I know techcrunch is(are) full of shit and Arrington is on vacation, but their posts aren't even spell-checked anymore? teh, athough, sItes, Wrodpress?
My favorite techcrunch typo is when the first (or last) few _letters_ of a word are not included in the link-text for an href. Is it really that hard to select the whole word?
It's pretty sad that the top rated comment on a Y Combinator forum about a Y Combinator site launching is about typos. Get off your high horse. Leave a comment in the post if you see a typo and we'll usually fix it within a few minutes.
If anything, it shows an opinion shared by at least a handful of readers, with a fast impression and comparatively high relevance. It is honest opinion, not some high horse. And if anything, said sadness reflects upon TC, and not YC, NH, nor the site in question. This is customer feedback.
We invest in more b2b companies than you realize. You just don't hear about them much because b2b companies are quieter. For example, one of the most successful startups we've funded is Clustrix, but the nature of their business is such that if the general public ever knows their name it will be as a Nasdaq listing.
This is not mainly YC's fault. Surf around. Every other week, I see a great startup that launches here with a consumer focus. All they needed to do, was focus on businesses and they could make a ton of money.
The sad truth is everyone wants to build the next Google. Meanwhile a few guys could copy services such as Scribd and sell the software to lawyers, small banks and clinics. And make a load of money.
This is something I am definitely going to look into for my new learning / tutorial site. Saves building our own player or shelling out £26,000 for Brightcove (The quote they gave me!)
The business model of "We are going to create X for Y", where X is a service like YouTube, never works. After viewing the intro video I saw that you can do things like create private communities and invite people to join, and I thought that this is the same way I share photos with the family on flickr. But wait, doesn't flickr also support video? And so does Facebook, and I am sure there are others.
Maybe I am just misunderstanding their business model, but I don't see the value of this service.
flickr is a photo sharing site, that also supports video. Facebook is a social network that supports video. Both are inherently made up of many-to-many personal relations without much direct focus. Neither of those, though, allows you to create a video site dedicated solely to a community of you-to-many. So, first, the ability to upload a video and share it with your friends is not equivalent to running your own video site. The two have different value propositions to you, the user.
Secondly, there is a business/blog play that you overlooked. There is a reason TechCrunch didn't build Elevator pitches as a Facebook Group, or on flickr, and it's the same reason we (I'm one of the founders of JamLegend) didn't waste our time using a social network as a video site. The point of the mockup video sites (for Techcrunch Elevator Pitches, VentureBeat, and Mashable), is to show that the video services of all of those businesses could have been built on Fliggo, quickly and easily, and at what I presume to be a reduced cost. The hack solution is wordpress + YouTube, but that's not very elegant, lacks a certain amount of professionalism, and can be difficult to monetize effectively. So, to have a more professional solution before Fliggo, you had to develop your video site in-house, outsource/contract/etc, or use something like Brightcove. Now that there is Fliggo, the process became as easy as point-and-click, while still allowing a full array of customization (as we took full advantage of).
Ive spent a fair while scouring the site and yet to find any form of pricing options for hosting on my own domain, the guys definitely need a lot more call to action points.
Ill just have to go about it the old fashioned way of emailing the guys there, shame as I would probably liked to read up on the pricing and possibly sign at that point having seen the features.
Somehow I remembered seeing fliggo repeatedly submitted on reddit with content taken from YouTube, and ended up associating it with blogspam. This must have been before it went YC. It looks quite different now, but how close was my impression?
Letting users customize the CSS seems like a great idea. When I used MySpace I really missed the ability to do this without resorting to really flaky hacks.
