ContestMachine Alternatives and Competitors Compared in Consumer Apps

Popcuts is a unique online music store. DRM-free songs are sold for 99cents, but every time a song you bought sells, you get a cut of the proceeds (earlier buyers get a bigger cut).

People and Pages is a service similar to Google Groups, allowing group organizers to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place. Although the screenshots show that it's part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly, and others. As of August 2008 the site is yet to launch.

PlayReader is a SaaS solution for businesses. Founded by Y Combinator alumni, this platform provides innovative tools and services to help companies streamline their operations and achieve their goals. Built with modern technology and user experience in mind, PlayReader offers scalable solutions for teams of all sizes.

Treehouse is an online technology school that offers beginner to advanced courses in web design, web development, mobile development and game development taught by a team of expert teachers. Its courses are aimed at beginners looking to learn coding skills and embark on a career in the tech industry. In May 2016, Treehouse launched the Techdegree program, a comprehensive learning program focused on helping people learn the skills they need to start a tech career. Through earning a Techdegree certification, a student will challenge themselves, deepen their skills, and prove their knowledge to potential employers. All in 6-12 months, on their own schedule. Treehouse believes that understanding, communicating with and controlling technology is a fundamental skill that everyone should have the opportunity to learn. Through learning with Treehouse, each student is given the opportunity to learn the valuable skills they need, whether they have existing, little or no previous experience, to confidently take control of their future.

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Slinkset

Consumer Apps

Slinkset is a white label social news platform that allows anyone to start a social news site and integrate it into their own website.

Trigger makes the $15Bn mobile application market accessible by web developers. It's the simplest way to build amazing mobile apps using the best of HTML5 and native. Trigger has raised $1.8M in seed funding from top Silicon Valley investors including Y Combinator and SV Angel.

Proudly recognized as one of CANADA'S TOP SMALL & MEDIUM EMPLOYERS for 2018! Mission: We build communities. Surrounded by mountains and water in beautiful Vancouver, BC, we are smart people who like smart people. We create mobile games with a social core that engage players and provoke us with creative new problems. We value data, informal leadership and keeping it all balanced. When we set out to make games with massive online communities, we knew that we first had to create the ideal environment for building ambitious things: a place where brilliant and inspiring people come together to build games that make millions of players happy. We realized that we needed to find incredibly talented people and get out of their way. Since then we've paid careful attention to how we like to work together - these are some of our guiding principles: Ownership; Have Wonderful Arguments; The Best Ideas Win; Keep Growing. We are artists, designers, and engineers. We leverage our talent with small, independent teams. And we know that a happy builder is an efficient builder.

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Ninite

Consumer Apps

The BaseShield App Store is a distribution platform for Windows software. Users can download and install applications with one click, and each application runs in its own secure virtual space. It is an open platform where third party developers can publish their applications. Developers who deploy their apps this way can rely on the built-in installer, update function, security and eventually payment processing.

Live data powers everything we do, from our global, multiplayer mobile games to our mobile ad buying to our live data ecosystem, Satori. MZ is creating new futures for people, enterprises, cities, and countries. The possibilities are endless.

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MightyQuiz

Consumer Apps

MightyQuiz powers a collection of user generated quiz questions that can be answered and rated on-site or through a distributable widget.

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FathomDB

Consumer Apps

FathomDB offers databases as a service, taking care of many of the day-to-day tasks database administrators have to deal with and letting them focus on more complex issues.

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Omnisio

Consumer Apps

Omnisio was founded in 2007 by Ryan Junee, Simon Ratner and Julian Frumar, and was subsquently acquired by YouTube in July 2008. Omnisio enabled users to annotate and share videos from any website, and enabled markup of the structure within a video. On May 13, 2008, Omnisio launched a slide-syncing tool using SlideShare for slides and a host of video services.

Heroku, a Salesforce company and industry pioneer in platform as a service (PaaS), enables developers to build and run applications entirely in the cloud. Heroku provides companies from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises with a faster and more effective way to create, deploy, and manage apps. Heroku operates the world’s largest PaaS, continuously delivering millions of apps with 6+ million container deployments, 60+ billion routing requests, and 10+ terabytes of application logs per day.

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280 North

Consumer Apps

280 North is a web application company based on their proprietary application framework, Cappuccino. Along with Objective-J, Cappuccino provides a complete toolkit to develop rich web applications. It's modeled after a proven desktop development environment, and has been released as an open source project under the LGPL. 280 North's first application, 280 Slides, enables anyone with a web browser to quickly and easily create beautiful presentations. 280 Slides takes advantage of the web by making it trivial to find and include great media in your presentation. We also built in advanced features like importing and exporting PowerPoint documents, so your data is always portable.

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Wundrbar

Consumer Apps

Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.

SocialBrowse is a Firefox extension for sharing links. It has been described as "a Twitter for links".

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Mixwit

Consumer Apps

Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through MP3 search engines Seeqpod and Skreamr.

Tipjoy was a simple, social payments engine that allowed merchants to sell digital content and features, charities to raise money for causes, and individuals to give money to one another. Tipjoy was a Winter '08 Y Combinator participant.

Auctomatic, a Y Combinator company, offers an auction and marketplace management system for all of those individual sellers on such sites as Ebay, Amazon, Overstock and others. The application lets you list your items as well as manage your sales, but it also helps you understand how to best optimize your selling and maximize profits. The company also received an investment from Paul Buchheit, the lead developer of Gmail.

Engineering tools should be as streamlined and smart as everything else in your life: as your phone, as your email, as all the apps that help you manage your day-to-day. Your work should be as efficient as possible so you can generate innovative ideas, design elegant technology, and manufacture at scale, all because you can focus on the right things. There should not be any distractions caused by poorly designed websites, unreliable data, or unwieldy spreadsheets of haphazard electronic component information. You should be able to compare components, find important technical information, and easily grasp the spectrum of parts that will be a match for your design. This is what Octopart strives for. Finding electronic component information should not be holding engineers back from bringing ideas to life quickly and efficiently. We believe that pricing, availability, technical specifications, and reference designs should be transparent, fast to find, and easy to understand. That’s why we create powerful, intelligent tools that streamline the engineering workflow and enable fast decision making. Octopart provides accurate and complete data for millions of electronic components in a way that makes it easy to find and compare parts. Focus on the important stuff: building the technology of the future.

Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show. Zenter was acquired by Google in June, 2007.

Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It's often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada's largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they're passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.