Dropbox Orchestra Mailbox Drew Houston Arash Ferdowsi Gentry Underwood IDEO Scott Cannon Apple Dropbox has acquired Orchestra, Inc., makers of Mailbox.  The announced was made by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi on the Dropbox blog.  The rumored purchasing price was between $50 million and $100 million, consisting of both cash and stock.

PG In a new essay, Paul Graham suggests Silicon Valley adopt standards for doing handshake agreements.  The goal is faster deal flow.  Startups and investors would be able to confidently reach a meeting of the minds on the essential terms of a transaction prior to drafting and signing any paperwork.  The need for such protocol [...]

Teespring Watsi Support non-profit Watsi.org and get an official Hacker News t-shirt.  Teespring.com is a startup that allows people to crowdfund awesome custom apparel with no up-front cost and no risk.  Watsi.org enables people to directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical treatments for people in need,  as previously reported here.  Teespring and Watsi are teaming up for a [...]

Y Combinator’s universe is more vast than you might initially think.  There’s Y Combinator itself, consisting of at least 14 partners and advisors.  Paul Graham inherently means YC’s universe includes the Lisp programming language and Arc dialect.  The other partners are also all interesting characters, like Robert T. Morris and the Gmail creator, Paul “Don’t Be Evil” [...]

Oracle IBM EMC Semantics3 Zillabyte Citus Data Mixpanel Segment.io Chartio Leftronic GinzaMetrics Consider the companies selling big data products: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, EMC.  Generally speaking, big data refers to extremely large volumes of unstructured data.  Such data is also called “dark data“, because it results in missed opportunities when not put to immediate use.  Problem is not [...]

Upverter Pebble Octopart CircuitHub Lockitron Double Robotics Boosted Boards Upverter held a hardware hackathon at Y Combinator HQ last Saturday, posting photos of the event and a recap on the Upverter blog.  Setup began at 7 in the morning and clean-up finished after 11 at night.  The hackathon had 300 applicants that resulted in over 130 attendees, [...]

FlightCar Goldbely Meldium Microryza Padlet Screenhero Semantics3 SimplyInsured Strikingly Swish Thalmic Labs Unmanned Innovations Watsi Wevorce Zaranga Zenefits YCW13 is winding down towards Demo Day on March 26.  About a month before Demo Day, the companies start showing up in the press.  Professional courtesy is that I don’t add companies to the YC Companies page until [...]

Jellyfish Art AnyVivo Jellyfish Art, from YCW12, sells moon jellyfish, jellyfish tanks, and jellyfish tank accessories.  They also have a Twitter account.  Alex Andon began Jellyfish Art based on his research catching jellyfish and building aquariums while finishing his B.S. in Biology and Environmental Science at Duke University.  Moon jellyfish require special tanks because they are mostly water.  The [...]

Y Combinator PG David Hornik August Capital Airbnb Dropbox Paul Graham keeps showing up on Bloomberg TV.  Yesterday, Emily Chang of Bloomberg West did an interview with PG about billion-dollar startup valuations.  He was on there for about fifteen minutes with David Hornik of August Capital.  The take-aways from that interview are:  Y Combinator’s total value [...]