Does Paul Graham Get What He Asks For? [infographic]

For "fix advertising," Munch on Me and Groupon were listed. I'm trying to figure out how these two companies have fixed advertising and I just can't. I don't even know why they are mentioned with regards to advertising.<p>There's still so much room for innovation in the advertising space. Advertiser's think that click through rate is the key metric for them, this is far from true. Click through rate just means the advertisement itself is compelling enough to garner a click. What about after the user clicks? Why are advertisers paying on a CPM basis when they are looking at CTR as the key metric? CTR means advertisers want people to visit a subsequent page and perform additional actions. Companies have tried to assign cost to these additional actions but have mostly been unsuccessful because it is extremely difficult to track. Google Adwords is better for this but people are moving away from standard search (in the long term at least) and it is still far from perfect. Also, there's enormous display inventory out there that needs to be disrupted.<p>I could go on for a while about advertising and I have some initial ideas for improvements of the online advertising model. I'm excited to talk to like-minded people at the YC ad innovation conference.

I know the creator acknowledges this, but the news sites aren't even close to (or trying to) fixing the news. Maybe someday down the road they will morph, but in fact there has been very little to be done to create an online news organization that both provides original reporting and is substantially better than the web adaptations that traditional media provides. If all we get is better aggregators, the orgnaizations generating the news to be aggregated might still fail.<p>Personally, I think the best prospect for something awesome to happen in the news sector is that a profitable aggregator similar to HuffPo (but probably not them for a lot of reason), Techmeme or Google News, really makes a run at becoming a media organization. This would require investing in setting up real live bureaus and paying for boots on the ground journalism, but at the rate the current guardians of media move (AP just added links into their stores), it might have some traction.

Actually the RFS has changed a bit for winter 2012. There are new categories like "New Paths Through Product Space" and "Ephemeralization Apps"<p>See Link - <a href="http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html</a>

I'm not sure if 280 North should be categorized under "web office apps"? Their main products were Atlas and Cappuccino - 280 Slides was more of a demo of what was possible using their tooling?

The point 22 doesn't have any samples: A web based database/Excel hybrid. I think Wufoo (a YC company), if used for oneself, could be thought as something like this.

Rockmelt: "Simplified Web Browsing" Yeah... right.

How does Gmail qualify as CRM anymore than YahooMail or Hotmail do?

I could potentially position my startup under 1, 2, &#38; 7, but since it forces me to pick one I'm skipping it since none of those is likely to be our explicit focus. Story of my life, I've never fit nicely into one box and I'm not gonna start now.<p>I guess I'll just leave it up to them to make sense of a universal feedback/recommendation engine that's a mashup of Pandora + Delicious + 20 Questions (aka Pandora for Everything).

After looking at that hopefully he asks for easier ways to view,submit and create custom reports from public health data for both doctors and patients, I'll be here Paul.

Took me a while to figure out its not RockMe_i_t...domain isn't even registered.

They forgot picplz.

"Asks" for? Paul Graham never <i>asks</i> - the reality just models itself after his writing.