Y Combinator plants permanent roots in Bay Area
Y Combinator, the incubator that’s become famous for mentoring and providing seed funding to young entrepreneurs, announced yesterday that they will only be based in Mountain View, Calif. and no longer hold alternate funding cycles in Cambridge, Mass.
According to Paul Graham, one of the four partners at the company, “the reason has nothing to do with startups” (in other words, the quality of companies around Cambridge) and is actually for personal reasons. Graham and Jessica… Continue Reading
FriendlyFavor: More web 2.0 clutter, or useful social networking add-on?
Favor-organizing startup FriendlyFavor officially launched its service today. The Seattle-based company wants to help you manage favors and requests across your email and social network contacts, but it’s entering a very crowded market of social network add-ons.
The site hopes to move social networking from a simple exchange of status updates and messages to a state where users actively commit to favors and requests. To this end, it includes a “favor management tool” that organizes all… Continue Reading
How the World of Goo became one of the indie video game hits of 2008
The growing popularity of the indie game, World of Goo earned it the No. 1 rank on Amazon’s top ten best-selling PC games recently, albeit temporarily, among giants like World of Warcraft, Spore, Left-4-Dead, and Fallout3. This independently developed game’s success illustrate the changes that are taking place in the video game and digital content distribution landscape. How appropriate, as we end this year and look for changes in the next.
A physics-based puzzle game for all ages, World of Goo is filled… Continue Reading
SeeqPod, a way to search for music and video on your mobile phone
SeeqPod, a company that lets you search for any “playable” content (music, video, presentations, etc) on the internet, legal and illegal, has released a stand-alone application for the Windows Mobile Platform today.
The application is meant as a search tool for all playable media and according to Seeq’s CEO, Kasian Franks, its main competitors are Google, Apple, and MSN Live Search. Seeq hopes to leverage the power of music to make their search product succesful in the same… Continue Reading
Report: Small online news sites more proven than large ones
It’s good to be a small online media outlet as long as you cover something you can make money on — that’s the unsurprising conclusion of a report published today by PaidContent’s parent company, ContentNext. In the 50-page report, titled “Size Doesn’t Matter: An Analysis of Online News and Political Sites,” Lauren Rich Fine, a former Managing Director at Merrill Lynch and current Director of Research at ContentNext Media, Inc., discusses the dominance of traditional… Continue Reading