Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hugh | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

hugh

A well-timed reminder of something that a lot of people here seem to forget: not all startups are frivolous webapps.

Some of the interesting ones:

Nanosolar: High-efficiency solar cells

Gridpoint: Something to do with power grid management

Plastic logic: Flexible displays

eSolar: Solar thermal power

HelioVolt: More solar cells!

SulfurCell: More solar cells!

GodTube: Christian Videos. Seriously, this one sounds like a joke, but it exists and somebody gave it $30 million.

Fisker: Electric cars.

Admittedly a rather high percentage are still web-based software of some kind. And an awfully large percentage of those remaining are related to energy.

Another interesting (if worrying) trend: I couldn't find any biotech on the list at all (there might be a few, I didn't look at everything but I checked the names for bio-sounding things).

View on HN

It seems as though this list is more accurately a list of web and energy startups, as there are companies that have raised money between 2006 and 2008 that is greater than 25 Million. Pacific Biosciences for example has raised ~$100 Million

(http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/fast-gene-sequencing-in-tw...)

It seems to me as though the list is not of the companies that raised the most money in the past two years, but rather the a list of companies that raised the most money that TC follows.

godtube is funny, its kinda like conservapedia. Its a good business decision for the guys who did it, because they cash in on rightwing ignorance, who think youtube/wiki produces all its content and spin it with liberal bias.

Its the same people who think blogspot needs to be sued because someone made an offensive post on one of their accounts

If you ever want a laugh, read conservapedia's terms of use.

If you believe that viewing certain things is wrong, then pre-filtered content is of value to you. Does Godtube particularly cater to "ignorance"?

Now, Conservapedia is ridiculous, but the only people I've seen take it seriously are liberals in search of a caricature to attack.

the hannity/limbaugh crowd takes conservapedia VERY seriously

Yeah, but nobody takes them seriously.

So the people who wrote Conservapedia did it as parody?

I guess that'd make more sense.

That's because this list is incomplete. This guy appears to have just gone through crunchbase and made a list of companies, sorted by the size of their latest funding round.

I know of several startup biotech companies that have been funded recently. None of their executives blog or twitter, however.

Nanosolar actually makes low-cost printed solar cells.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com