Category: Tech news

Volkswagen Jetta Hybrid. It’s a name that hits all the Californian pleasure receptors.

Few things are so well-suited to mobile devices’ lush color and displays as comics, and forward-looking publishers are fast ushering out the age of Mylar polybags

If you’re still using an automatic coffee-maker, you’re doing it wrong. We test five different manual coffee-brewing systems.

Zendesk has released its first iPad app whose features reflect an approach that puts a premium on development and a focus on apps native to the iOS platform.

And it is built for mountains and enhanced for couches:

iPads have the least usage among Zendesk customers compared to the iPhone and Android. But it is growing fast in comparison, especially considering that it is so much newer compared to its counterparts:

Zendesk’s focus on mobile stems from the popularity iPads and other devices have with customers:

For the most part, people use the iPad to do simple tasks, which is reflected in how Zendesk developed the app. It does not have administrative functionality or advanced analytics, which they say are jobs still better suited for the web-based environment.

The new iPad app featured capabilities include a simple dashboard, swipe actions on tickets, ticket history on customer profiles and a new reporting dashboard.

The coolest addition has to be the bookmarks that uses a “playlist” metaphor: it lists the issues the agent is monitoring. Each item on the list is a different bookmark that has a number for the total  number of issues for that particular topic.

Here’s what the reporting dashboard looks like:

Zendesk has chosen to build out a native iOS app for the iPad so it can use the operating system’s core capabilities. Pie charts and the “spinning wheel,” features are demonstrative of this approach.

Zendesk has a team dedicated to mobile development, which is reflected in this release. But like a lot of apps, it is still pretty lightweight. Deeper analytics seem like a missing piece that should be added in the next release.

The company does plan to open its mobile capabilities to developers. That should mean a broader set of features that would include analytics.

Here’s a familiar scenario: You’ve become bored with the current blogging platform you’re on or it decides to shut down like Posterous did after Twitter acquired it. What do you do with all of your posts? Sure, you could hop from one platform to the other, but you need a safe and trustworthy place to store all of your important thoughts.

I spoke with Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg yesterday about the topic, and he gave me some insight on how WordPress.com provides a consistent and simple import process for a lot of the popular publishing platforms out there. And it seems that WordPress, after all these years, is still the place people come to with their content. In the past 30 days alone, 15 million posts have been imported into the platform. The top two services that tend to migrate to WordPress are Blogger and Tumblr, Mullenweg tells me. And then there is Posterous.

As soon as Twitter announced Posterous’ shutdown date, the Posterous founders jumped into action with a service called Posthaven, promising to keep it alive forever. The new service has since seen 850K posts imported. However, there has been a spike in Posterous imports to WordPress.com in the last few weeks and 2 million total since WordPress began supporting the platform in July 2010.

Mullenweg discussed why WordPress is an important and longstanding platform in the blogosphere and how the freedom is really in your hands.

TC: When did you start seeing a lot of activity coming from Posterous?

Matt Mullenweg: We’ve seen two big spikes: in March 2011 when they de-emphasized blogging to focus on group sharing and events, and in March 2012 when they were acquired by Twitter. The latest spike started in January but wasn’t as big as those first two.

TC: As far as importing, what are the other services that you get content brought in from the most?

Matt Mullenweg: The top two by far are Blogger and Tumblr, with residual amounts from Movable Type and LiveJournal still. In the past 30 days we’ve imported over 15 million posts. Tumblr and Blogger are always the two highest because they’re both good at introducing people to blogging, and in Blogger’s case they get huge promotion and integration from Google, but people quickly run into their limitations and look for a more flexible platform.

TC: How many Posterous posts all time have been imported and how many have been imported since the April 30th shutdown date was announced?

Mullenweg: Just under 2 million posts altogether.

I’m not sure exactly when the shutdown was announced, but our stats tracking for Posterous was broken for a few weeks around then so that previous number is likely under-counting.

TC: It seems like WordPress becomes the haven for all of this abandoned content. What do you feel that says about your work over the years and staying power?

Matt Mullenweg: WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands. I’ve always believed that if you make it easy for people to leave, they’re more likely to stay.

———–

When you’re looking for a new home for your published content, WordPress is more than likely on your list of places to check out. The fact that it’s then super easy to export that content again means that there’s little to no risk of giving it a shot. For Posterous, once you grab your export file and upload it to WordPress the files and posts come in completely intact:

Importing from other services is just as easy:

According to Wikipedia, WordPress’ platform initially launched on May 27, 2003. That’s nearly 10 years of being a solid platform with no signs of slowing down. With each iteration on both the hosted and self-serve side of the house, WordPress remains a top choice. The plus for WordPress is that it is open source and leverages that culture to allow people to make what they want out of the platform, which makes it so that it never goes out of style.

Y Combinator was tougher to get into than ever this season, and the quality showed on stage. Thirty-three startups presented on the record at the incubator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day today. Picking the most promising ones was no easy task. But after a team huddle and taking input from VCs and founders, TechCrunch has chosen seven startups that have the potential to disrupt big businesses and make the world a better place to live.

YC’s head honcho Paul Graham said that he and his partners were pickier than ever about which startups were admitted to the Winter 2013 class. YC sported an all-time high of female co-founders this time around, though they still only make of 10 percent of the class. Fourteen of the 47 startups have refused press for now, but you can read about all 33 of the startups that demoed on the record in our write-ups about Batch 1 and Batch 2. And now, on to our favorites.

Thalmic: A wearable gesture device

Thalmic Labs has developed a sensor you wear on your forearm designed to detect electrical signals that map to movements in your hands. The device, called the MYO, is a gesture controller that doesn’t require a Kinect-style camera. The limitation with camera-based systems like the Kinect is that you have to perform a limited set of gestures in a fixed space. Thalmic is pitching this as a “once in a generation” shift in human-computer interfaces. It can be used to move through a slide presentation, play games, or control other wireless devices via Bluetooth.

When it opened pre-orders in February, people bought 10,000 MYOs at $149 a pop in just two days, which adds up to $1.5 million in sales. You can read more TechCrunch coverage of Thalmic and the MYO here and here.

Watsi: A non-profit to fund treatments

Watsi is Y Combinator’s first non-profit. (Or, as YC’s Paul Graham joked, it’s the incubator’s first company that’s “intentionally” not-for-profit.) It’s a crowdfunding platform for global health care. Essentially, people can pool funds to pay the medical bills of someone in need. For example, the first patient it helped was a 12-year-old girl in Nepal whose parents couldn’t afford transportation to the country’s capital for surgery. Watsi’s community crowdfunded the project in eight days.

The company says that it’s working with 13 medical organizations, and that it funds 17 patients per week on average. And 100 percent of the donations go directly to fund the medical care, with Watsi planning to cover costs several ways, including optional tips. You can read more of our coverage here.

Lollipuff: Authentic product auction

The eBay of designer goods, Lollipuff attempts to take the risk out of buying designer goods online by serving its customers with an authentication layer on luxury items from Chanel, Louboutin, and Herve Leger. That means zero counterfeits, so you can buy luxury items with confidence.

Since its soft launch in January, the platform has fulfilled over $45,000 in orders, growing 10x in 3 months. The startup has also seen 13 percent month-over-month user growth in the same amount of time. Founder Fei Deyle came up with the idea after starting a successful blog as a designer authenticator. Deyle brings up the crux of the buying-designer-goods-online problem in one statistic: 75 percent of Herve Leger sold on eBay is fake. “Would you spend $3k on ‘Chanel’?” Eventually she’d like to scale this authentication process by a combination of software and human expertise. “Over half of our users have never used eBay before,” she says, estimating the authentic designer retail market to be at $30 billion. Read more coverage of Lollipuff here.

Semantics3: Product data

How do e-commerce shops know which products to sell and how much to sell them for? Semantics3 wants to use big data to answer those questions. Its audacious goal is to index all the products and all the prices on the web in one centralized location. It then sells a data license or API access to e-commerce merchants. This lets them see who else is selling the products they’re selling, how much they’re charging, how their prices are changing, and what products are doing well. And beyond traditional e-commerce, Semantics3 wants to help app developers and other verticals, as well.

If it can sell a $12,000 a year license to just the top 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. e-commerce market, it could start earning $240 million a year and help a new wave of commerce entrepreneurs succeed. Read more coverage of Semantics3 here.

Wevorce: The tech-powered standard for civilized divorce

Wevorce offers a system for handling divorces that attempts to avoid the pain and cost of going to court. It covers six broad steps — divorce planning, co-parent planning, a parenting agreement, financial mapping, financial agreements, and divorce settlement. Its service is a combination of divorce professionals and online tools. Apparently, the system is working for early customers. The company says that 109 out of 110 Wevorce clients have never gone to court with their divorce cases. Divorce has become an institution of modern culture as people search for fulfillment even if it requires some tough decisions. If Wevorce can smooth the process, we’ll be a happier, better-adjusted society.

SimplyInsured: Kayak for health insurance

SimplyInsured wants to make buying health insurance as easy as booking a flight. The company says that the process normally goes through a health insurance broker, and between paper copies, phone calls and faxes, it can take two to three days to get a quote. Plus, it says that thanks to Obamacare’s reduction in commissions, there are 20 million policies that can no longer be served by traditional brokers. With SimplyInsured, you don’t need a broker. You just go online and get side-by-side comparisons of all the major providers.

The company has been seeing 60 percent monthly growth in recurring revenue for the past six months. Many people see health insurance as so complicated that they fail to make the best decisions about it, despite it being a huge cost to them or their employer. SimplyInsured could guide people to the most affordable and effective plan so when they get hurt, they’re taken care of.

FlightCar: Airport car sharing

Flightcar is a car-sharing startup that is specifically focused on travel around airports. Car owners drive to the Flightcar location that’s five minutes away from a given airport, drop off their cars and get black car service to their flights. With Flightcar, owners are guaranteed free parking, a free car wash, and curbside pickup and dropoff. In exchange, users authorize Flightcar to rent out their cars out to other travelers while they’re gone. From the rentals side of the business, Flightcar is the cheapest car rental agency at SFO.

Launched 10 weeks ago, the startup has seen 450 rentals of over 220 vehicles — since then it’s seeing 10 percent week-on-week growth in revenue, and it’s currently making $12,000 in revenue per week. Seventy-five percent of the cars parked at Flightcar have been rented so far. The founders see the market as a combination of the $11 billion a year rental market and $5 billion a year airport parking market. “A huge opportunity,” they said. Read our earlier coverage of FlightCar here.

Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day is a scaled back affair in many ways — 47 startups are graduating at today’s event, down significantly from the 84-startup Summer 2012 class and the 66-startup Winter 2012 class.

However, there’s one very notable aspect of YC that saw growth this time around: The percentage of founders that are female.

Out of 111 founders in the Winter 2013 YC class, 12 are women — that’s more than 10 percent, an all-time high for the program. Nine of those co-founders, which you can read more about in-depth in this blog post by Referly founder and YC alum Danielle Morill, are part of startups launching on the record today (14 of the 47 Winter 2013 startups opted to present at Demo Day today on an “off the record” basis.) It’s still a hugely underrepresented minority, of course, but it is a significant step up from the balance seen in previous classes, which on average had a 4 percent ratio of female founders.

Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston told me today that this is not the result of any deliberate “affirmative action” type initiative on the part of its partners. YC is simply seeing a greater number of talented women apply for its program, she said. Also, Livingston said, more of the female founders in the Winter 2013 class are serving as team leaders in the CEO role than they’d seen in any other past class.

There is still a long way to go before we hit the goal recently laid out by Sheryl Sandberg of full 50-50 gender representation in the upper realms of technology and business (and on an anecdotal note, there was still absolutely zero line for the women’s room here at YC Demo Day.) But if Y Combinator continues to fill its role as a smaller bellwether of what’s to come to the larger industry, this could show that the world of tech executives is slowly but surely moving toward more gender diversity.

XX Chromosome shirt pictured above available on Etsy by Xenotees

The Portland-based Vizify came out of TechStars’ accelerator in 2011 with the goal of helping everyday people turn their personal data — the stuff that’s fragmented across scores of profiles, networks and websites — into one, unified visual profile. Essentially, piggybacking on the rise of digital portfolio platforms that aim to recast how we use the resume, Vizify wants to help change how we build our identities online.

Shortly thereafter, Vizify won support from Tim Draper, Feedburner co-founder Matt Shobe and others to do that. Now, eight months from launch, with 250K users, a partnership with Twitter and a redesigned mobile experience under its belt, the startup is finally emerging from beta today with a new update up its sleeve. (This means no more “invite” code required.)

Previously, Vizify has tried to be About.me on steroids, offering users their own personal websites populated by their social data. The sites essentially Hoover data from your Foursquare, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts to create a simple profile and a “unified dossier,” if you will.

Coming out of beta today, Vizify is expanding on that experience with “Vizcards,” which are essentially bite-sized infographics about you, designed to be easy to customize and publish on your Vizify profile or social network of choice. Users can showcase their achievements, interests and quirks and help you present yourself personally or professionally online.

Again, Vizcards can be added to your bio or published on social media channels as a single graphic. CEO Todd Silverstein says that it’s an easy way for social media uber users down to the experimental novice to show what makes them tick and what matters. The team explains in detail how Vizcards work in this blog post, but, essentially, users start by choosing a topic that matters to them from Vizify’s library of subjects.

For example, take “cups of coffee” (in my case Red Bull), which allows you to share how many cups you’ve had, while enabling you to customize the mood these cups of coffee have inspired, the color and so on. You can then display these cards in a collection on your bio in a cascading, Pinterest-style layout, or on social media. In a way that’s mobile and tablet friendly.

“We think the lines between your professional and personal identity online are blurring,” Silverstein tells us. “For instance, our research with hiring managers told us that their biggest pain point was finding a cultural fit. Our vizcard prompts are designed to address that; they showcase your achievements, but also your interests, and quirks.”

More on Vizcards here.

Y Combinator Demo Day, where 47 startups are taking the stage to pitch investors and press, continues to roll along. Here are short descriptions of the second group of presenting companies (the descriptions in the headlines come from the companies themselves).

As we mentioned earlier, it’s a smaller batch of startups this time around, and since many of them are presenting on an off-the-record basis, this is the last group that we’ll be able to write about today.

Screenhero: Screen sharing

Screenhero is a screen-sharing tool that goes beyond simply showing what’s happening on one screen to let people collaborate together in real-time. With Screenhero, two people can be actively working on the same screen together, distinguished from each other with a uniquely colored mouse pointer. Since the app launched in December, Screenhero says it has seen 76 percent monthly growth — and in March alone its user numbers have tripled, with staffers from Facebook, GitHub, and Salesforce using the tool at work every day. Screenhero’s first goal is to take on WebEx, which it dubs a “dinosaur” in the presentation and collaboration space.

The company relates what it has built to YC alum Dropbox, since it’s “one of those products that lots of people want, but you have to get a lot of little things right” in order for it to actually be useful. Read more about Screenhero here.

PayTango: Biometric ID as a service

Paying with slabs of plastic is an antiquated practice. PayTango wants to let you make purchases with your fingerprint. Its technology converts biometric data into traditional card data so it can integrate with existing point of service hardware. That means with just an additional fingerprint reader any store can quickly get set up with PayTango. In the immediate future, the startup plans to work with gyms, restaurants, and convenience stores. But its founder says “We can replace membership cards, loyalty cards, and even ID cards. This is just the beginning.”

While payment cards may be on the way out, PayTango will have to compete with a slew of mobile wallets that are based on your phone. PayTango may need to rely on its strength in security, and focus on businesses where verified identity is critical. That might not be your local quickie mart. Read more about PayTango here.

Strikingly: Mobile optimized site builder

Mobile optimized Strikingly is the website builder for the mobile age. Since its launch seven months ago, over 25,000 websites have been built using its tool and the startup is seeing 40 percent revenue growth. Strikingly’s platform allows users with little or no development background to create a global optimized website in around 30 minutes.

The founders are aiming to do for website building what Twitter has done for blogging, simplify it, and bring up the example of a blind person who easily created their website on Strikingly. “Mobile has reopened the entire website building market,” the founder asserted, viewing their market as the 75 percent of US small businesses like event planners that still don’t have a unique website.

Ready more about Strikingly here.

Prizeo: Celebrity raffles

Prizeo is a startup that runs raffles to let fans of brands and celebrities donate to causes and win prizes for their social media influence into actual funding for charitable causes. The company already counts boy band One Direction, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, and singer Alicia Keys as users of its platform; and at Demo Day, the company announced a partnership with talent agency superpower William Morris Endeavor, which has selected Prizeo to be the preferred digial partner for all its clients.

According to Prizeo, it’s not only charities that benefit from celebrity- and brand-oriented philanthropy: Raffles are a great way to collect rich consumer data, making Prizeo a unique way to monetize and expand influence. The potential here is big, the company says — there are tens of thousands of “influencers” with hundreds of millions of fans around the world, and brands have told the company that they are willing to spend some $50,000 per campaign. Read more coverage of Prizeo here.

StyleUp: Daily fashion emails

Designed to replace fashion magazines, StyleUp delivers daily, personalized fashion advice emails to women. The emails show off an outfit tuned to the recipient’s taste and that day’s weather, and they’re getting a stunning 70 percent open rate. That’s much better than the 14 percent industry average. The fashion magazine market is worth $2 billion but it’s dying out. Some top mags saw a 15 percent to 20 percent drop in newsstand sales last year. Meanwhile Style Up is seeing 20 percent monthly growth. Brands will likely be willing to pay to get in front of StyleUp’s users. While it might not be revolutionary, translating an important offline market to the web and augmenting it with personalization can be an easy route to success.

Read more coverage of StyleUp here.

Lollipuff: Authentic product auction

Ebay of designer goods Lollipuff attempts to take the risk out of buying designer goods online by serving its customers with an authentication layer on luxury items from Chanel, Louboutin, and Herve Leger.

Since its soft launch in January, the platform has fulfilled over $45,000 in orders, growing 10x in 3 months. The startup has also seen 13 percent month-over-month user growth in the same amount of time.

Founder Fei Deyle came up with the idea after starting a successful blog as a designer authenticator. Deyle brings up the crux of the buying designer goods online problem in one statistic: 75% of Herve Legier sold on eBay is fake “Would you spend $3k on ‘Chanel’?” Eventually she’d like to scale this authentication process by a combination of software and human expertise.

“Over half of our users have never used eBay before,” she says, estimating the authentic designer retail market to be at $30 billion. Read more coverage of Lollipuff here.

Swish: Preorder platform

Billing itself as “Kickstarter, but only for pre-orders,” Swish says it is filling a gap that is deliberately left open by Kickstarter, which emphatically states on its official website that it is a crowdfunding platform and “not a store.” Swish says that today, individual hardware creators are creating their own sales and pre-order software, since there is no good solution out there — until now. Swish has made a full-service pre-order platform that handles listings, payments, escrow, and fulfillments. It seems to be hitting a nerve: Since launching last month, Swish has already become profitable. Going forward, Swish says it aims to be the marketplace on which a new generation of hardware sales will take place.

Read more coverage of Swish here.

Semantics3: Product data

How do ecommerce shops know which products to sell and how much to sell them for? Semantics3 wants to use big data to answer those questions. Its audacious goal is to index all the products and all the prices on the web in one centralized location. It then sells a data license or API access to ecommerce merchants. This lets them see who else is selling the products they’re selling, how much they’re charging, how their prices are changing, and what products are doing well. And beyond traditional ecommerce, Semantic3 wants to help app developers and other verticals as well.

If it can sell a $12,000 a year license to just the top 1% of the 2 million US ecommerce merchants, it could start earning $240 million a year and help a new wave of commerce entrepreneurs succeed. Read more coverage of Semantics3 here.

Medisas: Transfer patient info between shifts

Medisas is a a software as a service startup that wants to replace the piece of paper (!) that doctors use to transfer information to each other between shifts.

Medias founder Gautam Sivakumar brings up a scary statistic that 66 percent of all serious medical errors stem from errors on these notes, resulting in the deaths of 10k people every month.

Optimized for web tablet and mobile, Shanharam assert that their SAAS powers a better doctor shift handoff and is a $1 billion market, “Enterprise sales happen fast when people are dying,” he says. He sees the opportunity as much bigger than just the handoff notes, which he calls “the spine of the medical record market.” “We can eventually save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” he says.

Swapbox: Drop box for packages

Swapbox is a system of automated kiosks for people to pick up their packages at their convenience by entering in pin codes sent to their mobile devices. The aim here is to make it so that people “never miss a delivery” again, a pain that the Swapbox folks say they know too well: In a clever part of their Demo Day pitch, Swapbox’s co-founder said his team was not wearing company logo t-shirts due to a missed UPS delivery.

Swapbox, which currently has 18 kiosk locations active in San Francisco and has inked a deal for a 15 kiosk pilot in Houston, claims that they have a leg up on Amazon Lockers (and, presumably, YC alum-turned-Google acquisition Bufferbox) because it’s an independent company — “Simply put, Amazon Lockers only work for Amazon,” Swapbox says. “Everybody can use a Swapbox.” Charging $2 per package, Swapbox says that it can quickly scale up to a $150 million annual revenue run rate with 10,000 locations — and that’s just 10 percent of the addressable market. Read our earlier coverage of Swapbox here.

Wefunder: Startup investing for everyman

“We are not simply giving startups dumb money,” says Wefunder’s co-founder. His company is an equity crowdfunding platform that creates rich profiles for startups and lets anyone invest in exchange for owning part of the dream. Or at least it will when the JOBS Act is up and running.

Investors can cash out when their startup goes public, gets acquired, or sells stock on the secondary market. Wefunder will have to compete with FundersClub from the last Y Combinator class and other equity crowdfunders. But if the JOBS Act goes into effect as expected, it could make bottom tier venture capitalists obsolete. That’s because like top tier VCs, Wefunder believes the crowd can add value along with their cash. With 60 investors instead of a round of six comes an army of evangelists, recruiters, marketers, and testers who could give their startups an edge. Read more coverage of Wefunder here.

Zenefits: Automated employee benefits

Zenefits wants to eliminate the pain involved in offering employee benefits and health insurance for smaller companies. After going through this difficult process as a two-time founder, Zenefits founder Parker Conrad knew there was an easier way.

“Usually setting up health benefits involve a couple of weeks and a dozen trips to the fax machine,” Conrad says, “Zenefits is ‘set it and forget it,’” mechanizing a process that has thus far been completed using people and paper.

With Zenefits all a small business needs to do is enter a new employee’s 401k info like name, email, salary, stock options, and hire date, and the startup generates an offer letter and a flow for getting insurance memberships up and running.

The service is offered free to clients, but makes revenue as a form of lead generation for insurance companies, making a $50k a year commission per company. “It’s rare to have a free service to clients with such significant reoccurring revenue,” Conrad says. Read more coverage of Zenefits here.

Terascore: School test software

Teachers spend an unbelievable amount of time grading tests. Terascore is building a tool to let these educators create and administer tests online. That means a lot less time checking to see if everyone knows the capital of Idaho. Terascore piggybacks on the trend of everyone carrying smartphones and tablets, so teachers don’t need to book computer lab time to give a test. They’ll also be able to give students real-time feedback to improve learning.

In a surprising move, Terascore’s business model is to get teachers, not school districts, to pay for its platform. The districts are just too slow moving, but the startup believes teachers will pay $9 a month and change their behavior to get more of their precious off-hours back. Read more coverage of Terascore here.

Lawdingo: Lawyer marketplace

Lawdingo purports to have created the most efficient way to conduct legal services, with an online platform where lawyers and clients can connect, consult, and even exchange payments. According to the company, with its growing consumer traffic levels and more than 600 lawyers plugged into its service, Lawdingo today is comparable in scope and scale to some of the largest law firms in the world. The site lets people search for help using natural language — type in “I hate my wife,” for example, and you get results for divorce lawyers (no kidding).

This is a big market: Legal services is a $250 billion market annually in the US, and law firm advertising is a $4.5 billion market. This startup aims to “elegantly” address both sides. Read more about Lawdingo here.

Meldium: Password manager for companies

Meldium is a single sign-in layer for teams, an account and password manager alternative to the horribly inefficient and insecure spreadsheet most companies currently use.

With Meldium, a given team signs up for a single Meldium account, and members can use it in the form of a browser extension, enabling sign ins for some 400 independent apps, including Box, Github, Salesforce, Box and Google Apps.

“When you fire someone you know they’re out,” founder Boris Jabes said, on the benefits of Meldium versus something like Google Docs to hold sensitive login information. The startup currently has 2,000 users and companies seem to be adopting Meldium from the bottom up because of the problem it solves, “My office manager can use this!”

The founders estimate the size of the market as $1.3 billion a year, with 55 million knowledge workers and 2 percent of that paying for the premium version. “It’s 2013 and we have these amazing cloud services managed with a spreadsheet,” Jabes reiterates. Read more about Meldium here.

Goldbely: Fab for food

Goldbely connects its customer base of “Food Explorers” with the most interesting foods from iconic restaurants all over the country, delivering Chicago deep-dish pizza, Texas barbecue, Buffalo chicken wings, and the like to anywhere in the US within a matter of hours. Goldbely prides itself on shipping these items in top-notch condition to ensure that they taste exactly like they would on site.

And it seems to be taking off. Goldbely, which today announced a partnership with Facebook Gifts, says it just broke $100,000 in total sales and is seeing 100 percent month-over-month growth since its late 2012 launch, with 50 percent of its customers coming back as repeat users. Goldbely says it’s targeting a $11 billion market that is incredibly fragmented and dominated by lackluster brands — the top three players in the food gifting space are Omaha Steaks, 1-800 Flowers, and Harry & David, not exactly gourmet food providers. Read our earlier coverage of Goldbely here.

Most of us have faced that sense of dread that comes when our phones lay drained and dysfunctional right when we need them the most. Sure, we could beat ourselves up for not charging them as long as we should have (or perhaps making a bad choice of phones), but that’s where this particularly cute Kickstarter project comes into play. Devotec’s Fuel micro charger is a terribly tiny rechargeable external battery for when a smartphone’s charge goes south at an inopportune moment.

How small is it? Think “clip it to your keychain small.” And it’s shaped like a little gas can! How quaint.

As you could probably guess from its size, there’s only so much juice you’ll be able to squeeze out of this thing. The Fuel’s internal battery is only capable of holding about 500mAh worth of charge, which Devotec figures will give your smartphone up to a half hour of extra talk time — more than enough to fire off a few frenzied emails or to make a brief emergency call or two. I’ve come to appreciate bulkier fare like Mophie’s PowerStation Duo, but folks looking for a pint-sized lifesaver that won’t weigh down their bags will find something to like here.

For this first production run, Devotec is focusing mostly on churning out Fuel chargers with microUSB connectors, but the team is also plugging away on Lightning versions for the iPhone 5s in your life. There’s still no ETA on when to expect them though, so iPhone 5 owners may want to look elsewhere for now — after all, the first-party microUSB-to-Lightning adapter costs nearly as much as the Fuel itself.

Devotec’s Kickstarter campaign launched less than a week ago and the team has already blown past its $20,000 funding goal, but you can still lock in your order for a microUSB model for around $18 at this point. The final retail version will cost $25, so the cheapskates among you may want to jump on this now (like I just did).

A new partnership between mobile game publisher Playdek and Wizards of the Coast, famed creator of Magic: The Gathering and other tabletop games will bring Dungeons & Dragons to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch later this year. Playdek will be developing officially sanctioned and licensed titles that bring various Wizards of the Coast tabletop experiences to iOS devices, with the first such efforts slated to go live sometime in 2013.

The full details of the arrangement weren’t shared in an official release announcing the news, in which Playdek CEO just said that it was “thrilled to to work with Wizards of the Coast” in order to “re-create this compelling entertainment in a mobile form.” Playdek has a solid reputation, though: it created the Penny Arcade card game for iOS devices that takes a lot of cues from Wizards of the Coast classics like Magic: The Gathering.

Speaking of Magic, that’s a title that already has an iOS offering from previous Wizards of the Coast efforts not involving Playdek. Magic 2013 is a freemium title with virtual decks that can be purchased in-app which Wizards of the Coast released last year. On its own, the company (which is owned by Hasbro) has also released iOS games based on its popular Kaijudo franchise, but we’ve yet to see an officially blessed Dungeons & Dragons property hit the App Store.

If there can be said to be a definitive name in digital tabletop games, it’s definitely Carlsbad, Calif.-based Playdek. In addition to the Penny Arcade game mentioned above, the company’s Ascension series has been lauded with accolades and positive reviews. Playdek was founded in 2011 by Jeff Garstecki, Gary Weis and Joel Goodman, all vets of Sony Computer Entertainment America and THQ’s Incinerator Studios. The company has raised $1.56 million in funding to date from a seed round and an Angel round, with investors including Greycroft Partners.

The partnership with Wizards of the Coast might be a perfect storm of Playdek’s digital tabletop genre choices and the source material that holds a special place among its core target audience. Definitely looking forward to tracking the progress of this new partnership.

Before the pitches kicked off at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day, partner Paul Graham said the incubator was stricter than ever when selecting the current batch — there are 47 companies demonstrating today, compared to 75 in the last session.

“There are hardly any startups in this batch that are bad,” Graham said.

For that reason, he claimed that it will be just as hard for investors at this demo day as in the past to select the best startups. That’s a general complaint about demo days in general, especially YC’s (where there are more presentations, and those presentations are only a few minutes long), but Graham said it’s not about the format. When it comes to choosing winners, Graham said, “if it seems like it’s hard, it actually is hard.” He added that it’s best to think about the presentations as a “live action” name tag, and that investors should make their real decisions after talking to the founders.

Graham offered a few more details about the process in a short conversation before the event. He said that this time around, YC looked at “predictors of failure,” not just “predictors of success.” For example, he said that in the past YC might have chosen a company that had great founders (a predictor of success), but this time it might have filtered that same company out because those founders, while great individually, all hate each other (a predictor of failure). He also wrote about the methodology back in December.

As for what he means when he says there are fewer bad startups, Graham said he normally ranks all the companies, then goes down the list to find the point at which he’s comfortable predicting that a startup won’t be one of the big hits coming out of Demo Day. This time he didn’t reach that point until five or six companies before the bottom, which is unusual.

To be clear, Graham said this isn’t the first time YC decreased class size — it also did so right before Graham and YC partner Jessica Livingston had a child together. (He pointed out that the smaller class had Airbnb in it, so being stricter didn’t prevent YC from landing a big hit.) However, Graham said this is the most serious the firm has been about cutting back.

It’s Demo Day time once again for Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has become a Silicon Valley institution since shaping its first class of startups back in 2005.

A handful of us TechCrunch writers are here in Mountain View, Calif, at the Computer History Museum, where the 47 startups that made up YC’s Winter 2012 class are set to pitch to a room filled with tech investors, executives and press (as you’ll see from our co-bylined posts, covering YC Demo Day is a group effort.)

This is the 16th ever Demo Day being put on by YC, and this class is notably smaller than the past two startup classes to graduate out of the program — 66 startups graduated from YC’s Winter 2012 class, and 84 startups graduated out of Summer 2012.

Kicking off the event with onstage remarks, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said that he feels like the contracted size of this class means that there are essentially no weak startups in the bunch — which will make it more competitive for the investors on hand. All of YC’s Winter 2013 companies are in the process of raising equity funding, aside from one company that is a non-profit, which is looking for donations. All the founders will be adhering to the recently composed “Handshake Protocol” when negotiating investments on-site, he said.

As always, TechCrunch will be on hand with full Demo Day coverage. Not all of these startups are ready for publicity — so some are presenting their apps on an “off the record” basis — but we’ll be covering all the on the record pitches in a series of posts. We’ll also be reporting our analysis of the best of the bunch and the larger trends we see.

Here are the 16 companies that presented in the first on-the-record batch from YC Winter 2013 Demo Day:

Wevorce: The tech-powered standard for civilized divorce

Wevorce offers a system for handling divorces that attempts to avoid the pain and cost of going to court. It covers six broad steps — divorce planning, co-parent planning, a parenting agreement, financial mapping, financial agreements, and divorce settlement. Its service is a combination of divorce professionals and online tools.

Apparently, the system is working for early customers. The company says that 109 out of 110 Wevorce clients have never gone to court with their divorce cases.

Airware: The DOS of drones

Designed to be the DOS of drones, Airware is building an app development platform for unmanned aircraft. While drones have historically been expensive and predominantly for military use, they’re getting cheaper, smaller, and used for commerical purposes like search and rescue, infrastructure inspections, open air mining operations, and much more. While other companies are building the software that handles the basics of keeping a drone in the air, Airware’s platform is for designing apps that tell drones where to fly and what to do. It works with a drone’s sensors, navigation, and communication systems to help developers create powerful apps. Airware expects to have 20 customers and $4 million in revenue in 2013. The fact is that drones are going to change a lot of businesses, but the technology’s application creates a big barrier to entry. Airware could help businesses fly right into drone tech.

FlightCar: Airport car sharing

Flightcar is a car-sharing startup that is specifically focused on travel around airports. Car owners drive to the Flightcar location that’s five minutes away from a given airport, drop off their cars and get black car service to their flights. With Flightcar, owners are guaranteed free parking, a free car wash, curbside pickup and dropoff and even make make money if the car is rented. From the rentals side of the business, Flightcar is the cheapest car rental agency at SFO. Launched 10 weeks ago, the startup has seen 450 rentals of over 220 vehicles — since launch it’s seeing 10 percent week-on-week growth in revenue, and it’s currently making $12,000 in revenue in just a week. Seventy-five percent of the cars parked at Flightcar have been rented so far. The founders see the market as a combination of the $11 billion a year rental market and $5 billion a year airport parking market. “A huge opportunity,” they said. Read our earlier coverage of FlightCar here.

Fivetran: A spreadsheet for number crunchers

There’s a big hole in the spreadsheet market. There’s easy, but weak Excel on the low end, and powerful but complicated MatLab and SPSS on the high end. Fivetran wants to combine professional functionality with consumer-level accessibility to create the spreadsheet for the big data era. Fivetran’s founder explained that once upon a time, there were typists, but now everyone does their own word processing. He believes that though today there are data scientists, everyone will eventually work with data themselves, and Fivetran could be their tool. For more info, read our launch story for Fivetran.

Thalmic: A wearable gesture device

Thalmic Labs is developing the MYO, a device for gesture controls — it’s an armband instead of a camera. The limitation with camera-based systems like the Kinect is that you have to perform a limited set of gestures in a fixed space. The company is pitching this as a “once in a generation” shift in human-computer interfaces. You can read more TechCrunch coverage of Thalmic and the MYO here and here.

CircuitLab: Circuit design tools

CircuitLab makes browser-based circuit design tools, aiming to replace the painful DOS-era tools still being used by electrical engineers. Already CircuitLab says it has become a de facto standard of where people talk about circuits online according to its founders — “a tool that stays with you for decades.”

The founders estimate their market to be $500 million, because of CircuitLabs’ influence over which components the developers using the platform choose and targeting companies like Nintendo who compete to sell parts. They describe the product as “Adwords inside an engineering tool.” Upstream of the supply chain, the startup is seeing 15 percent week over week growth, with 80,000 users since its launch a year ago. Read our previous coverage of CircuitLab here.

SimplyInsured: Kayak for health insurance

SimplyInsured describes itself as the Kayak for health insurance. The company says that the process normally goes through a health insurance broker, and thanks to the involvement of paper, phone calls and faxes, it can take two to three days to get a quote. Plus, it says that thanks to Obamacare’s reduction in commissions, there are 20 million policies that can no longer be served by traditional brokers.

With SimplyInsured, you don’t need a broker. You just go online and get side-by-side comparisons of all the major providers. The company has been seeing 60 percent monthly growth in recurring revenue for the past six months.

Zaranga: Vacation rental marketplace

Zaranga wants to bring demand-based dynamic pricing to the vacation rentals market. It wants to do what Airbnb did to Craigslist, but to incumbent vacation rental-by-owner site VRBO. Zaranga addresses the special needs of property managers including special integration, custom terms and conditions, and variable pricing to make sure they get the highest rate possible. The site’s listings are nearly doubling each month. The “Airbnb for…” model might seem a bit tired, but there’s still unused inventory in plenty of verticals. So while Silicon Valley might want something fresh, it doesn’t mean Zaranga won’t succeed. Check out our launch story for more info on Zaranga.

Microryza: Kickstarter for science

Microryza is essentially a Kickstarter for academic research, hoping to fund “the long tail of ideas,” according to its founders. Over the past five weeks the platform has doubled week over week in projects submitted, and already researchers from Stanford and Harvard have used Microryza to fund projects instead of getting grants. Coming up with the idea after difficulties getting grants for research around a treatment for Anthrax, the founders highlighted some notable projects raising money on the platform, including a project aiming to kill sperm with the cancer gene and around cannibalism in the Tyrannosaurus. The startup has also already seen some notoriety, having been one of the top stories on Reddit and even garnering a quote from Bill Gates: “This solution helps close the gap for potentially promising but unfunded projects.”

With Microryza, research is no longer limited to universities. “It turns everyone with a credit card card into a modern day patron of science,” the founder said. Read our launch coverage of Microryza here.

Buildzoom: Yelp for contractors

BuildZoom connects contractors with remodeling jobs. The goal, the company says, is to build “a national remodeling brand.” It also claims to offer more contractor listings than other sites (for example it has 20,138 contractor listings in San Francisco) and to offer deeper information in those listings. It started by pulling government listings on licensed contractors, and is now supplementing its information with data from the Better Business Bureau too.

The company makes money by partnering with contractors and charging them a 7 percent commission. You can read more in our launch coverage.

Errplane: Real-time application monitoring

When a developer’s app performance suffers, so does their wallet. They want to know immediately if something’s wrong. Errplane is a real-time application monitoring system that alerts developers via email, text, or chat when the performance of their app degrades. It’s been rapidly signing up customers, moving some to paid services, and 38 of the 300 that signed up in the week since its public launch already have Errplane deployed for their apps. That underlines how easy it is to set up the system. It also supports next-generation languages like Node.js. Right now it pulls in all of a developer’s data and crunches it itself to check for performance fluctuations. This year, it plans to start doing on-premise deployments so that huge developers with too much data to upload to the cloud, or security or regulation issues preventing them from doing so can crunch the data on their own servers.

In one of the most aggressive pitches of the day, Errplane lashed out at its incumbent competitor, saying “We’re going to turn New Relic, into a relic.” Check out our launch story on Errplane for more info.

Padlet: Put stuff online

Drag and drop website collaboration tool Padlet is “the easiest way to put stuff on the internet” according to its founder. Over 300K monthly users from 197 countries create content on the site every month, seeing 30 percent growth a month for the last seven months. The product is “deceptively simple” but the founder compares it to Twitter as such, “If something has enormous growth it means it’s solving a fundamental problem, so are we.”

The founders described the typical Padlet use case as needing to share images of Abraham Lincoln for a class, asserting that Google Docs or Facebook wouldn’t quite cut it. The company hopes to monetize by attracting hundreds of millions of people to its simple tool, 2 percent of which are (hopefully) paid. Read our earlier launch coverage of Padlet here.

BitNami: App store for server apps

BitNami is an app store for enterprise applications that runs in the cloud or behind your company’s firewall. The founders say that you can search for apps on the site, hit the “launch” button, and have an app that’s configured and ready to use in minutes.

The company is already profitable, with millions of dollars in recurring revenue (presumably annually). Customers include MasterCard, Boeing, and Fiat. And it says there are 1 million new deployments of its software every month. You can read more in our launch coverage here.

Teespring: Kickstarter for T-shirts

This clothing startup wants to make you proud of what you wear. Across the web and the world, there are communities rallying around interests and causes. Their members want to declare their affiliation, and would happily buy a piece of clothing with the group’s name on it. But producing and paying for the merch up front can be risky. Teespring lets any group upload a clothing design, like a slogan, to put on a t-shirt, and set up a page to sell it. They promote the page to their group members, and when people click to purchase, Teespring prints and delivers the clothing. Then it splits the profit with the group.

Teespring is one of the hot Demo Day startups because it joined Y Combinator when it was already earning serious revenue. Since then it’s been growing 46 percent per month and will do $750,000 in revenue in April alone. Its founder Walker Williams claims Teespring will be bigger than Threadless by the end of the year. The Internet is bringing together like minds, and Teespring could help people express their affinities in the real world, while funding the groups and earning a tidy profit itself. Read our earlier coverage here.

Posmetrics: POS feedback on tablets

Posmetrics is an iPad-based, real time feedback platform at point of sale. Making its public debut this march, the platform has already signed up 74 local SF businesses, including hotels, retail stores and restaurants, and is seeing 41 percent week over week growth. Twenty-three out of those businesses have converted to paid users.

The founders call the response aggregation tool a “real time pulse on location” and hope to pick up some of the millions that chains like Sears spend on broken feedback systems. Their research shows that 35.6 percent of customers give feedback when stories use Posmetrics to cull it, versus the very inefficient 1.9 percent that respond with email surveys. The product also alerts managers immediately to negative responses.

The founders assert that clients have seen a 1.5 Tripadvisor star increase since using the platform, and that even a one-star Tripadvisor increase results in 28 percent greater revenue. The startup hopes that its subscription model will eventually be used in over 1.1 million retail stores. Read our launch coverage of Posmetrics here.

Watsi: A nonprofit to fund treatments

Watsi is Y Combinator’s first nonprofit. (Or, as YC’s Paul Graham joked, it’s the incubator’s first company that’s “intentionally” not-for-profit.) It’s a crowdfunding platform for global health care. For example, the first patient it helped was a 12-year-old girl in Nepal whose parents couldn’t afford transportation to the country’s capital for surgery. Watsi’s community crowdfunded the project in eight days.
The company says that it’s working with 13 medical organizations, and that it funds 17 patients per week on average. And 100 percent of the donations go directly to fund the medical care, with Watsi planning to cover costs several ways, including optional tips. You can read more of our coverage here.

Google today announced that it has redesigned some of Google Analytics‘ social reports to make it easier for publishers to see when they get inbound links from other sites. The update also makes it easier to track how people are engaging with a publisher’s content through the new Data Hub Activity report. Google Analytics’ Social Data Hub gets this data from partner sites like Reddit, and Digg, through commenting systems like Disqus, Echo and Livefyre, as well as a number of other services.

The standalone Data Hub Activity report provides publishers with a “timeline of the number of activities that have occurred in the Social Data Hub and the raw activities in a list below.” The data can also be filtered by specific networks.

This Social Hub data was already available previously, but it was mostly buried inside Google Analytics’ social reports. Now that this data is more visible, integrating with the Analytics Social Data Hub will surely become more interesting for companies that operate social networks and platforms, as more Analytics users will now be aware of it and ask for this kind of integration so they can track their social engagement data in one place.

Stats about trackbacks, too, were already available in Google Analytics, but they are now available in a standalone report. Previously, however, it was hard to see how important a certain inbound link really was. The new report, Google says, now provides more context “for the significance of each of these trackbacks by displaying the number of visits that were driven by each endorsing URL during the reporting period.”

Shipping things to your house is so 2011, so companies like Amazon are setting up physical lockers for you to pick your online orders up from. Today, Walmart has announced that they’re testing a similar program in about twelve stores.

Basically, you can go online, order all of the things that you want, and your items will show up in this locker rather than your doorstep. This means that you can pick it up anytime you want, within two weeks. It’s a convenience thing for sure, and the reason why Google bought Y Combinator company Bufferbox and the reason why a company like Swapbox can emerge.

We’d show you what the lockers would look like, but Walmart PR didn’t have any photos available since they haven’t been rolled out. I tried to get an artist’s rendering, but it probably just looks something like this:

UPDATE: Our resident beautification expert, Bryce Durbin, has come up with an artistic rendering of what the Walmart lockers might look like:

Clearly, Walmart has a slew of stores, around 4,000, with the company telling us that two-thirds of the U.S. population is located near a Walmart store. That’s mind-boggling when you think about it. With as many potential customers as Walmart has, it’s key to be able to cater to all of the needs that shoppers have. Sure, there will still be people who like to come in and browse, but for most of what Walmart has, you just need to get it when you need it.

Walmart executives tell us that mobile is a huge part of the company’s future, allowing shoppers to scan items in and check out on their own. What does this move to automation mean for, you know, actual human beings who work there? We’re told that those folks will now have time to do other things like stock shelves.

One overheard quote from Walmart’s media day was “E-commerce brought the store to the web, but mobile takes the web to the store.” That’s an interesting concept for sure, especially when you open up the Walmart app and it enters “store mode.” Yes, a subset of Walmart stores are geo-fenced and will help you navigate around the aisles and pick up the things you need.

With so many stores, Walmart can do some interesting and wild testing to see what catches on. Will people want to order things and pick them up from a locker? Time will tell. What we do know is that the postal service as we know it is in serious trouble. With companies like Amazon and Walmart hacking the shipping system to bring items to people, seemingly overnight, it will be hard for the government to keep up.