Incubator Y Combinator just wrapped the first of its two West Coast demo days for its latest batch of startups. As usual, their concepts were all over the place, from ticket sales to retail polls to job listings.
The startups gave demos on the East Coast last week (Y Combinator’s summer session is held in Boston), and there has already been some debate about whether there were any “winners.” One grumpy attendee reportedly told Silicon Alley Insider he was unimpressed by the entire lineup, although other commenters (including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham) begged to differ.
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Still, there were a handful that jumped out at me as particularly promising, or at least fun and interesting. Here are the five that made the best first impression, in order of preference:
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Here are the other companies that demoed today, unordered. (There were also a number stealth companies that I’m not supposed to write about, some of whom were as promising as any in my top five.)
TicketStumbler — A Kayak for sports tickets, which aggregates listings from around the web.
People and Pages — A Google Groups/Google Sites competitor that uses a simple interface to combine email lists with websites creation and editing.
Anyvite — A self-described “Evite-killer” that wants to make the event organization and invitation process easier, therefore listing events that are too small to bother listing on Evite.
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Meetcast — A web conference service that wants to bridge the gap between expensive business solutions like WebEx and free-but-limited services like Tokbox.
Youlicit — An automated Mahalo, Youlicit uses algorithms to create pages listing the best links for any different topic.
Frogmetrics — Uses a touchscreen device to perform customer surveys at point of sale. Because it’s so easy and convenient, response rates supposedly exceed 85 percent.
Picwing — A digital photo frame that makes it easy to sync your online photo albums with the frame.
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Snipd — A service that makes it easy for users to share images, videos and text online, and for publishers to see what content is most popular — not just frequently-shared articles, for example, but also “hot zones” in the articles that seem particularly popular.
ididwork — A sharable work log that makes it easier to track an employee’s performance and give them feedback over time.
BackType — A search engine for comments that also allows users to create accounts linking all their comments across the web.
Poll Everywhere — A mobile voting startup that focuses on meetings, conferences and other live events.
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