Boston Startups

TechCrunch has a story about the Y Combinator Boston 2008 startups that showed demos of their products to potential investors yesterday. Check out the post for a list with brief descriptions of some of the startups.

The guys from Snipd were at the last Web Innovators Group event. I had a chance to talk to them. At the time, I didn’t know they were a Y Combinator startup.

Last night’s Y Combinator event at Tommy Doyle’s Pub was a success. The place was packed. Somewhere around the order of 100-150 people showed up. Here are some photos. If you are posting photos, Anyvite asks that you post them to Flickr with the tag yrbb4dt0.

Here are some things I took away from the event:

From the Q&A that Paul did, here are some insights on what Y Combinator likes to see on applications:

• Past projects that demonstrate ability. Don’t have one? Funding rounds are 6 months apart, take that time to make something cool.
• Keep it entertaining. They read a ton of apps and it can get rather arduous.
• Short is good. Be to the point about your idea.
• Founders with long histories of knowing each other.
• Don’t stress out about “What is your greatest hack?” or “Tell us something amusing you’ve discovered.” I gleaned this from examples Paul and the Y Combinator startups gave. Most of them were not monumental, world changing discoveries. An amusing anecdote will suffice. You don’t need to say you cured cancer or defeated Skynet to get accepted.

Funny Paul Graham quotes:

• In response to the question “What about MBA and business plan writers applying to Y Combinator?”, Paul: “It’s like ladies night at a bar. You’re ok if you bring a hacker.”

Having worked at Microsoft in the past, I wanted to hear speaker Kevin Merritt’s story about his first startup getting acquired by Microsoft. Overall, his experience with the acquisition was pretty good, and he worked hard while at Microsoft. But in terms of overall excitement level, he said a good day at Microsoft didn’t beat an average day at his startup.

Kevin’s current project, Blist, is a web based spreadsheet/list application with collaboration features. It’s pretty nifty, and you can test drive Blist with no account.

Also, Nabeel Hyatt gave a short and sweet talk which poised the question: “How do you know when your startup is working?” He shared some opinions from important people in the industry (if he got these opinions from them directly, then he has an impressive rolodex). Check out his social gaming company, Conduit Labs. Their web site is quite unique.

I’d like to say thanks to Dan for sharing some interesting stories about TicketStumbler, and also thanks to the following startups who setup this event:

• Posterous - Blog like posting of media over email
• Slinkset - Create your own social news site
• Startuply - Job listings for startups
• TicketStumbler - Second hand ticket aggregation
• Anyvite - Event invites

Thanks to Dan from Ticket Stumbler for leaving a comment and letting me know about an event tomorrow night hosted by some of the Y Combinator startups. You can RSVP at that link. Here are the details:

Monday, August 11 at 7:00 PM

Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub
96 Winthrop St.
Cambridge MA, 02138
Google Map

Speakers include Paul Graham (Y Combinator), Nabeel Hyatt (Conduit Labs), and Kevin Merritt (Blist). Paul is taking questions in advance at:

http://askpg.slinkset.com

I found this blog today: Northeast Venture Capital Funding and M&A Activity. It’s updated frequently, and it reports the basic stats of funding, merger, and acquisition events. Most of the news comes from Massachusetts.

Y Combinator does a Boston round of funding every summer, and the first few startups from this year’s round have launched. Here are some ones I’ve already noticed:

• TicketStumbler - Aggregated search for the secondary ticket market. In other words, they aggregate the listings of second hand ticket brokers.
• ididwork - Performance tracking for the individual employee
• Popcuts - online music store with a twist, they pay you a cut if you discover bands early. TechCrunch explains.

I’ll update this blog as I discover more.

The Boston User Group has an event calendar for Boston area computer events. Many of these events are relevant for startups. Some are networking events, others are user groups for programming languages.

The next Web Innovators Group event is coming up this Tuesday, July 15. WebInno is an event featuring presentations by startups and lots of time afterwards to network. Several hundred people attend, including founders, people looking for work, and investors. This is one of the best events in Boston, and I highly recommend it.

The demos for WebInno18 have been announced. I’m looking forward to the WebNotes presentation by Ryan Damico. I had the chance to meet Ryan at the last WebInno, and I liked his concept.

If you are planning on attending, please RSVP for the event. Details for the event are listed on the RSVP page.

This is a video of the last Mobile Monday event that I previously blogged about. The event was about mobile web browsers.

Mark’s Guide was recommended to me as a resource for finding technology and startup related networking events, but it also has networking events for many other interests.

Mobile Monday Boston is a group for those of us interested in mobile device opportunities. They host regular events, keep a blog and online discussion group, and are a great resource for Boston startups interested in mobile technologies.

Their last event took place just yesterday. It was titled Browsers — Driving the Web, or Driven by the Web?, and it was a panelist discussion about mobile web browsers. The moderator was Ed Mitukiewicz of Orange Labs Boston, and the panelists included:

• Keith Waters - also of Orange Labs
• Mike Phillips - Co-Founder of vlingo
• Brad Lassey - Mozilla, working on mobile Firefox
• Franklin Davis - Nokia, business development
• David Carson - Google, technical lead for Android browser

The event was hosted by Orange Labs in Cambridge, and their offices were very sleek and modern.

The discussion covered a lot of basic ground involving mobile enabling the web. Questions and topics included:

• Interesting facts and figures about the mobile industry:
  • Around the world, more mobile devices exist than PCs. There are roughly 3 billion mobile devices and 1 billion PCs.
  • In many countries, mobile phone penetration is high but access to PCs is low. This means that for many people, a cell phone was their first web enabled device.
  • 1 billion mobile phones are sold per year yet…
  • Less than 1% of all web browsing is done from phones
• Diversity of platforms and devices
• Applications versus widgets versus mobile web
• Web transcoding, content proxies, etc. for mobile devices
• Resources for developers:
  • dev.mobi
  • W3C Mobile Web Best Practices

Afterwords there was snacks and drinks at the Royal Sonesta hotel. I had a chance to meet some of the organizers and panelists. Alessandro Pace, one of the organizers, showed me some demos of Flash running on his phone.