YC Company Thinkature Launches

Thanks to a reader tip, I found that Thinkature Corporation launched late last night. With Thinkature, users can create collaborative whiteboards or "workspaces" which support sketches, text, diagrams, and chat.

One cool feature I noticed right away is their "hand tool." Click the hand on any piece of your whiteboard and a shrinking box zooms in right where you clicked, letting your collaborators know what your chatting about. It's like a laser pointer, except useful and cool, instead of totally annoying.

Y Combinator doesn't let interviewees use Powerpoints. I wonder if Thinkatures will be fair game.

Reddit Acquired

Yesterday the internet was abuzz with the news that Reddit has been acquired by Conde Nast/Wired. Reddit, one of the original batch of Y Combinator founders, took less than $100,000 in funding. Acquisition talks began when the team worked with Conde Nast to create a version of Reddit dedicated to celebrity news, called lipstick.com.

After the announcement, two of the founders, Steve and Alexis, were interviewed on TalkCrunch.

How big was the deal? The Reddits won't (can't) say, despite the fact that people really want them to know. Founder Aaron Swartz did post a blog entry in which he says, "I logged into my bank account this morning and saw more digits in my balance than I've ever seen before."

Kiko For Sale on eBay

The online calendaring company Kiko put their site up for sale on eBay today, presumably signifying the end of their company. This will be the second Y company to fold (the first was Simmery). According to the eBay description, "We are selling Kiko because we want to have time to work on other projects as a development team. We had a project in mind we just didn't want to wait on :)."

Things didn't look good for Kiko when Google entered the market, but co-creator Justin said he wasn't scared. According to one Reddit poster, Kiko has been down for the last few days.

Currently there are no bidders for the site, which has a starting price of $49,999.99.

Update: There is now one bidder! After 111 bids, Kiko was sold for $258,100.

Angel Day

Y Combinator Angel Day is this Thursday. The web page about the event includes a one-liner description for each of the 12 SFP companies. I've included each description below, but added (where known) the company that the description refers to. Please comment below, or contact me, if you can fill in any of the blanks.

1. a variant of Craigslist;
   
2. a service that enables chat on third-party sites;
   
3. a dating site that reflects how dating works in the real world;
   
4. a site for remixing music;
   
5. a successor to IM for businesses;
   
6. a site where people categorize themselves by selecting images; Pairwise
   
7. a collaborative "Dear Abby" site; Pollground
   
8. software to improve the efficiency of corporate email; Xobni
   
9. a social site about fashion;
   
10. a service bridging IM, text-messaging, and email;
    
11. a shopping blog service;
    
12. and a job site for programmers

Note that number 6 is evidence that Pairwise (mentioned in the last post) is indeed a Y Combinator company.