Here are some more of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2008 intake and where appropriate a mention of
Youlicit automatically generate simple, link only web sites that are supposed to be at least as relevant as those generated by human editors – time will tell if the automation as good as a real person produces but it should generate them plenty of free organic traffic that is very monetizable. Do people want this ? I’m not sure but it may well be one of the more commercially viable companies presenting.
As the name would suggest, these guys are in the online recruitment space. They have two offerings that are somewhat related . The first is a series of niche job boards and some white label software to roll out more job boards. The second is a syndicated distribution network for jobs that will try and place job adverts on blogs, forums, networks etc. They say they "want to fix on-line recruitment " – but, whilst I admit they have have done some great work in a short time, I don’t think they are going to fix anything – they are just adding to the current melting pot of offerings. (We are investors in Standout Jobs .)
Slinkset is another company that is providing software to enable not programmers to launch a white label version of a well know offering – in this case you can create your own version of Reddit /Digg (social news site) and brand it as you like – with no coding necessary. I guess that they must have been caught out by Reddit going open-source.
Frogmetrics have developed software solution for doing mobile survey response that tracks responses in real time. I don’t see anything new in this business but they have taken the Apple approach of delivering a smooth, polished, end to end solution that includes both hardware and software – in this case they were demo’ing on Nokia hardware. I really see this as a systems integration play.
Competition for E-vite. Nothing new per se, but well done and less of a hassle to use than E-vite. Not sure how they plan to gain main stream awareness – always the problem with a ME2 product, but if it is that much better .. who knows.
Ididwork enbales you to share your work log with co-workers and managers. Nice implementation but I think they could look to incorporate some of the thinking from the team at Timmy on time - developed by a couple of young guys from Trois Rivieres (almost Montreal!).
Think pyramid marketing scheme meets indie music. The earlier you buy a song the more "revenue share" you will get when (if) the song takes off. I don’t think this is going to fly using financial incentives but it could evolve into something interesting.
BackType was the only Canadian team presenting ( a second team are still in "stealth mode") and one of the reasons we wanted to go to Demo Day. They refer to themselves as the Google of comments. Simple idea; they provide a search service that allows you to search the Web for comments by a particular author or on a given topic. Let’s see if they end up in Montreal or the Valley 
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That’s it for the reviews – the next post will draw some conclusions about my trip to Demo Day.
by Nicolas
We still wait for your conclusions about the Y Combinator Demo Day… It would be interesting!