this impact to the next level – and help Facebook users connect and share. Because Facebook is not acquiring Carsabi.com, we’re looking for someone to buy the Carsabi service, so the two of us can focus on our new jobs. We can’t thank all of you that have used Carsabi enough – developing Carsabi has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and we hope we helped you think differently about how to find the perfect used car!

We want to give special thanks to our partners, customers, and investors for helping us fulfill our dream.

Christopher & Dwight

A Y Combinator grad with attitude, Carsabi launched at Demo Day in March of this year. The goal was to index every vehicle for sale and connect the right user to the right car. That goal became a tougher job when, in its crusade to shut down competition, Craigslist blocked Carsabi from indexing its car listings.

That may also be the reason Carsabi’s traffic has halved recently:

Source: Compete.com

Carsabi traffic

Crow and Berner are now looking for a buyer for the Carsabi service, since Facebook will not be taking that over, but it’s unclear who will want a scraping service that is blocked from one of the key scraping sources … and, as a Y Combinator company doesn’t have a ton of investment.

It won’t help that the site currently looks a little abandoned:

Source: Carsabi

Carsabi, October 1 at 2:30 PST

Perhaps Craigslist itself could use a new interface to potentially lucrative car sales.

photo credit: Vu Bui via photopin cc

And by getting out of Silicon Valley and moving to Detroit, where, chief executive Jay Gierak says, he can get twice the talent for half the price. Of course, it also helps to be announcing a $2.5 million first institutional round of funding from Draper Associates and others, including Detroit Venture Partners.

“Recruitment wars are great for buzz but bad for business,” says Gierak. “There’s no reason to fight for talent in the Valley when you can find great talent elsewhere.”

Every six months, Gierak told me, a new class of Y Combinator graduates would be recruiting his CTO and engineers. In Detroit he can find great talent, pay less for it, and count on better retention as well.

Succeeding in any industry is easier when you focus on massive differentiation from your rivals.

A sample Stik personalized results page

“We replicate the word-of-mouth referral experience offline and bring it online,” says chief executive Jay Gierak. “But we do it with three key differentiations.”

The differentiation part is important, because a lot of companies want to own local, from FourSquare to Google to legacy iYPs to scammy-looking page scrapers.

The differences Gierak is talking about include a strong category focus on mortgage, insurance, and real estate verticals — the very definition of infrequent, expensive, and high cost of failure transactions. Plus, Stik developes its user reviews differently, focusing on the business first, not the end user … an extremely unusual tactic. And finally, Stik offers a very deep Facebook integration that affects everything users see on the site.

“We focus on small businesses first,” says Gierak. “Small businesses are willing to hustle for the reviews, and people are really eager to help small businesses that served them well.”

That focus has helped Stik build an inventory of 150,000 businesses in its extremely limited categories, with more than 2.5 million reviews cumulatively.

That’s a significant number because the verticals Stik serves are not typical categories with huge numbers of reviews, like restaurants, entertainment venues, and coffee shops. As Gierak says, “Yelp is built on restaurant hobbyists … but it turns out there are no mortgage broker hobbyists.”

Gierak attributes the traction Stik has within its verticals to its minimal expectations from users. Business owners, he says, can get value from Stik within two minutes of signing up, and users don’t need a lot of time, effort, or expertise. He’s not impressed with the typical dashboard model that most local search companies follow.

“Everyone wants to do a dashboard,” he told me. “It’s a classic engineering approach … but there’s no way you’re going to get a guy who’s running a dry cleaner to sit in front of a dashboard with charts and graphs.”

The deep Facebook integration solves a massive problem in local: fake reviews.

In some local search applications — Yelp, we’re looking at you — reviews are too easy to game or purchase. But it’s not just a Yelp problem; it’s industry-wide. Stik avoids fake positive reviews and fake competitor-dissing reviews by tying all reviews to a Facebook identity, which is much harder to game.

I’ve been in Detroit covering the tech startup scene here, and Stik is a significant local success story. Gierak started building the site in Silicon Valley a few years ago and took a seed round investment from Tim Draper. Now he’s back in Detroit and will be announcing a $2.5 million series A round of funding by Detroit Venture Partners and Tim Draper.

Dan Gilbert, billionaire entrepreneur and principal in Detroit Venture Partners, sees it as a significant win for Detroit:

“The fact that Stik.com is moving to the M@dison Building from Silicon Valley is more proof that downtown Detroit’s energetic tech core has something to offer up-and-coming technology companies.”

Gierak plans to use the funding round to expand his team. And while he’s currently in a coworking-style space owned by Detroit Venture Partners in downtown Detroit, he’s looking for other space already.

Given the availability of cheap prime real estate in the area, Gierak is thinking of acquiring a funky old warehouse, with half for his and other companies, and half for an indoor basketball court.

Try getting that in San Francisco.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photo pin cc

Tripl tells you where your friends and family are going by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social media accounts and then combining their travels and memories into a gorgeous daily package. The company recently released an iPhone and iPad app to accompany its web app.

The obvious appeal of demo day: angels, VCs, and press gathered in droves yesterday to see 2-minute pitches from 84 of the latest companies hatching out of Paul Graham’s startup incubator.

Source: Instagram

Tripl’s Instagrammed guerrilla marketing stunt (full version)

The “parking ticket” invites surprised recipients to “avoid penalty” by taking a trip with Tripl, and then it explains what the service is. A QR code enables an immediate download of the app, and the blurb includes an investor-friendly update on traction: Tripl has “served 750,000 trips to 20,000 users in just five weeks.”

Some of the gathered investors might start to “pay the ticket” by downloading the app or contacting Tripl. The company has already taken at least $600,000 in investment, but a little more never hurts a growing startup.

A few comments on Hacker News – sort of a Y Combinator mini-Reddit —  are a little dubious, speculating that recipients would find it annoying and not dissimilar to junk mail. I suspect, however, they are simply kicking themselves for not thinking of the idea themselves.

Even without additional investment, however, I’m sure that Tripl is happy with the free PR.

Image credit: pjsullivan3/Instagram

Right now, Graham is worried. Worried enough, at least, to send a letter to the companies currently in the YC startup program. And that’s likely to make a lot of other people worried.

What’s the problem? In a word, Facebook:

 … I had dinner recently with a prominent investor. He seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. But no one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle.

If funding becomes a problem, startups are forced to raise money at a lower valuation than earlier funding (a “down round”) … or may not be able to raise money at all.

What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price, and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face “down rounds,” which can be damaging.

There is a solution, however: be profitable.

The best solution is not to need money. The less you need investor money, (a) the more investors like you, in all markets, and (b) the less you’re harmed by bad markets.

I often tell startups after raising money that they should act as if it’s the last they’re ever going to get. In the past that has been a useful heuristic, because doing that is the best way to ensure it’s easy to raise more. But if the funding market tanks, it’s going to be more than a heuristic.

For some of us in the technical world, it may be a little hard to imagine one IPO having so much of an impact. Even though Facebook’s IPO losses have been crushing blows to some, it seems obvious to others that after assembling such a massive audience, the world’s largest social network will not fail to find ways to monetize. Even on mobile, because they really haven’t even started trying yet.

However, financiers and venture capitalists may look more at the pure financials of the situation, see major losses, and overreact. Financial markets are, after all, not exactly rational. That’s why there are tulip bulb crazes and dot-com blowups.

As Graham says,

The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on easy terms, and are then led thereby to spend a lot, and to pay little attention to profitability. That kind of startup gets destroyed when markets tighten up. So don’t be that startup. If you’ve raised a lot, don’t spend it; not merely for the obvious reason that you’ll run out faster, but because it will turn you into the wrong sort of company to thrive in bad times.

What’s your opinion? Do you think the Facebook IPO could have a catastrophic effect on capital markets?

Image credit: ShutterStock

Sitting at the intersection of group messaging and social networking is Everyme, a startup so zeroed in on private communication that it prevents sharing beyond its walls. Today the company, which allows users to post updates and photos to groups, has released apps for Android and the web to make its growing service accessible everywhere.

Founded last year, Everyme is a Y Combinator graduate that started its life as a mobile address book assistant. It soon switched to a private social network, and began applying its technology to help people create automatic groups, called “magic circles,” using address book and social network data.

Everyme is the anti-Facebook, meant to satisfy the changing needs of web denizens who grow out of the desire to share their most intimate moments with a burgeoning list of people, accumulated over the years, they may or may not know.

“Our app is a realistic way for you to share things — and it’s working too,” Everyme co-founder and CTO Vibhu Norby told VentureBeat. “People really do want a private alternative.”

Launched on iPhone about one month ago, Everyme has 400,000 subscribers across 40,000 circles — and that’s without any help from Facebook or social distribution. Everyme’s subscribers are akin to service users, but they’re not all registered members as the company lets circle participants share in the experience through email and text without requiring them to sign up.

The Android application (seen below) is an almost perfect replica of the original iPhone version, and was built to be particularly speedy. The Everyme web application (pictured above) is intended for non-application users who’ve been roped into circles but opt to participate via email and text message instead. Everyme’s flagship iPhone application has also received an update and now features photo filters, mentions, and improvements in the circle creation process. All of these updates, save photo filters, have been baked into the Android and web apps as well.

All three applications share a similar design aesthetic and seem especially adept at bringing shared photos and moments to life.

Circles, private-sharing, group communication, and photos. This all sounds pretty darn familiar, you say. You’re right. Everyme borrows elements from today’s trendiest social constructs. It’s focused on groups, like Google+, but it creates its circles automatically. It’s meant to be a more private way to share things, so it overlaps with Path in purpose. It allows for cover photos, so it’s purloining from Facebook’s Timeline storybook style. But Everyme most resembles Twitter-owned, blogging-turned-group space Posterous — if Posterous had a more elegant look and had been originally built with mobile in mind.

But here’s the kicker: Everyme is private. Really private. And no, we’re not kidding. This isn’t a Path-like experience where you can share with a smaller group of social network friends but also simultaneously publish updates elsewhere. Instead, Everyme has gone to the extreme to prevent sharing outside its secluded circles. You can’t post to Facebook, tweet to Twitter, or check-in anywhere. And that’s its hook.

Though seemingly counterintuitive to growth, Norby said its this type of extreme seclusion that has helped Everyme win over new users. “It creates an atmosphere of trust. Each circle is kind of like a community,” Norby said. “And people share more. When you have privacy like we have … you share a lot more interesting things.”

Everyme has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors and Angels including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, SV Angel, and CrunchFund. The company is based in Menlo Park and has a small, five-person team.

42Floors emerged from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class back in March as an office space search and discovery service with the mission of helping companies find their dream office.

The company launched with some strong rhetoric about technologically upending the commercial real estate industry and liberating data from fragmented listing sources; all goals that are still actively pursued.

But after gathering lots of feedback from their users and fellow startupers, it realized that finding a dream office is more than just a real estate transaction: it’s also all the work that goes in after the deal closes.

That’s why 42Floors is today announcing an extension to their office search site that puts the focus back on companies seeking their dream office: a one-stop, nationwide marketplace called Showroom where companies can get inspired and shop for office products and services from space planning to furniture to catering.

The site is currently limited to a simple showcase of wares and services that can’t actually be bought, but the next iteration will allow streamlined purchasing so that a dream office can be ordered and delivered with the same fluidity as buying and downloading an app from the App Store.

I had a chance to talk about the new development with co-founder and chief executive Jason Freedman, a provocative figure in startupland these days—one need look no further than his very public hiring stunts or his unabashed condemnation of “non-technical” startup founders.

But despite all the showboating, Freedman and his company display a keen understanding of what startups in Silicon Valley want and will pay for.

Says Freedman, “We know on a tactical level that we can make an office manager’s job a lot easier, but we also know that right now, if you’re a CEO, the chief reason to invest in your office is hiring.”

Hiring indeed. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is experiencing a fiercly competitive talent crunch that’s forced companies to pursue every available avenue to successfully market themselves to potential hires. This includes the physical office space they inhabit, where each piece of furniture or catered meal plays a vital role in communicating the culture of that particular startup. Once compensation levels reach a certain point, factors like culture tend to sway employment decisions.

In terms of market positioning, however, Showroom is an oddity. There’s no denying that with all the money chasing deals in the Valley these days, there are a lot more companies that are willing to part with their freshly infused cash for offices with “personality.” At the same time, several of 42Floor’s own Y Combinator cohorts were acculturated on the “ramen-profitable” philosophy: running a lean operation that looks down upon anything other than shipping and iterating product. Odds are that most of those startups will be fine with their local IKEA offerings.

The current market for Showroom is thus limited to high-growth seed-stage and first-or-second round venture-backed companies. These firms are not bargain hunting: they can afford to allocate toward aggressively marketing their startup to new hires through swanky office space.

The company is aware of the need to be flexible, however. Version 2 is set to debut with an option to view Showroom offerings depending on what company one might be shopping for (ranging from a small two-person startup to, for example, a large financial services company).

No matter the size of the market, Showroom opens a new revenue stream for 42Floors as well. It plans to take a percentage of all transactions that go through the marketplace, adding to the company’s existing stream of referral fees from brokers closing deals procured through the main office search site.

42Floors has ambitious plans for the future. Freedman tells me that both iPhone and iPad apps are to be released “soon,” with interesting features like crowd-sourced photography of spaces.

The company is also set to announce a large funding round soon, which Freedman says will go toward further refining the product, strengthening ties with brokerages, and expanding to other cities (New York being first on the list).

When I last covered 42Floors, my parting note was that the company had a unique opportunity to use the showcasing of office spaces to drive community-based growth as a startup-for-startups, like what AngelList is for the startup funding process. Showroom is a good starting point that seems to take at least some of this commentary to heart.

SMS messages sent for practical, group communication rather than just LOLs is serious enough business that investors have handed SendHub a $2 million check.

Recent Y Combinator graduate SendHub, which bills itself as SMS for organizations, is in the business of replacing the email blast with an SMS message and aims to solve a myriad of real-world consumer, business, and enterprise one-to-many communication challenges.

SendHub has just closed a $2 million seed round led by Kapor Capital, the company exclusively told VentureBeat. Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, 500 Startups, Bronze Investments, Menlo Ventures, and angels including Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, and Jawed Karim all participated in the round.

Why such a sizable seed raise for an SMS service? The young company and its new investors believe that SendHub is tackling a massive problem.

“How do you send a message and make sure you get a response?” said SendHub co-founder Ash Rust. “Email is not really that medium anymore, it’s just such an overburdened channel. Social media is even worse. It’s often impractical to call people. So that leaves SMS. And nobody has really made SMS serious — and that’s what we do.”

Teachers, group leaders, soccer coaches, business owners, company managers, and so forth can sign up for the service to get a number and access to a simple-to-use dashboard for sending messages (from the web or a cell phone) to a group of contacts. A teacher, for instance, could use SendHub to send a message to kids’ parents about a looming test or homework assignment, or a CrossFit box (a.k.a. gym) owner could have his members text the SendHub number to receive an auto-responder with the WOD (workout of the day in CrossFit speak).

If the idea sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very much a hybrid of consumer group messaging services such as GroupMe or Beluga and SMS marketing services. But the group messaging apps can’t realistically replace email, Rust said, and SendHub wasn’t really intended for marketing purposes. “We’re basically making SMS a BCC email,” he said.

The young company got its start specifically hoping to solve a pain point for teachers. This time last year, co-founder and CEO Garrett Johnson observed that teachers at his nephew’s charter school in Tampa had a really hard time getting in touch with parents and connecting with their students. So Johnson and Rust, then a director at Klout, set about creating a cost-effective and simple solution to facilitate this type of communication, but they quickly found that their serious SMS product had more universal appeal.

With the new funding, SendHub will hire more aggressively and round out the product with more enterprise-friendly features. “Our goal is to create a sustainable business around the fact that enterprises need to communicate in real time,” Rust said. “You should be able to use efficient communication systems like SMS from anywhere. We want to invest the money in making sure we can be everywhere our customers are.”

SendHub, which runs its service off of telecommunications startup Twilio’s voice and text platform, offers customers both free and paid plans and will work with enterprises on custom arrangements.

Founded in 2011, SendHub previously raised $300,000 from Howard Lindzon, Tom McInerney, and Y Combinator. The company currently employs a team of five and operates out of Mountain View, Calif. but is in the midst of relocating to Palo Alto. SendHub has thousands of users and sends hundreds of thousands SMS messages each month, Rust said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

In today’s VBWeekly video we invade the VentureBeat writers lounge to ask our reporters about the Y-Combinator Demo Day event. We asked Meghan Kelly and Sarah Mitroff about the presentations that made them laugh; later we ask them what company they think has the best chance for success. Finally, we asked the Magic 8 Ball if tomorrow’s VB Mobile Summit will be a success.  And it says ‘Yes”!

Here’s a quick list of the companies we talk about:

Sonalight: Voice texting for drivers.

Pair: Messaging for couples.

99dresses: Women trade clothes.

MatterPort: 3D scanning.

Enjoy!!!!  See you next week.

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Creating and managing a wiki can take work. It requires a special syntax to format your text and build out the wiki how you’d like it. Hackpad is trying to make the wiki fresh again, with real-time updating and no special text editor.

“Hackpad is easy to edit, works in real-time, and is simple to share,” said co-founder Alex Graveley.

Hackpad is aiming to create a better option for collaborating than the traditional wiki or Google Docs. Hackpad uses color coding to show which authors have contributed which content. When someone makes a change to the wiki, all the collaborators are emailed. You can also send an email to update the wiki, without having to visit the wiki page. A simple, but useful feature is the ability to create a new page by just typing @ before the page title link.

Hackpad has more features than a traditional wiki, such as in-line photos, check lists, and a smoother text editing format. Companies can use it for collaborative work between co-workers, and everything typed into the wiki is updated in real-time.

The company says its users are creating 1,000 new documents per week and that 400 companies are using its beta service. Thee service is simple, but looks clean and makes using a wiki much easier.

Hackpad is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

“The type of inventory boutiques sell is produced in small batches,” said Vidisheva at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day.

Boutiques sell clothes and accessories in small quantities and usually only service the area they are in, as opposed to bigger, global brands. That makes setting up an e-commerce business more difficult than taking some pictures and putting them on Craigslist. You need to have an attractive website, a point of sale function, and the ability to keep up with the inventory on the physical end.

Vidisheva believes her product gives boutiques a way to show off their clothing and reach loyal customers who may not live in the area. Shoptiques takes a “healthy commission” on purchases made through its site, as it takes care of the heavy e-commerce lifting for the small-scale business.

“We go find the most exclusive, unique boutiques, we put them online, and then consumers … can come on Shoptiques and find their favorite little shops from all over the world,” she said.

Vidisheva is banking on her knowledge of what women want. She came from Russia in a classic $100-dollars-in-my-pocket story and studied at Harvard. She later worked for Chanel and became familiar with the fashion industry. She explained that, in her mind, women are most concerned about not showing up in the same room with the same outfit as another. For her, boutiques offer a way for women to find unique clothing, without having to trek to a boutique far away.

Already, Shoptiques has promised funding from Greylock Partners as well as Andreessen-Horowitz, and it proudly announced that it will not be accepting further offers.

Shoptiques is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The problem with kids these days is … actually a problem with smartphones. Parents are hard-pressed to find a safe way let kids have the smart-gadgets they really want. Kyte, however, believes it has found a solution for Android phones.

“Your kids are smart and they hate [dumb phones],” said co-founder Martin Drashkov at the Y Combinator Demo Day today. “[But] with all the dangers out there, who wants to give a smartphone to a seven-year old? Every kid wants a smartphone and there are no good solutions.”

Kyte is an application that can be downloaded to any Android phone, activated and then given to a child. The app allows the child to make per-approved phone calls and only play authorized games. A kid is unable to leave the app to access the rest of the Android phone’s features. Parents have full control over the applications from the browser. Should the child lose the phone, or if there is a more dire situation, parents can also track the phone’s GPS online.

Drashkov explained that right now, there are 50 million children in the United States. At $10 a month, the company could make up to $6 billion a year. Of course, it would have to sign up every child in the U.S.

Mobile technology company Fuhu created a similar solution, but for tablets. Its Nabi “Kiddified” tablet, allows children to play on an application that cannot be shut off, and is otherwise controlled by the parents.

Kyte is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Crowdtilt

Since the company’s launch in February 2012, it boasts 21 percent transaction growth each week and 34 percent repeat use from people looking to collect money from friends for concert tickets, vacations, and gift buying.

The process is what you’d expect if you’ve ever used Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding site. The person who creates the campaign sets a “tilt” point at which the campaign will hit its funding goal and an expiration date after which no new funding can be pledged. People can contribute to complete stranger’s campaigns, but most stick those created by their friends.

Crowdtilt launched in February with backing from Y Combinator. The company presented onstage at the incubator’s demo day, trying to drum up more funding for the service.

Crowdtilt is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s virtual-assistant Siri isn’t available on Android phones, so copycat apps are popping up all over the Android Marketplace. Sonalight, however, promises to not just be another voice-activated assistant app, but rather a life-saving voice-activated assistant app.

“I’m from the future, and it’s awesome,” said Sonalight co-founder Spencer Skates while sending a text message using the app.

Sonalight is a Siri competitor for Android phones, but it is meant to be used while on the road to prevent the accidents and tickets that go along with texting and driving. Skates demonstrated the application to a crowd at the Y Combinator Demo Day Tuesday. He held his phone at his side, representing a phone resting on the median between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Skates asked Sonalight to send a text message, the female computerized prompted him to dictate the text, then read back his words verbatim and, with permission, sent the text.

“I want to point out that this is a good thing to do without making a lot of money…this app saves lives,” said Skater.

The demonstration was impressive given how far the phone was from Skates’ mouth. However, like most rooms during a presentation, it was pin-drop quiet as he performed the demo. The app might not be as responsive when the hum of an engine, honking, and the car radio detract from your voice.

Siri users often complain about needing silence to get the feature to react. Indeed, Parks Associates did a survey of Siri users and found that only 55 percent are satisfied with the product. Placing calls and texting are the of the most used functions of Siri.

Sonalight hopes to move its app beyond the smartphone and onto all connected devices, including televisions. It’s timely as rumors are swirling about a potentially Siri-powered television by Apple.

Sonalight has already sent over 500,000 text messages. Customers pay $20 a year for the service.

Sonalight is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

42Floors is breaking into the commercial real estate world, helping new tenants find office spaces in an otherwise broker-run industry.

“This process is really broken,” said 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman. “We have the determination and the talent … we’re going to go out and build a big company.”

The company, which presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Tuesday, wants to be the missing link between office-less companies and company-less office spaces. Similar to Airbnb, 42Floors has a professional photographer take photos of the office spaces to be used in listings on its website.

The website is fairly easy to maneuver. When you first arrive, a map will show you a number of available units — marked by dropped pins on the various locations. A scrolling bar on the side gives you a listing of all the available units with the cost per square foot and more.

Check out an interview we recently had with Freedman about 42Floors.

You can narrow down the selections with specific criteria, and once you’ve found a place you’re interested in, you can contact the broker. Yes, brokers are not made irrelevant with 42Floors. Instead, the site takes some of the responsibility off the broker’s hands and allows potential customers to choose the places they’d like to see. The trade-off is losing the expertise that comes with an industry expert giving you a city-wide tour.

42Floors does not yet deal in bigger, commercial buys, such as full office-complexes, but hopes to move in that direction soon. It also has plans to cover what’s in the office.

“If you’ve ever searched for an office, one you find it your problems have just begun…we want to help sell desks, chairs, interior designers.”

42Floors takes a 20 percent commission on its sales and targets $24,000 in revenue per purchase. The team is starting with the 80 percent of the spaces that are priced at under $5,000 a square foot. SV Angel is a current investor.

42Floors is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

With Flutter, you can use a wave or hold up your hand to control iTunes or Spotify music on your computer. All you need is a webcam and the app. The company boasts that more than 50,000 gestures have been used thus far with the app.

The technology is similar to Microsoft’s Kinect, but Flutter points out that Kinect is limited by the hardware and the fact that it can only be used on the Xbox and some Windows programs. “Flutter is Kinect without the hardware,” said co-founder Mehual Nariyawala during his presentation at Y Combinator’s Demo Day. “Naveet, my co-founder is the Tom Brady of computer vision,” said Nariyawala.

Flutter has gained so much attention that Daniel Ek, chief executive of Spotify, even tweeted about the company.

Flutter is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Y Combinator’s semi-annual Demo Day is taking place today, and 66 companies are pitching their products at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Twenty seven of the presenting companies are still in stealth mode.

Twice a year, the incubator grabs the entrepreneurs from its three-month program and throws them onstage to present before Silicon Valley investors and press. Each company generally gets a $5,000 base amount and $5,000 per-founder from Y Combinator to help it get up and running. It’s then up to each startup to raise additional funding from angel and venture capital investors.  Some notable Y Combinator alumni include Hipmunk, Scribd, Rapportive, Airbnb, Dropbox, OMGPOP, and Reddit.

We’ll be reporting on the presentations all day. Below is a list of the 39 companies that are presenting, not including those that are still in stealth mode and presenting off the record.

We’ll update you with more details on the most promising companies as the day goes on.

PlanGrid: Blueprints for tablets.

There was once a time when blueprints existed as big spools of paper, spread out across an architect’s desk. Despite computer-aided design, architects on the job still lug that paper around. PlanGrid is making the obvious and needed move to bring those paper plans to the iPad. Read more…

Medigram: Chat for doctors.

Zillabyte: Palantir for salespeople.

HireArt: Employee agency 2.0.

Flutter: Gesture controls for webcams.

You’re jamming out to your favorite track on Spotify, and then all of a sudden a song that makes your want to scream starts playing. Instead of running over to your computer and frantically pressing keys and clicking at your screen to make the madness end, Flutter lets you wave at your webcam to change the track. Read more…

Givespark: Celebrity fundraising.

Celebrity investors aren’t unheard of with Justin Timberlake, Ashton Kutcher, Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, and a number of others all throwing money into hot startups. But what if we took advantage of their influence to promote crowdfunding? That’s what Givespark hopes to do. Read more…

Popset: Group photo albums.

SendHub: SMS for organizers.

Screenleap: Screen sharing.

Coderwall: Quantified resumes for software developers.

This startup creates resumes for coders and developers that show off how great they are at the jobs they already have. Using a gamification platform, developers can earn badges for projects they accomplish and skills they’ve obtained, also know as “geek cred.” Read more…

LVL6: Social mobile games.

Midnox: Video camera app and hosting.

42Floors: Commercial real estate search.

42Floors is breaking into the commercial real estate world, helping new tenants find office spaces in an otherwise broker-run industry. “This process is really broken,” said 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman. “We have the determination and the talent … we’re going to go out and build a big company.” Read more…

Sonalight: Voice texting for drivers.

Apple’s virtual-assistant Siri isn’t available on Android phones, so copycat apps are popping up all over the Android Marketplace. Sonalight, however, promises to not just be another voice-activated assistant app, but rather a life-saving voice-activated assistant app. Read more…

Your Mechanic: Airbnb for car repair.

Crowdtilt: Kickstarter for groups.

Crowdtilt takes the messy pot of money you and your friends are pooling for a group vacation to Vegas and moved it online. The company does crowdfunding for small groups of people who already know each other; friends and family looking to throw their money together for a common reason. Read more…

Flypad: Smartphone as game controller.

Carsabi: Used car search.

AnyPerk: Discounts as employee benefits.

TiKL: A walkie-talkie app.

Where much of technology tries to push new ideas into the hands of consumers, TiKL is putting an old stand-by on smartphones: the walkie-talkie. Read more…

Dealupa: Deal aggregator.

Priceonomics: Price guides for everything.

Following in the footsteps of FindTheBest, Priceonomics searches for prices on consumer goods. Essentially  for everything you’d want to buy, Priceonomics wants to be the service to tell you how much it will cost you. Read more…

Kyte: Turns any Android phone into a kids’ phone.

The problem with kids these days… is actually a problem with smartphones. Parents are hard-pressed to find a safe way to send kids off to school with the gadgets they crave. Kyte, however, believes it has found a solution for Android phones. Read more…

EveryArt: Commissioned art marketplace.

Shoptiques: Online aggregator for real-world retail boutique shops.

Boutiques are the last type of store you’d expect to get technical, but Shoptiques co-founder Olga Vidisheva is confident she can bring the tiny shops to your digital doorstep. Vidisheva believes her product gives boutiques a way to show off their clothing and reach their loyal customers who may not live in the area. Read more…

Pair: Messaging for couples.

If your friends are sick seeing of lovey-dovey status updates meant only for your significant other on Facebook and Twitter, it might be time to take your love to a private social network, such as Pair. Read more…

Daily Muse: Lets users discover “inspired places to work.”

AnyVivo: A marketplace for living things.

Per Vices: Software-defined radio.

iCracked: Tablet repair network.

Socialcam: Video sharing.

HackPad: Real-time wiki.

Creating and managing a wiki can take work. It requires a special syntax to format your text and build out the wiki how you’d like it. Hackpad is trying to make the wiki fresh with real-time updating and no special text editor. Read more…

FamilyLeaf: Facebook for families.

There are social networks for friends, social networks for work, even social networks for relationships. FamilyTree wants to make a social network for the family. Read more…

Ark: People search.

There a new search engine in town to freak out about: Ark, a “people” search engine which scrapes social networks to compile its own profile of you. Read more…

Chute: Images and videos as a service.

Minefold: Multiplayer game hosting.

Exec: Uber for errands and tasks.

99dresses: Women trade clothes.

99Dresses co-founder Nikki Durkin describes her company as an enabler to one of the world’s most powerful drugs: shopping. The company allows women to upload items of clothing onto the website, rate its quality, and then assign a price to it. Read more…

MatterPort: 3D scanning.

3D printing is turning heads these days, especially with the do-it-yourselfers. Before you can print something in 3D, you first have to give the printer a 3D model to use as a reference. Matterport has a small scanner that can help. Read more…

Starting today, 42Floors is finally the answer to that question. It’s a web service aimed squarely at helping companies find office space easily—and also those listing leasable space.

But could it really have taken five to seven years for office space search to finally be optimized by the Internet?

Yes, says 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman, who blames the commercial real estate industry’s lack of a consumer focus and reliance on hapless brokers for keeping the opportunity at bay for so long. It’s hard to believe, but in an era when software is eating the world, it hasn’t yet taken a bite out of this $11 trillion industry, which has a poorly executed presence on the web.

In classic Silicon Valley—and Y Combinator—fashion, Freedman insists that 42Floors is strictly a technology company saving an industry that’s anything but. Industry data providers still rely on thousands of cold-callers to gather information; brokers base their livelihoods on faxes, paper fliers, and hastily assembled spreadsheets. “It’s the single most inefficient process you can dream of, and it’s going to all be replaced by software,” he proudly exclaims.

It all started when Freedman and his team (formerly of Y Combinator-backed startup FlightCaster; acquired in 2010), were looking for office space for their next startup, but became aggravated by the outmoded process that was office space search. Lacking a broker’s license to sift through listings, they were at the mercy of other brokers who were operating as if the Internet didn’t exist. Craigslist was a letdown as well, with most listings severely out of date and brokers on there engaging in bait-and-switch tactics.

The only companies that had relevant online listings were giants left over from the last dot-com boom, namely LoopNet and CoStar, many of their listings lack quality photos and data. The interface is a bit cluttered as well, lacking the minimalism and modernity of 42Floors. While browsing LoopNet is free, being able to use the site professionally (for brokers) requires an expensive subscription. Surprisingly, brokers had become complacent with that subscription and overall model.

This is also why, according to Freedman, the residential search startups took off earlier, since the data in that market was spread out over several competing listing systems that weren’t as locked-in and monopolized.

The co-founder became so enamored by the prospect of shattering the old system and conveniently finding his dream office that he took the requisite courses to get himself licensed as a full broker. Within months, he and his team had dissected the industry and built a website that would make finding office space transparent and direct for tenants.

While making the marketplace more efficient may be synonymous with killing the middlemen (in this case brokers), that’s not necessarily true. The company has been working with several large brokerages to replace their internal systems so they can feed data into 42Floors much more fluidly. “Brokers don’t need to go away, but the data needs to be liberated,” says Freedman, who sees the role of brokers evolving to be more of a consultant and negotiator.

To be clear, 42Floors is not serving the market for buying commercial properties. This is strictly about direct-to-tenant office space leases, although it will grow at some point to all types of commercial leases.

42Floors takes many design cues from the more established residential search sites, with a few enhancements. For one, their own professional photographers take all listing photos. Once on the site, the photos are joined by beautifully displayed data. The interface is extremely minimal and uncluttered. This really is one of the better listing sites you’ve seen. The site relies heavily on the Ken Burns effect, where still-photos are gradually panned and zoomed through a steadily paced slideshow. Freedman insists this is much better than 360-degree views for showcasing office space, and I’d have to agree.

A videography feature will debut later this year, but photography is the more sensible option for a majority of spaces, Freedman says. In fact, 42Floors is currently working on a mobile application (set to debut within the next quarter) that will allow brokers and landlords to take photos with their smartphones and upload them to the service directly. This is an interesting angle for the company and it will be worth observing how the trend plays out.

While all these innovations enhance the browsing and discovery of office space, the company will not be touching the transaction process at all. Once a company finds a space they like, 42Floors will refer a broker and then collect a 20 percent commission if the deal goes through.

In fact, this referral fee will be the primary business model once several quarters of growth have gotten the startup on steady footing. However, it will always be free to both browse and list space. The goal is for 42Floors to generate value by lubricating the market, reducing friction by making it free to list and view beautiful office spaces.

The company also plans to open a marketplace of services to help round out the creation of a dream office, with design and furnishing vendors on the list of eventual offerings.

The service is currently limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, where a panoply of office-hungry startups serve as a great testing ground for beta testing.

This will be the second time this team of entrepreneurs goes through the Y Combinator program, which they say was a “no-brainer,” citing loyalty to the program as the main motivator. In addition to all the important business insights gleaned from the startup boot camp, Freedman and co. insist that the real value is in the community, the people and the attitude. They could have raised more money from larger institutional names but were drawn to Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who Freedman likens to a hard-charging college coach that “you just want to perform for.” Their own peers from the current batch of startups have voted them #1 in their group.

The company has so far raised $400,000 from Y Combinator, Start Fund, and a follow-on from SV Angel.

My parting thought on 42Floors is that it truly is astonishing how a direct-to-tenant modern web service for finding office space wasn’t done yet, and that launching as a startup for startups is a great play here. Just as AngelList has become the go-to social network for startups looking to fundraise, helping entrepreneurs make connections and fall back on the community during that difficult process, 42Floors can be the go-to social hub for startups looking to do the same around the office-space dynamic.

It’s also a great content-marketing angle for 42Floors to play: showcase hot startup office spaces, galvanize the community, promote their own service, and build an audience with authentic engagement. It may seem cliché, but we just haven’t seen this paradigm around physical startup spaces yet.

Front photo via Kelly Smith/Flickr

“Last time we did it, they sold out so quickly, we didn’t have enough,” Sen Sugano, director of business development at Grubwithus, told VentureBeat.  He says that his team is actively working to add more seats to keep up with demand. The dinners will take place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and Washington D.C.

The roster of recent Y Combinator graduates includes top companies like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb and dozens more, making it one of the most dynamic networks of entrepreneurs anywhere on the planet.

The Y Combinator alumni meals are an ideal venue for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to meet with the founders of today’s hottest startups, and to get advice on how they too can get their company into the next batch at the Mountain View, CA accelerator program. This is the second time GrubWithUs has hosted an event for potential Y Combinator applicants.

The get-to-know you meals could serve more than one purpose for a wry entrepreneur. While the application tips and mentorship opportunities could prove invaluable for getting your company accepted into the next class at Y Combinator, if you’re crafty enough, you may land a new customer for your product or service, or score a future employer.

Grubwithus has played a variety of matchmaker roles the past. The company hosted an HR and recruiting meal in San Francisco for Zynga, and Sugano told VentureBeat that one of their top grubbers in Chicago took a job with someone whom she met at a meal.

Alumni from Picplum, Earbits, Paperlinks, Tutorspree, CrowdBooster, Aisle50, and GraffitiGeo are just some of the many participants in this year’s meals.

So it comes as no surprise that, shortly after launch, it has raised $3.7 million from Redpoint and original seed investor Kinsey Hills Group. Co-founder Trip Alder wouldn’t disclose precise valuation the investors placed on Scribd, but did say the rumored $17.5 million post-money valuation is just about right.

The round closed a few weeks ago, but Trip had waited for the legal work to be done before saying anything. Several top firms were interested, and the high valuation resulted from competitive bids for the deal. Venerated VC firm Sequoia Capital was among those turned down. Redpoint, Trip says, offered the right combination of track-record (Redpoint partner Geoff Yang backed Tivo, MySpace and Excite, among others) and attractive terms.

Pre-launch, the Y-Combinator graduate had tried to raise significant funds, and though Trip had expected that Y-Combinator would connect him to scores of potential investors, he says, this did not happen. Ed Kinsey and Michael Hills came to the rescue with $40,000, allowing Scribd to scale enough to go live.

Shortly after the launch, Scribd was racking up 100,000 unique visitors on a daily basis and suddenly, the previously tepid investors were banging down the door. An associate at Redpoint approached them and the rest flowed from there.

We previously covered Scribd and expected it to run afoul of hawkish publishers out to protect their copyrights, but Trip says this has not really been an issue. On average, Scirbd gets about one “takedown” notice a day, and Scribd takes down the material within 24 hours. Whether this situation will sustain itself as Scribd grows is yet to be seen. Copyrighted Harry Potter books, for some reason, are continually uploaded, and Scribd does a search each day for them preemptively.

Right now, they have limited competition. A potential competitor called Scriptovia has emerged to focus on getting high-school and college students to share their papers and lab reports, but it has not seen much action. And now that Scribd has a Facebook application, that niche might already be served.

The company intends to use the money to build out an API, expand its programming and marketing teams, and move into real offices. Until now, it has been three guys in a small apartment.