Andrew Rollins

The Y-Combinator demo day is March 18, and TechCrunch described the 19 companies delivering presentations. Out of the list, here are my top picks:

• Tipjoy
  • Easy micropayments for giving tips to web site owners and content producers. All the video upload sites on the net sorely need this feature, and I’m glad someone is finally seriously focusing on this problem.
• Baseshield
  • Virtualization, something I’m always interested in.
• insoshi
  • Open source social network. I’m curious what an open source approach can do for social networks.
• deluux
  • Destributed, decentralized social networking. I like the idea of not having a single entity control all my social data and keeping it in my hand instead.
• YumDots
  • Mobile application to help you find restaurants on the go. Interesting, and somewhat overlapping with a small piece of what my startup wants to accomplish.

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Mix 2008 ended yesterday. It’s a web development conference run by Microsoft. Check out Ray Ozzie’s keynote.

I found Ray’s 2007 keynote to be more interesting. The 2008 keynote focused more on Microsoft products, whereas I felt the 2007 keynote was about broader web trends and provided some great insights into the future of the web.

For those of you that don’t know him, Ray Ozzie is the new Chief Software Architect at Microsoft who is taking over the role from Bill Gates.

Also, there was a candid interview with Steve Ballmer. The interviewer is Guy Kawasaki, who is the author of some of my favorite books for startups and is well known for his evangelism at Apple in the ’80s.

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