Singapore Startups vs Y Combinator Startups: Are Theirs Any Better Than Ours?
Y Combinator is famous for churning out startups like a Chinese toy factory. And they’re of good quality too. They’re highly respected for pushing out some of the best and most promising companies in the valley and some of my personal favorites include Dropbox, Wufoo and Reddit. A decent chunk of them have been acquired or have gone on to receive follow on funding. And just yesterday, they demo-ed a slew of new startups at their Demo Day event in Silicon Valley.
Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch attended the event and did a coverage of them here. The projects featured look really interesting and considering Y Combinator’s past reputation, they are definitely poised to be very successful companies. It is interesting to note that 2 of the demo-ed companies are very similar to our local startups. Olark is similar to Zopim and HighlightCam is similar to HomeCamera. We decided to take a closer look at Zopim and HomeCamera to see how good they really are.
Zopim
It’s pretty clear from the TechCrunch coverage of Olark that e-commerce/consumer/business service site owners are increasingly understanding the marketing importance of engaging and chatting with their web visitors in real-time. Zopim’s real advantage is in providing seamless integration with it’s customer’s product by docking it on the bottom left/right of a web page and allowing it to be skinned/colored to match most web page designs. Also, on web pages where English isn’t the predominant language, Zopim’s language-detection kicks in and renders the chat widget in the appropriate language. As of now, they have been translated to 15 major languages, with the help of their customers.
Unlike other products in this space, Zopim provides both a web interface to manage visitors as well as the hugely popular feature of being able to reply via major Instant Messaging (IM) clients. This gives site owners the option to reply via IM when traffic on their site is low (eg. off-office hours) and to log into the Zopim web dashboard when traffic is high. Logging into the web dashboard also gives site owners access to more details about a visitors (eg. previous visits, previous chat history, email address, country, etc.) and advanced features such as shortcut messages (a.k.a canned messages), web/chat statistics, etc.
Having the ability to reply via IM to visitors on a website isn’t groundbreaking given that services like Olark does the same as well. Zopim’s approach to replying-via-IM is slightly different from the competitors. Instead of relying on a single protocol (Jabber/Gtalk/MSN/Yahoo), Zopim’s service interoperates with all these protocols and uses ‘chat bots’ to route visitors’ messages to IM clients. This not only means Zopim works across all major IM networks, it also means business owners need only add a few chat bots to their buddy list (as opposed to adding say 100 chat bots for sites with 100 visitors).
A quick chat with one of Zopim’s co-founder, Royston Tay, revealed that they’ve been receiving numerous emails from interested resellers and partners who would like to integrate live chat to their suite of services. The next natural step, added Royston, would be for them to work closely with some of these partners to develop an API that is flexible and extensible enough to value-add to all the other fantastic web services out there.
HomeCamera
Varun Arora, HomeCamera‘s founder, is quick to point out that the space they are in is highly competitive and open with new companies offering a slew of services and no clear market leader. It seems like the company is doing well and will be announcing their first ISP partner in South Asia in the coming weeks, so there’s something to look forward to there.
From a pure features point of view, they seem to have a strong edge over their new launched counterparts, which kind of seems like a product quickly assembled so that it could make the demo day launch date. For example, HomeCamera allows subscribers to subscribe to mobile and email alerts whenever motion is detected using their services. This is highly useful and sensible for a home security based solution where you would want to be alerted in case someone was in your home while you were away. They also provide their premium customers way more archived footage and some of their customers are still viewing footage recorded 2 years back. As Varun mentioned, this is a competitive space and though HighlightCam is new, it has features which HomeCamera does not such as the ability to use the system for streaming video.
From a traction point of view, HighlightCam will have to play catch up with the frontrunners, HomeCamera, where their base of subscribers from over 180 countries have highly recommended their services. These include The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Zealand Herald and PC World.
What’s Different Between Them and Us?
Fundamentally what’s different between them and us is the maturity of the ecosystem and the access to high quality mentors. From a mentorship point of view, these companies were mentored by Paul Graham and his team of highly experienced startup veterans. In just one event, they were able to attract a slew of VCs and angel investors, including executives from top companies.
The complete answer to this question can fill up an entire blog post itself, but based on my conversations today with James Chan, these 2 problems are slowly going to be alleviated over the next few months. The updates will be annouced slowly over the upcoming months, but based on what I have heard so far, it seems like the exciting times are coming ahead.
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