headphono.us

Y Combinator has been gaining some considerable airtime at your friendly techie blogs with their slew of new startups. Here’s a couple that are interesting to note:

Jamglue – “Remixing for the masses” is their slogan, which is great except that the ‘masses’ produce shitty whizh-swosh-pop-gurgle infused beats that they uploaded from their cellphones. Though the idea is very neat (read mad props), one must think about whether remixing should be brought to the masses. Some would argue that it’s only natural in a world where mashups rule, but then others could counter that mashups are an art-form and not everybody who can match bpm’s can create awesome mashups.

But aside from that, I found some technical problems. Well, firstly, I couldn’t even get to the site (granted it was featured on the O’Reilly blog). Once I did finally get in, their flash craziness had me load their default loops, which took me around 5 minutes to finally get through (I got some altoids during then). After finally spending some (not too much) of my time getting my remixing station set up, I quickly lost interest in the lack of features for some serious remixing. What started out as exciting concept turned out to be meh…

Overhear.us – Again, another great concept, especially for smaller companies/startups where there are often fewer options to voice your opinions. Theoretically, it would also be great to look up prospective companies (that you just got that hot new offer from) to see if there’s more than meets the eye. Unfortunately, none of that is possible on the site. At the time of this writing, all entries on the site are filled with gibberish (I’m guessing they got hit by bots). But that didn’t deter me from looking deeper. What became apparent was that it seems awfully similar to a very basic bulletin board (anybody remember BBS’s?) with the ability to post anonymously, with obvious lack of spam control. Another meh…

So even though Y! Combinator is doing the right thing by cultivating good ideas, they might be a little off on the execution. Let’s hope these guys clean up their act like reddit did.