With all due respect, I know that a lot of work goes into these YC companies, but how is this ground breaking? Not simply for that fact that this seems like a feature the Scribd provides but also that fact that this is clearly not the next Google. We're seeing a lot of YC companies and startup founders in general creating these non-compelling web 2.0 features and 'apps' getting a lot of buzz and a descent amount of funding. This is not good for the startup ecosystem as a whole. The VC and angel investors who would have provided some kind of stop gap to weed out the next Pets.com have all drank the proverbial Kool-aid and are tripping over themselves to invest in these companies. This is creating a bubble scenario. This will hurt YC and in the long term. Please let us return back to sanity.
Ryan from Crocodoc here. The Adobe Acrobat product line alone is a $600M+/year business. We believe that we can expand upon and disrupt that industry just like Gmail did to Outlook and Google Docs is doing to Microsoft Word. So if you ask us, we definitely have big plans for Crocodoc.
The HTML5 canvas tag is basically a Cairo surface minus a few functions. That means there's a lot of desktop software that can finally be moved to the web. It also means the entry barrier is fairly low. This is great for disrupting desktop software businesses and destroying the market.
I agree with you that it's still not clear whether the valuations for these new companies are reasonable.
If I had a bunch of money right now, I'd be buying under-valued desktop software properties and moving them onto the web.
