Crowdfunding, gaming, finding deals, and decorating your office – these are some of the ideas powering the startups in Y Combinator's Winter 2012 Demo Day session three. We're here at Mountain View's Computer History Museum covering the flurry of launches, and investors are salivating.
You can read our coverage of the first and second sessions, plus Eric Eldon's analysis of why mobile is trending at Y Combinator. Now here's a breakdown of all the companies from Demo Day's third of five sessions:
We're covering Y Combinator's Winter 2012 Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where 66 startups are presenting the applications they've built over the past three months in YC's Silicon Valley incubator. The startups are presenting over five sessions; you can find our coverage of the first one right here. This is the second batch of YC startups who presented on the record today
Crowdtilt: A simple way for anyone to crowdfund anything. While Kickstarter is great for bigger organizations and startups, Crowdtilt is optimized for groups of friends. It specializes in making sure organizers get their money, and in the six weeks since launch it's seen $400,000 come through its system. That figure is growing at 21% week over week, and 34% of users come back and fund another project. Imagine the fun trips you could go on and parties you could plan when you split the cost with friends.
Flypad: Turns your iPhone into a game controller and lets you play on your PC or TV screen. While adults may long for their dual-stick physical controller, kids are growing up in the age of touch screens and they'll dig Flypad. The company also serves as an app store where you can discover games to play with your phone. Not only will Flypad power more complex games that need separate screens for controls and gameplay, it will open new game styles by letting anyone with a smartphone play. Mobile phones and even tablet screens can be cramped with both gameplay and controls. Flypad already has more than 25,000 users and 28% week-on-week growth since the start of this year.
Carsabi: An evolved search engine for buying a used car. Carsabi aggressively crawls every online car sale listing it can find, from classifieds to dealers. It already surfaces more deals than industry leader AutoTrader, and has features that let you sort by the biggest savings, not just lowest price. Social features let users ask friends for purchase advice, which cleverly doubles as a viral mechanism. It's a huge market, as last year $650 billion was spent on car sales and $3.8 billion on auto ads. Carsabi has 10% week-on-week growth since its mid-February launch, because when people save they tell their friends.
Anyperk : A platform for rewarding employee performance by giving them discounts on products. With 54% of companies saying that employee retention is their biggest concern, Anyperk is aiming at a pretty big market. The company makes money by charging between $5 to $10 per employee per month. In the four weeks since it launched, Anyperk has signed up more than 1,200 companies, growing its customer base by 200% each week.
TiKL: An Android and iOS app that turns your phone into a real-time push-to-talk walkie-talkie that also sends texts, voicemail, images, and video. Launched 20 months ago, it now has more than 22 million users without any marketing. TiKL was named a top Android developer by Google, and featured in the Android Market and the App Store. The company says "Email is to SMS as a phone call is to a walkie-talkie", and that TiKL just works better for short, quick exchanges of words.
Dealupa: As we covered in-depth yesterday, Dealupa aggregates daily deals from all over the web and presents them on a website where users can browse according to their interests. Since it crawls the web constantly, Dealupa purportedly has ten times as many deals as Groupon — which allows the service to target the right deal to the right user. Also, since Dealupa doesn't actually source any of the deals itself, it doesn't need a sales force, meaning that virtually all of the 10-15% commissions it makes on sales turn into profit. Dealupa currently has more than 10,000 subscribers, and has growth 20% week-on-week since it started the Y Combinator program three months ago.
Priceonomics: An online price guide for anything. Type in anything you want to own and it will tell you how much it should cost, like a Kelly Blue Book for smartphones, laptops, TVs, stereos, etc. Priceonomics crawls through hundreds of millions of transactions to find out what people are selling and how much they're selling it for. It got 250,000 page views in March, plans to make money through targeted advertising, and already has funding from SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, CrunchFund, and several angels.
Kyte: Every 7-year-old wants a smartphone just like mom or dad have. But obviously, it's dangerous to give kids access to the world wide web. That's where Kyte comes in: It's a mobile app that turns any Android smartphone into a kid-safe device, that can only be used to make calls and play games that have been approved by a parent or guardian. Kyte also comes with a parent's dashboard that lets you see exactly where your kid is on a map, and monitor their phone usage.
EveryArt: Aiming to address the art world's middle ground between low-end prints and high-end fine art sales, EveryArt lets regular people commission a piece or art from an artist online. The site launched officially last week, and while it was in private beta prior to that the company processed $25,000 worth of art. The company says it is seeing increasing traction especially from small businesses, which are using EveryArt to commission custom pieces for their offices.
Read more Y Combinator Demo Day coverage and check out all 39 startups who presented publicly:
- TechCrunch's Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day
- At Y Combinator's Biggest Demo Day Yet, Mobile Is Taking Over
- YC Demo Day Session 1: PlanGrid, Medigram, Zillabyte, HireArt, Flutter, Givespark, Popset, SendHub, Screenleap, Coderwall, LVL6
- YC Demo Day Session 2: Midnox, 42Floors, Sonalight, Your Mechanic
- YC Demo Day Session 4: Shoptiques, Pair, Daily Muse, Per Vices, iCracked, Socialcam, AnyVivo
- YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, Minefold, Exec, 99dresses, Matterport
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