27-year-old Danielle Morrill is co-founder and CEO of the new start-up Referly.

Referly aims to introduce incentives into discussions by regular people about regular things, by embedding affiliate links in their conversations. At launch today, it is a link shortener that appends an affiliate tracking code.

Many other companies, including MyLikes and Klout, try to reward people for their social media participation, but Morrill said she thinks they end up rewarding self-promoters and scammers rather than average people.

Referly has already raised seed funding and been accepted into the next Y Combinator round, and since then Morrill convinced her husband, Kevin Morrill, to join as co-founder and CTO from an engineering role at HelloFax, she said. Designer Al Abut, formerly of AOL, is also a co-founder.

Twilio recently hired former Jive exec Lynda Smith as chief marketing officer.

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, a short Ark pitch delivered in the midst of 64 other start-up presentations got the company commitments for $2 million in funding in a single day. And more than 250,000 people have signed up for Ark beta invites.

Less than a month after Demo Day, Ark now tells me that it has raised a $4.2 million seed round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Salesforce, Tencent, Transmedia Capital, and a bunch of individual angel investors.

That’s the largest seed round ever raised by a Y Combinator company. Update: Paul Graham of Y Combinator says the program does not track such statistics, so he cannot confirm that Ark’s is the largest seed round to date. Thus, I’ve updated the headline to “biggest seed round in memory” from “biggest seed round ever.”

The round benchmarks Ark as a clear front-runner in the most recent batch of the program’s closely watched start-ups. (Though to be fair, I’ve heard other top companies in the winter class are also cleaning up.)

Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.

And it actually is too good to be true — right now, Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access, as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.

Ark co-founder and CEO Patrick Riley

But Ark CEO Patrick Riley, who was previously working on his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, is clear about his ambition. “Google seems so out of touch without the rest of us,” he told me last week. “They’ve lost their neutrality.”

The rift between Google and Facebook leaves social search dramatically underdeveloped, Riley said (and it’s a point I’ve argued, as well).

“Politics have left open this enormous opportunity,” is how Riley put it.

Part of what’s hard about social search is that Facebook prohibits outside crawlers. But Riley said he’s confident that he can get Facebook data, because he has gotten advice from Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, and has worked with Facebook’s legal team to make sure everything’s kosher.

So why should anyone care about “people search”? Beyond the age-old attraction of researching and stalking people, Riley described Ark as an automated “About.me of everyone,” that collates various social profiles.

Riley also said Ark is planning to beef up its social-discovery tools, so users can find new activity and interest partners inside and outside their networks. There will also eventually be an Ark equivalent of Google AdWords, where users can pay to promote themselves, he said.

Riley wants to develop a reputation and validation tool that fingerprints a person by comparing their social graphs on different networks. Because many sites and apps improve with a better sense of who is using them, he plans to provide social-data plug-ins to other companies.

After being founded just last summer and coming into focus during the three-month YC program, Ark already has a team of 16 employees, including co-founder Yiming Liu, also from Berkeley’s iSchool. And now it has a bunch of money to hire more.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Pair's "thumbkiss" feature vibrates two users' phones when they virtually touch thumbs.

I’m four days behind covering Pair’s launch, but in that time it’s been downloaded 50,000 times, with users sharing 1 million messages — pretty impressive growth for an app that’s not really viral at all, given only two people would ever be connected on it at a time.

Four days is too short to measure retention, but each couple on Pair is sharing an average of 30 messages per day, said co-founder Aswinkumar Rajendiran.

The Pair app is pretty rudimentary, and only available on the iPhone now, but the idea makes a lot of sense. Plus, you have to give them a little credit; when the team started at Y Combinator in January they were building a 3-D CAD app for tablets.

Pair goes a bit beyond just being a more private and intimate version of the same photos and messages you’d share on Facebook, Instagram and Path, as there are some features specific to couples. For instance, one cute idea is a “thumbkiss,” where users can press their thumbs against their screens at the time. When the thumbs line up, the two phones vibrate. Beat that, FaceTime!

Pair told investors at Demo Day that it will soon close its funding round, with participation from SV Angel and Dave Morin.

“Demo Day” will be held for the first time as one grand event at the Computer History Museum, after the end-of-program affair had swelled into multiple sessions over multiple days as it outgrew the orange-walled Y Combinator offices time and again.

“YC” is the influential start-up accelerator that has produced hits like Dropbox and Airbnb and also helped reshape the start-up world around the ideal of its young, hacker-led teams. Over the years, it has become a sort of entrepreneurial grad school; in fact, YC recently announced it will start accepting applications from groups who don’t yet have a company idea.

Some 66 start-ups participated in the current session, and more than 500 angel and venture investors are scheduled to attend.

Y Combinator created a tablet-optimized portal for investors and start-ups to connect with each other before the day ends. To give you an idea of the anticipated feeding frenzy, here’s what the firm told investors: “We recommend you sign up for the online system, because the increased opportunities to meet at Demo Day may mean that some start-ups will have handshake deals for as much money as they want by the end of Demo Day itself.”

This year’s batch of companies have each already had the opportunity to raise some $168,000 while giving up a small bit of equity, and some start-ups have already launched to the public.

The group includes one founder who is on his third round at Y Combinator. That’s Justin Kan of Exec, which he called “an Uber for TaskRabbit” when we interviewed him before it launched. Kan was formerly founder of Kiko and Justin.tv, and is also a part-time partner at Y Combinator.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user brianjmatis)

Disrupting investment banking is also particularly hip in the age of “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.”

FutureAdvisor CEO Bo Lu

The latest such start-up to launch is FutureAdvisor, which opens to the public today. The site helps users manage their index investments, and it says it is the only competitor to plug into 401(k) plans — it pulls data from 100 of the largest ones in the U.S.

Investing is “unnecessarily daunting,” FutureAdvisor CEO Bo Lu told me. “If we just bring the power of math, it’s actually not that difficult. Most people can put together a great portfolio in three funds.”

FutureAdvisor’s product is advice — it doesn’t help people move their money. Users need to have an existing 401(k), IRA or brokerage account to participate, though there’s no minimum investment. Automated advice is free, and users can pay an annual fee of up to $195 to video chat with investment advisors.

FutureAdvisor has been gestating for a while — the Seattle-based company participated in Y Combinator in 2010, and at the end of that year raised funding from Sequoia Capital, Keith Rabois and Jeremy Stoppelman.

FutureAdvisor isn’t disclosing how much it raised, in part because it’s peanuts compared to competitor Personal Capital, the wealth management start-up led by former PayPal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris, which has $27 million from IVP and Venrock.

Personal Capital, which last week launched an iPad app for asset allocation from the comfort of a touchscreen, offers tools to manage stock options, tax optimization and stock portfolios. A very basic version of the service is free, but the real product is active investment help. Users must invest a minimum of $100,000 within the system, and they pay a relatively low fee of approximately 1 percent of their assets per year.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is “focused on long-term money and complex households,” Harris said in a recent interview. Users can’t directly manipulate their holdings, but can connect to full-time financial advisors when they want to move things around.

Also in the online personal wealth management space — though I haven’t talked to them yet –  are Wealthfront, which is backed with more than $10 million from DAG Ventures and individual partners at Andreessen Horowitz, and Betterment, which raised $3 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners. Both manage investment accounts on behalf of users, while charging what they say are reduced fees.

As an aside, one thing I’ve found interesting is that FutureAdvisor, Personal Capital, and virtually every financial start-up I’ve ever talked to, pays Yodlee to hook into accounts at various financial institutions. Seems like an excellent business.

Creating a marketplace for moderately skilled labor is something lots of people are working on — TaskRabbit, Zaarly, Coffee & Power and others. What Kan is doing is the real-time, appified version of that. So if you want something done, Exec can find someone to help you with it, right now. You might pay a slight premium for that convenience. Kan calls it “an Uber for TaskRabbit.”

Exec is only available in San Francisco right now, with a team of 30 part-time errand runners. They cost a flat rate of $25, and can do things like pickups and dropoffs (of objects, not people), cleaning and research. It’s all managed through the press of a few buttons in the app.

Exec is part of the current Y Combinator class. It’s actually Kan’s third time through the start-up program. First he did the online calendar Kiko, then the video start-up Justin.tv (which still exists, but is now focused on gaming, has about 60 employees and 16 million monthly unique visitors, and is led by a co-founder). Another Justin.tv co-founder, Michael Seibel, is also at Y Combinator now, with Socialcam, a direct spinoff of Justin.tv.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user miss karen)

The new location-sharing apps promise to provide more value to users than ever — but they will surely teeter awfully close to the edge of creepy for many people.

Unless you go to Stanford or one of the 10 other colleges where it’s been tested, Glassmap may not have crossed your radar.

The stealthy-till-now company came out of the Y Combinator program last summer, and it’s specifically focused on colleges, families and tight groups of friends. The Glassmap app for iOS and Android constantly shares users’ locations and shows them on a map.

Glassmap founder Geoff Woo says his company’s secret sauce is the work it’s done around managing battery drain, a common problem with smartphone apps that use GPS. This is done through careful management of pushing and pulling data from each user’s client version of the app.

Woo contended that Glassmap is also “more social” than other passive location-sharing services that are not for dating, like Google Latitude and Apple’s Find My Friends. He noted Glassmap features such as integrated text messaging, calling and virtual “waves” (like Facebook “Pokes”). Outside of college campuses, Woo said he sees the app being used among families and close groups of friends.

Meanwhile, another new app that’s getting some attention in Silicon Valley is Highlight, which, like Glassmap, constantly transmits users’ locations, but is very different in practice.

Highlight tells iOS app users when they are in the vicinity of their Facebook friends and other people they might want to get to know, based on common friends and interests.

Highlight explicitly does not show users on a map, but rather pinpoints moments when two users are in close proximity to each other (within 150 meters). The idea is to increase serendipity.

“Highlight makes people friendlier,” co-founder Paul Davison told me.

“The real world is like Facebook where every profile is just a single photo,” Davison said. And so Highlight — which Davison started as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital — aims to put those faces in context.

Okay, sure, but what about the creepy factor? “If you build this simply enough with the right privacy controls, it could be useful to everyone in the world,” Davison argued.

I personally think Highlight is interesting, especially in the run-up to the location-sharing mecca of SXSW Interactive in Austin next month. But even in this young space, the claws are already out.

When I asked Woo what he thought of Highlight, he quickly dismissed it by saying, “You could just talk to people on the street if you really wanted to. In the mainstream world that’s not something people want to do.”

The hackers and engineers of Y Combinator are doing what hackers and engineers do to any industry, they’re efficiently and ruthlessly disrupting the traditional model of venture capital and are going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves, as broadband did to entertainment, Craigslist did to newspapers, and Amazon did to traditional retailers.

– WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

The problem with true hyper-growth … It’s the problem like baking a cake in three minutes.

— Marc Andreessen, talking about growth at Y Combinator’s Startup School this weekend

There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things. I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term. You don’t have to move out here to do this.

— Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview this weekend at Y Combinator’s Startup School event, noting that he would have stayed in Boston if he were founding the social networking site all over again.

Today AngelPad launches the 15 start-ups that comprise its third 10-week-long class.

This class was AngelPad’s first to be gifted $100,000 upon starting the program, in line with competing start-up accelerators TechStars and Y Combinator. Though most participants didn’t know about the six-figure funding when they applied, AngelPad leader Thomas Korte said it has had a significant effect on their development, allowing them to hire earlier and do things like pay for outside user interface help and spend $5,000 on Google AdWords or Facebook advertising.

Here is how the companies described themselves in a handout given to investors at AngelPad’s Demo Day this afternoon:

SourceNinja solves the legal pains, maintenance headaches, and security nightmares of using open source. Founders are former Symantec, PGP and McAfee engineers.

SimpleReach offers real-time social intelligence and content recommendation for publishers. Founders are experienced in building high performance ad systems and are repeat entrepreneurs based in NY.

LendFriend is an online platform for friends and family loans. Founders are Stanford grads and repeat entrepreneurs with experience at PayPal, UBS, Deutsche Bank and RBC.

Pipedrive is a pipeline tool for active deal makers helping them stay organized and focused on closing deals. Founders are former Skype engineers and experienced deal makers from Estonia.

Frugalo is a social savings platform enabling online shoppers to discover and share awesome offers through their social network. Founders previously worked at Digg and are engineers with a strong background in consumer products.

iDoneThis is a daily productivity check-in for individuals and teams to track and coordinate progress. Founders are a former Yelp engineer, physics PhD student and corporate lawyer.

Prizzm enables businesses to reward their customers for sharing feedback. Founder is a CRM veteran (Salesforce, Scopus, Siebel) and a second-time entrepreneur.

Buffer is a more intelligent way to share updates at optimal times to social networks. Founders are repeat entrepreneurs from the U.K. and Austria with a Master’s degree in computer science.

Wishery integrates SaaS applications with email clients to help business communicators optimize customer retention. Founders are a serial entrepreneur with deep marketing experience and a Microsoft engineer with a Master’s degree in information security.

Shoplogic gives e-commerce merchants an intelligent way to optimize and manage their promotions. Founders are engineers, scientists, and product managers from data-driven companies such as Adchemy and Khimetrics.

Kout is a dead-simple e-commerce/payments platform, designed to work seamlessly across social, mobile, web. Founders are hackers with deep affiliate marketing & e-commerce knowledge.

LikeAndy is a complete solution to manage and share mobile videos and the only place you need for your personal videos. Founders have PhDs in video streaming and processing and are ex-Googlers (Google Video and YouTube).

Storie is a mobile social media platform for publishing and sharing content in the form of photo-based articles and stories. Founder is an engineer and ex-Google and YouTube product manager.

Vungle is a platform for mobile developers to launch and manage video advertising campaigns. Founders previously ran a video start-up and are outrageous marketers, moving over from London.

Tapviva is mobile food ordering built atop a next-generation restaurant technology platform. Founders have been developing technology products together for over a decade.

Image via CoverHound blog.

Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said today that it was joining well-known investors Ron Conway and DST Global’s Yuri Milner in the Y Combinator Start Fund, which gives $150,000 to each start-up in its semi-annual group.

Andreessen Horowitz will be investing $50,000 of the total in each entrepreneurial effort, starting with the next “class” of up to five dozen companies later this month in the well-regarded incubator.

The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which is a loan that can convert if a start-up raises a funding round. Start-ups can refuse the money, although most do not.

“I can’t tell you how impressed we have been with the quality of the start-ups that Y Combinator has had,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with me this afternoon. “[Co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston] have become the consigliere to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs.”

Indeed. Y Combinator assembles these start-ups twice a year, giving them about $15,000 to work on their idea, but — more importantly — providing a lot of support and entree to powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Its efforts have been critical to the beginnings of many successful companies, such as Reddit, Loopt and Scribd.

“So many of the high quality seed deals have been coming from Y Combinator and we wanted to be close to all those companies,” said Andreessen. “It’s a great view of what’s coming next from the very best start-ups.”

In New York, there’s Grouper, which matches two groups (usually of opposite genders) of three friends to get drinks or dinner. And in San Francisco, there’s Outgoing.me, which organizes group events like wine tastings and cooking classes.

Both companies are more on the social engineering side of a tech company than the engineering engineering side, though they’re working to develop systems for scheduling logistics and personality matching.

Grouper and Outgoing.me — which have each facilitated only about 100 events — say they’re more appealing to retailers than Groupon and the like. Rather than tempting users with a deep discount, they ask would-be socializers to pay normal prices upfront.

Grouper, which is a two-month-old two-man start-up, says it’s already profitable. (It’s not to be confused with the last tech start-up named Grouper, which did online video and sold to Sony in 2006.)

Meanwhile, Outgoing.me, which launched in May, says it’s about to close a round of angel funding. The San Francisco-based company has a four-person team led by brothers Dan and Jeff Morin, who are two-time Y Combinator founders but still looking for their first big hit.

The Morins think their secret sauce will be facilitation and follow-up, so they’re training community members to lead events and putting an emphasis on helping attendees keep in contact with each other.

At this point, it’s murky whether these approaches can scale into larger businesses. Elsewhere, an alternative like Meetup.com is much more generic, and the somewhat similar Table For Six is all about dating. There’s also some other early stage competition, like Grubwithus and Spoondate.

Further reading: “How Big is the ‘Social Discovery’ Opportunity?“

“We didn’t become less selective,” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said of the latest class, his program’s thirteenth. “We funded three percent of the applicants just like we always do. It’s just a larger percentage of the total pool of start-ups is coming through Y Combinator.”

The other distinction is that Y Combinator didn’t let investors snag any participants early, as it previously has. Though some companies in the new class may have raised money already, they’re all still open to taking more funding, Graham said, revving up investors with the promise of discovering the next Airbnb or Dropbox (a.k.a. the Y Combinator all-time MVPs).

Here’s how the on-the-record start-ups describe themselves.

Aisle50: Groupon for groceries — the future of CPG promotions.

Interstate: Project management software that lets you share development roadmaps with customers.

MixRank: Competitive intelligence for online advertising.

Picplum: We automatically send premium photo prints for parents with young children. They send us their best photos, we print & send them to grandparents and family once a month.

Launchpad Toys: We’re building digital toys that empower kids to create, learn, and share their ideas with friends and family around the world — the Adobe Creative Suite for kids.

Interviewstreet: Interviewstreet helps companies hire the best programmers.

Debteye: Automated debt counseling.

DoubleRecall: A new captcha-like ad type that monetizes 12x better than banners.

Envolve: A customizable chat system for your website.

Quartzy: Life science labs spend $9BB (US) on consumables, yet they use Excel to manage inventory and orders. Quartzy provides free inventory and ordering software, aggregating demand and creating a marketplace.

Munch On Me: Daily deals for food.

Paperlinks: Paperlinks is the QR code infrastructure for businesses.

PageLever: Analytics that help businesses be more effective on Facebook. Customers include YouTube, MTV, etc.

MarketBrief: Marketbrief takes SEC filings and puts them through a system of humans and computers to create an easy to understand article containing all important information from the filing.

Snapjoy: Snapjoy stores and organizes the world’s photos.

Opez: Yelp for individual service professionals.

Bushido: Hosted ecosystem and app store for web apps.

Stypi: Stypi is Google Wave done right.

Proxino: Proxino is a cloud platform that makes it easy to debug and deploy JavaScript code.

MongoHQ: MongoHQ allows you to quickly and easily create MongoDB databases for use in your applications. We offer data hosting and management, performance monitoring, scaling and optimization.

ZigFu: ZigFu is an app store for motion control apps. Developers use our tools to create gesture-controlled user interfaces and full-body motion games.

Parse: Heroku for mobile — power your mobile apps with our cloud platform. Add a backend to your mobile app without servers.

Science Exchange: Science Exchange is an online marketplace for outsourcing science experiments. We’re improving the efficiency of scientific research by making it easy for scientists to access experimental expertise across research facilities.

Verbling: Connect language learners to native speakers for verbal practice through in-browser, real-time live video. If you’re learning Spanish, we’ll connect you to an Argentine who’s learning English, for example.

MobileWorks: MobileWorks is crowdsourcing, reinvented. Businesses can outsource work to our crowd in 3 clicks and developers can add human intelligence to their applications.

Vidyard: YouTube for Business.

Tagstand: NFC platform that makes it easy for developers and businesses to incorporate near field communication into their apps.

Kicksend: Realtime file sharing and delivery for friends and family.

Vimessa: Video voicemail — the ease of SMS with the magic of video.

Can’tWait!: We use trailers to get users to tell us what upcoming media releases they want to watch or buy, and then sell it to them when the media is released.

Codecademy: Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

Image via Flickr user Brian Auer.

Some from the seed funding program and others from the accelerator, 27 companies presented to a packed house at 500 Startups’ HQ in downtown Mountain View, Calif.

This class was heavy on consumer services products, focusing on things like shopping and product discovery. A surprisingly large number of food- and restaurant-related services also demoed. And, of course, it wouldn’t be an incubator demo day without at least a few companies building services for tech companies.

McClure emceed the whole session, noting that 500 Startups had invested in 175 companies to date and plans to continue a focus on adding international start-ups to its ranks.

Below is the list of companies and products announced. The list is complete, thanks to a lack of “off the record” conditions such those imposed at Y Combinator Demo Days.

Tout
http://www.toutapp.com
Email response templates and tracking.

VidCaster
http://www.vidcaster.com
Make a video site on your own domain.

Daily Aisle
http://www.dailyaisle.com
Expedia for wedding vendors.

AppGrooves
http://www.appgrooves.com
iOS app discovery platform.

Loku
http://www.loku.com
Big data for local.

Kibin
http://www.kibin.com
“The easiest way to get feedback and editing on your writing.”

OVIA
http://www.oviahr.com
Video interviewing service for recruiting.

BugHerd
http://www.bugherd.com
Visual bug tracker for the Web.

Skipola
http://www.skipola.com
Easy mobile apps for restaurants.

LaunchBit
http://www.launchbit.com
Ad network for email.

Tinfoil Security
http://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Protecting Web sites from outside hackers.

Culture Kitchen SF
http://www.culturekitchensf.com
“Ethnic cooking classes taught by the grandmas you wish you had.”

Storytree
http://www.storytree.com
Capture and share family stories.

DailyGobble
http://www.dailygobble.com
One-to-one marketing for restaurants through receipt digitization.

Vayable
http://www.vayable.com
Social marketplace for experiences.

Singboard
http://www.singboard.com
YouTube meets karaoke. AllThingsD‘s Liz Gannes wrote about them here.

Chirpme
http://www.chirpme.com
Connecting people through single dates.

From.us
http://www.from.us
Crowdsourced gift selection and purchasing.

Welcu
http://www.welcu.com
Managing unique high-end events.

Console
http://www.console.fm
“Awesome music with no hassle.”

Zerply
http://www.zerply.com
“Professional networking done right.”

WillCall
http://www.getwillcall.com
HotelTonight for live music and theater.

Manpacks
http://www.manpacks.com
Purchasing help for men’s accessories.

Snapette
http://www.snapette.com
Location-based fashion discovery and sharing.

CardinalBlue
http://www.cardinalblue.com
Makers of Pic Collage, a Top 10 photo app.

CoderBuddy
http://www.coderbuddy.com
Next-generation ODesk meets Heroku.

CraftCoffee
http://www.craftcoffee.com
Mobile apps for small business.

The funding is intended to alleviate founder stress and encourage faster product progress, said AngelPad’s Thomas Korte. Competing program Y Combinator has a similar deal to give participating companies $150,000 from DST investor Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the so-called “Start Fund.”

Korte said the AngelPad money is not the same: “It’s different. It’s a real investment from a VC firm, rather than just plain capital or quote-unquote free money.”

Korte acknowledged that having funding from the get-go will put more pressure on the companies in his program to make a return for their investors. “It’s probably more of a sense of responsibility,” he said.

AngelPad is two weeks away from starting its third class of 15 start-ups, but has left one spot open for a company that may be enticed by this new funding offer, Korte said.

Korte declined to specify which VCs are putting up the money, but said they focus on investments in B2B, mobile and e-commerce, like AngelPad.

Though AngelPad has a close relationship with Google Ventures, a spokeswoman for Google Ventures said that the firm was not one of the two participants in the new funding program.

The four-year-old mini venture firm said its strategy runs counter to the Y Combinator-led trend of maximum number of companies and minimum investment dollars.

Tandem plans to select eight start-up eggs — in this case from the mobile arena — put them in one basket, and watch them carefully.

Tandem co-founder Doug Renert said he hears from start-up founders who complain that they don’t get enough hands-on time with the network of advisers at other incubators.

Calling out the elephant in the room, Renert said, “At [Y Combinator], those companies get three months in [the incubator], and get shot out, to figure it all out.”

Tandem may take issue with the big orange incubator’s tactics, but there aren’t too many people saying the model is badly flawed. Y Combinator did, after all, just spread to larger digs and is currently hosting its largest class ever.

So what is Tandem’s better deal?

Renert explained that in exchange for the standard convertible note and 10 percent of the common stock, companies in Tandem’s next class would receive “$200K, to start, and six months in our new incubator space.” Which, he added with zeal, is a snazzy little Victorian home in the Peninsula.

Tandem calls its model “muscle capital,” which seems to mean its advisers will be far more active and participatory than just offering the occasional coffee date. Renert gave an example from a previous class, in which Tandem’s staff acted as the business end of a mobile gaming start-up so the founders could focus on software development.

At the very least, Tandem’s founders should be able to provide a voice of experience for navigating the recently bubble-icious tech scene; two of Tandem’s partners co-founded Webvan, which vies with Pets.com for first place in the category of “most iconic collapse of tech bubble 1.0.”

Tandem’s test, bubble not withstanding, will be to see if it can leverage the extra “muscle” and capital to make “smaller” more profitable.

After all, the only difference between “small” and “exclusive” is smashing success.

We reported on Odio’s departure last week, and he agreed to explain this quick switch after he officially left Facebook on Friday.

Freshplum is part of the current class of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator program where Divvyshot was incubated in 2009, Odio said.

Why leave Facebook now? Odio was product manager for Facebook Photos, which is thought to be the largest online photo-sharing service in the world. It wasn’t a bad gig.

Odio said he’d been brainstorming the idea for Freshplum with co-founder Nick Alexander, who was accepted to Harvard Business School for the fall. When the opportunity emerged to join Y Combinator just before the latest session started a few weeks ago, Odio and Alexander felt like it was now or never to work together on their idea, so Odio left Facebook and Alexander decided not to go to business school.

Plus, Y Combinator came with $150,000 in immediate funding offered to all participating companies by Yuri Milner and the Start Fund, so it wasn’t that much of a leap.

Odio certainly gave up earn-out opportunities by leaving Facebook earlier than he might have planned, but he says he’s OK with the decision because he’s a start-up guy at heart.

Price optimization seems a far cry from photo sharing, but Odio said he studied economics at the University of Virginia and his first start-up was a currency exchange site called OdioWorks that he used to pay for college and fund Divvyshot.

Alexander, meanwhile, had helped manage OdioWorks, in addition to founding a previous Y Combinator company (a failed coupon site) and working as an engineer at Cisco and Divvyshot. Odio and Alexander had previously lived together when they were both pinching pennies to try to make their last Y Combinator start-ups work.

Why are Odio and Alexander doing Y Combinator again? The Mountain View, Calif.-based program is a bit different these days; the current class has 60 companies versus 14 in Divvyshot’s cohort two years ago. But the Y Combinator brand, the easy funding, the network of people associated and the pressure to build something in three months make the program worth doing again, Odio said.

Odio wouldn’t comment about Facebook’s plans for its photo products after his exit, though it’s quite obvious Facebook is working on a mobile photos offering that will include features like group and event photo sharing, which were Divvyshot specialties.

Odio maintained he was very happy with his experience at Facebook, pointing to the responsibility he was given over Facebook photos and the many features he was able to ship in just a year. “If I were to sell again as a talent acquisition I would definitely sell to Facebook,” he said. However, he said he intends Freshplum to be a different sort of company.

In the weeks just prior to its acquisition in April 2010, Divvyshot had raised angel funding from investors including Jim Young, Richard Chen and Gabor Cselle, who got a quick and small return on their investment. Odio said he hopes to raise money from those same folks, as well as others, now that he’s building something for the long term.

A version of Freshplum should be out in the next couple of months, Odio said. It will provide an API that allows, for instance, the maker of a Mac desktop client for Twitter to dynamically figure out what price to charge its customers.

Odio said he looks forward to charging his own customers for something they want to pay for, versus the constant worry of where the next dollar would come from at a photo-sharing Web site.

In fact, he recalled — despite that angel funding coming together at the last minute — Divvyshot was on the verge of running out of money when Facebook’s Blake Ross called to express interest in an acquisition. The day the Divvyshot guys drove to Palo Alto to sign the acquisition papers, they ran out of gas and had trouble buying more because their business credit card was maxed out.

This time around, Odio said, things will be different.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110621/sam-odio-i-left-facebook-to-rejoin-y-combinator-with-a-new-start-up-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/ http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 11:30:55 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=78657 Start-up accelerator programs are now available in every flavor and color. The latest is Vancouver, BC-based GrowLab, which says it will accept five technology companies for its first class beginning August 15.

GrowLab participants will spend three months in Vancouver and one in San Francisco, receiving $25,000, office space and mentorship, plus a promise of $150,000 from BDC Venture Capital upon completion of the program. That means effectively that GrowLab has matched Y Combinator’s relationship with Yuri Milner and SV Angel, which provide the same amount for all participating companies (though Y Combinator serves many more start-up teams–it expects to have 62 in its next class).

GrowLab is led by Canadian entrepreneurs and angel investors including folks from NowPublic and AbeBooks.com, and it will give preferential consideration to applicants from Canada. A previous Vancouver-based start-up accelerator called Bootup Labs reneged on its promise to fund some participants and seems to have been discontinued.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110526/growlab-accelerator-takes-root-in-vancouver/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/ http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 15:38:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=77379 The Y Combinator model of “start-up accelerator”–assemble a group of young companies at a location for a few months, give them mentorship and tens of thousands of dollars each in exchange for a small stake, finish with a day of pitching to investors–has become an industry itself.

Some 100 similar programs exist, and Y Combinator too is rapidly expanding, with 62 companies expected for its next class (up from eight in 2005).

Now the programs themselves are getting topic-specific, rather than just location-specific. At least three new Silicon Valley accelerators are launching in the next few months, with focuses on education, cleantech and health, respectively.

It makes sense: The act of building a company has its own curriculum, but start-ups in different sectors will undoubtedly benefit from more specific mentorship.

The newest such program is Greenstart, a cleantech accelerator based out of a 7,000-square-foot office in San Francisco that will begin its first session this fall. It launched to the public today. Here’s the pitch:

Greenstart is led by three successful tech entrepreneurs gone green, Mitch Lowe (Jumpstart), Dave Graham (ArizonaBay Technology Ventures) and Dillon McDonald (OpenAuto/Jumpstart), Greenstart aims to cultivate the specific needs of ambitious startups with ideas for minimizing dirty energy. For their first class they seek “new cleantech” companies – those working in software, smart grid, smart sensors, mobile apps, and the clean web – versus capex intensive ideas like solar panels or biofuels.

However, Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech points out that the Greenstart leaders don’t have extensive cleantech resumes, and that most cleantech projects require considerably more funding than the $25,000 Greenstart is offering.

Elsewhere, Geoff Ralston has launched Imagine K12, an education start-up accelerator that Kara covered earlier this week. That program has the explicit endorsement of Y Combinator, which says it will refer future education-specific applicants to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imagine K12 instead.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham wrote,

If you want to start a startup building things for schools, we encourage you to apply to Imagine K12, because frankly, we couldn’t help you the way they can. The hardest question we always have to ask such startups is ‘how are you going to get the first users?’ Imagine K12 doesn’t have to ask that.

Also starting this summer is Rock Health, a San Francisco-based accelerator focused on health apps that has relationships with the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Harvard Medical School, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110524/start-up-accelerators-get-topic-specific-education-health-and-now-cleantech/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/ http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/#comments Mon, 23 May 2011 13:01:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=76424

Last week, I met up with Geoff Ralston, an Internet exec whom I have known for a dog’s age–from his stint in the early days at Yahoo and later at music service Lala, which was sold to Apple in 2009.

These days, instead of heading to another company or starting one, Ralston has joined with Tim Brady and Alan Louie to launch Imagine K12, an education incubator.

Based on Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, the aim of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imagine K12 is to help education-focused start-ups with a little money and a lot of entrepreneurial encouragement.

After sifting through a pile of applications for slots, Ralston and his partners picked the first “class” of start-ups, who will begin work on June 2.

Here’s a video interview I did with Ralston talking about it all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110523/geoff-ralston-talks-about-education-incubator-imagine-k12/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stanford%e2%80%99s-sse-labs-creating-entrepreneurial-buzz-in-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stanford%e2%80%99s-sse-labs-creating-entrepreneurial-buzz-in-silicon-valley/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 07:00:45 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41323 Y Combinator is considered by many as Silicon Valley’s elite start-up school, offering selected entrepreneurs a three-month crash course to help them build companies and raise capital.

But about a five-mile drive up El Camino, on the third floor of AOL’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., another start-up accelerator is emerging as a clubhouse of choice for some talented young entrepreneurs.

Only about a year-and-a-half old, SSE Labs is drawing the attention of heavy-hitting investors in part because of its direct ties to Stanford University, nesting ground to Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and other giant Silicon Valley tech companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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