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Ask HN: Tell us about your S2017 startup

70 points| merqurio | 9 years ago | reply

Have you applied to S2017 batch to YC ? Tell us about your company and why should be selected to the rest of us.

117 comments

order
[+] pfraze|9 years ago|reply
https://beakerbrowser.com/

A peer-to-peer Web browser. We let users create and host unlimited sites from their own devices. We think the technology can support thick hostless applications, which eliminates data silos and makes every application forkable from the browser. No blockchains, just an improved variant of BitTorrent called Dat [1].

We've been quiet the last 2 months but our 0.7 release is coming up, and we're excited about it.

1 https://datproject.org/

[+] merqurio|9 years ago|reply
Sound a great alternative the actual centralized model. Any guess if other browsers would be interested in adopting Dat ?
[+] dilemma|9 years ago|reply
This is exciting. Let people host their own Instagram profile on their phone.
[+] diggan|9 years ago|reply
Oh, that's interesting that you've applied to YC. How would the business model look for beaker browser?
[+] malux85|9 years ago|reply
https://signalbox.ai/

An out of the box platform to make deep learning easy. It has a drag and drop interface, connectors for common databases and blueprints for common tasks.

SignalBox is being used for: Forex trading, Genome visualizations, customer segmentation, large recommendation systems, fraud detection, realtime anomaly detection, bot detection and geo-dataset market prediction.

As well as the general platform I'm getting some much larger customers onboard where we build out their entire data environment - HDP deployments alongside SignalBox instances work great.

We are profitable, have some great customers on board, and are growing rapidly - and most importantly making our customers happy! :) Please reach out if you would like to work together!

[+] kbyatnal|9 years ago|reply
https://www.60secondseveryday.com, the fastest way of keeping track of your memories.

You get a phone call every night and record your 60-second response to the question "How did your day go?". From there, your response is archived into your private online journal and displayed alongside your photos, twitter posts, check-ins, etc from that day.

Soon, you'll start getting Flashback emails (ex. "Here's what you were doing 6 months ago") with all of those cool things so you can reflect on your past.

We want to help people stop forgetting 90% of their lives.

[+] TeeJay942|9 years ago|reply
"We want to help people stop forgetting 90% of their lives."

I also saw this tagline or similar on PH, and I got to say I'm not a fan. If you look at everyday on it's own, for most of us, it's pretty boring stuff. Why would I want a record of that? If something hugely important happens, sure maybe I'll want to be able to access that memory / my thoughts at that time in the future.

But 10 years (let alone 50) from now, I might not even know what year big events happened. And so I'll be digging through maybe 100s of hours of recordings/text if I'm looking for a specific event.

There's definitely some product in this space that could be great, but I don't think 60 second recordings is it, especially without some way to filter through the boring crap. I imagine looking through my old calendar would be more helpful than my 60 seconds of nightly drivel.

[+] kleer001|9 years ago|reply
It seems useful, but I can't really tell how. What problem are you solving and who has it?
[+] Grustaf|9 years ago|reply
http://kitex.tech

We're building a new type of wind turbine that generates energy using significantly less material, making it much cheaper to install. We do this using huge fixed wing kites made of carbon fibre, and drone technology.

[+] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
Interesting area to work in.

There's huge interest in renewables here in China and a great deal of windy Himalayan mountain peaks that have been covered with wind generators here in Yunnan province (far southwest China) in the recent past. Also solar and hydro is everywhere. Lots of e-vehicles too, everything from golf buggies to cop cars to buses to taxis to bicycles to cars to old-person mobiles to tractors.

Also coming from Australia with Scottish heritage, I wonder if you could use this to power long distance autonomous e-vehicular trucking through remote high wind land areas?

We also have awesome high altitude lakes for kite surfing (Fuxian in particular), I used to sail Weta trimarans there, but sold them last year. Motor boats are banned. You guys should come visit!

+Wiener's Eighth and Final Law: You can never be too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system.

[+] J-dawg|9 years ago|reply
This is an awesome idea. I remember reading about kite-based propulsion systems for large ships a few years ago, do you see any overlap with that area?

How do you deal with the possibility of the kite breaking free of the tether, or breaking up in the air? I guess it could be quite dangerous if there's a populated area downwind.

[+] searchhn|9 years ago|reply
This is cool ! How does it compare in size and power generation to a modern upgright wind turbine ?
[+] merqurio|9 years ago|reply
wow, that's really cool. Why is it cheaper than normal wind turbines ? Maintaining drones that take off and land autonomously sounds expensive

I really like the idea of low environmental impact

[+] fudged71|9 years ago|reply
How is this different from GoogleX's project?
[+] xetorthio|9 years ago|reply
https://sherloq.io We detect and stop online hate speech, harassment and other kinds of cyberbulluying, allowing companies to have toxic free discussions and environments.
[+] Meekro|9 years ago|reply
I tried your demo and it worked great! I tried saying similar things to see if it was just word matching, for example:

  "You should crawl under a rock and die." -> offensive
  "You should join a rock band, that music is to die for." -> fine
My only complaint with the demo is that you keep trying to refresh the result as a I type, and I quickly overwhelm whatever rate limiting you have in place and get a "please wait before trying again" message. If you just gave me a "submit" button rather than refreshing as I type, that would fix it.

What I'm curious about is, how do you plan to sell this? Is reddit or HN going to pay for it? Are you going to make a paid vBulletin plugin? Something else I'm not thinking of?

[+] mars4rp|9 years ago|reply
https://cowritestory.com

CoWriteStory is a platform that let users cooperate to develop a story collectively. Users can start a story with a paragraph or more and other users can continue the story line that they like. Users have the opportunity to expand their favorite branch of story or create a new branch with different story line. Writers can get feedback from users via voting and comment system and get reputation and badges for their contribution to the community.

[+] ryanx435|9 years ago|reply
so this is actually a relatively large market for adult themed material based on this idea and there are several different versions out there, each with its own focus.

I think the biggest one is http://www.bearchive.com/~addventure/

which is a better version of the original addventure http://www.addventure.com/

there are other, non-adult, versions as well but they don't see as much traffic.

*i just realized i definitely went to that site to check that the link was working on my work computer, so thats going to show up as a flagged site in my history now. great :/

[+] l33tbro|9 years ago|reply
What's your stock reply when someone asks, "Couldn't that just be a subreddit"?
[+] gfmio|9 years ago|reply
Automorph - AI for software development

I'm developing a programming language called Morph inspired by LISP, Smalltalk, Eiffel JavaScript, Python (and others). It's extendible, homoiconic and designed to be transpiled to other languages, so that you can build entire projects with multiple applications on separate platforms from one code base. This is then coupled with a symbolic AI engine to generate, build and deploy applications at an increasingly higher level of abstraction.

[+] Grustaf|9 years ago|reply
Sounds like a very interesting (and ambitious!) project, looking forward to hearing more about it!
[+] merqurio|9 years ago|reply
What is the purpose of the AI? What is it's function ?
[+] namuol|9 years ago|reply
Do you have any examples of prior art? Sounds really interesting.
[+] zach417|9 years ago|reply
Corinthian Robotics - robots that do housework

I'm building an inexpensive, autonomous robot that take cares of your laundry. While you're at work, it will wash your clothes, fold them, and put them away.

[+] fudged71|9 years ago|reply
I'm throwing money at the screen but nothing is happening
[+] ChrisPodlaski|9 years ago|reply
Oort - the cloud, in space.

We are building an orbital communications network and linux based satellite operating system that lets you program your small sat in widely used programming languages, and gives you access to unprecedented, low latency compute and storage on orbit, and enables uninterrupted connectivity to the ground.

[+] dzenos|9 years ago|reply
https://tuiqo.com

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBj8ezqLCOs

Tuiqo - Document versioning for humans

Tuiqo allows you to work on many versions of your text at the same time, from within one document. It is the easiest way to revise your text and organize document versions.

[+] Grustaf|9 years ago|reply
Beautiful and sorely needed! But how do you handle versioning (if at all), as a separate dimension of just like the "Google" vs "Facebook" versions?
[+] lowglow|9 years ago|reply
RadBots (http://radbots.com)

We build tools for bots. Monetization, Bot-to-bot communications, Persona temporal key/value store, and more fun stuff coming out. :)

[+] bluker|9 years ago|reply
https://www.creatorarcade.com

Learn to make Electronic Dance Music alongside the world's most popular Dj's and music producers.

Apprenticeship style learning that makes learning to create music fun, easy and accessible.

Pre-launch but if anyone wants to beta some of the content let me know. : )

[+] larriant|9 years ago|reply
Hi! I'd be keen to beta some of the content!
[+] bferst|9 years ago|reply
How can I reach you?
[+] arielcamus|9 years ago|reply
Microverse.

We are launching a tuition-free and remote software engineering program based on ccollaborative and project-based learning.

Our mission is to train 1 million software engineers by 2030.

Not everyone can afford to spend thousands of dollars or was born in the right place to get access to a college degree.

On the other hand, most people don't have the superhuman willpower to learn alone from home watching videos online for 8 hours a day during a year.

We use Collaborative Learning (e.g. Pair programming between students) to create a learning experience that is as supportive (e.g. Mutual accountability) as a traditional learning experience (e.g. College or bootcamp) and as scalable and affordable as online learning platforms (e.g. Coursera, Udacity).

[+] dankai|9 years ago|reply
https://plan.university - plan.uni

A free course schedule planner for college students, platform to connect with people within classes and soon the way graduates will find the job they are uniquely qualified for.

Write me at [email protected] if you think your college/university would need plan.uni as well :)

[+] twitchard|9 years ago|reply
As a class project we wrote a Chrome extension that transformed our university's terrible course offering page into something like this (but less ambitious) It was a pretty big hit and continues to be used even 3-4 years later.

https://github.com/twitchard/corsola

[+] dankai|9 years ago|reply
If some of our competitors (like the ones who visited us already) read this, reach out to us! It'd probably make sense for us to join forces.
[+] merqurio|9 years ago|reply
Calendar + Social network + Job search; why the three ?

I always wanted an app that by giving it the amount of hours needed to study each class (at home or library) scheduled the whole semester.

[+] AldousHaxley|9 years ago|reply
https://www.formgraph.com - collaborative creation platform

The goal is to create a social media platform that does for content creation what previous social networks have done for distribution. Create in an open space, collaborate dynamically, and remix any other content on the platform.

[+] tmatthewj|9 years ago|reply
https://typito.com/create - Help creators produce videos for web fast and easy. Provide them with simplified online work-flows to publish videos that give better ROI on online platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

You can check out the demo - https://typito.com/demo. The tool currently helps with one use-case - adding good-looking motion titles, images and text animations on your video before publishing on YouTube with a few clicks. Adding these elements, we have seen, improve the watch time and engagement on YouTube videos and hence give better ROI.

We went live 5 weeks back and have 15 active users (who publish more than 4 videos / month via Typito), mostly YouTube creators - the market we are looking at.

[+] jkhtaria|9 years ago|reply
http://www.poundaweek.ca/

A smart calorie counter app with AI - Analyzes the foods you eat, how active you are and the progress you make to automatically set nutrition targets designed for you, every single week.

We've helped users lose over 20,000 lbs.

[+] blizkreeg|9 years ago|reply
how do you guys do things differently compared to MyFitnessPal? I recently started using MFP and it's been useful in that I know how much I'm eating (whereas previously I was just wrongly guesstimating with some mental math).

I love your concept, just curious what sets it apart.

[+] alehul|9 years ago|reply
Haul will be a city marketplace of local retailers' stock with on-demand delivery, offering an alternative to shipping.

The goal is to offer products more reliably and quickly than Amazon or individual companies' online stores while charging less than the user would've paid for shipping. Each city will have a separate marketplace with immediately deliverable inventory. The model largely prevents against counterfeits, enables delivery within an hour, and more.

We also have plans with some retailers to offer an alternative to lugging bags around after shopping in-store, via using "HaulHome" at checkout to have your purchase delivered home within a timeframe you specify.

Would love to receive input from the community here!

[+] ruairidhwm|9 years ago|reply
https://brandfox.io

A way for Instagram users to sell their photos to brands who want authentic stock photos. We're also building an influencer search/compare/booking engine.