Steve Hemingway

Y-Combinator is a very interesting startup. Based on four trends:

1. One is hardware. Moore's law has made computer hardware effectively free.
2. Internet has made promotion free: used to have to buy advertising or PR firm; now word can spread more quickly.
3. Programming languages have gotten more advanced, more abstract; don't have to do as much work to get a given program done. Used to be that to build a startup you had to have a team of developers, five or six people writing C++; doesn't work to have that many partners, so had to hire them. Now, you can do it with just the founders, if 2-3 or them are programmers. Don't need to raise money to hire people. That's the reason there are so many more startups, and the reason they are more mobile. Anyone can do it.
4. Don't have to raise money to build a factory; don't have to be plausible, old, well-dressed to raise money. Presumably partly because so many manufacturing/other capital requirements can be leased incrementally.

It does seem a good time to start a startup. As Paul Graham has pointed out, firms like Apple and Microsoft started in the teeth of deep recessions.

I don't know where the name 'Y-combinator' comes from, but could it possibly have something to do with a chromosome that the large majority of young people (wannabe entrepreneurs, presumably) shown in the slideshow share that is absent from half the population?

Google Latitude is a system similar to Loopt. The general idea is that you can checkout the map on your smartphone and work out if one of your friends is hanging out in the location where you now find yourself. Maybe this is just too much information.