Most of the files are fairly standard, the pics are mainly humour ones (google and you'll find them), a few games, a windows WGA hack. Some zip files which appear to be of other sites, and bizarely enough it appears to be hosting the images for the coin bras at http://www.judithshead.com.
Lesson learned? If a file is in the path that the webserver reads from, it could be compromised!
By default, you should never have directory listing turned on. If you have it on, you are just looking for trouble. (Want free MP3s? Google has lots of them it's found like this!)
A good wake up call to YC/TechStars, etc. It has occurred to me that having lots of good programmers with a vested interest in breaking into the server you take applications from is a high risk situation. Not everyone has high ethical standards and it is a tempting target.
It'd probably be best if all applications like this were downloaded off the server that accepts them. But even that wouldn't prevent someone from altering the code to send off a copy somewhere.
My submission is in there. It didn't have any specific stuff luckily and I'm sure that's why we didn't get funded. We didn't have a solid idea.
Now my company is rolling along really well with a solid business plan and plenty of apps coming out. I feel like I dodged a bullet by not getting funded.
I'm pretty pissed that my data is out there though. I keep getting emails and Twitter messages telling me about it.
Out of curiousity, why did you submit your pitch if you knew it was so-so ? - aren't you worried it might damage your reputation (first impression, etc.) if you want to approach KP in the future for funding ?
I'm not worried it would damage my reputation. 9 out of 10 ideas are poor ideas to begin with but some evolve into good or great ideas eventually. Even the ones that get funded don't have great ideas, the best company they have funded is ng:moco. That company is just an iPhone game company. Not exactly an original idea.
There's a partial (google cached) copy linked to from the TC article, I haven't seen anyone claim to have a full copy yet. Although it's may well be in the alexa archive for people who have access to that.
I found Aaron Greenspan's and Joel Sadler's pitch interesting and actually very valuable - iPhone application consolidating your flight information, et. al.:
24,'Mr. Aaron Greenspan',Every one of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of business travelers in the United States hates flying. More than ever, the airlines and government regulations make life difficult, with lost baggage, long security lines, weather delays, maintenance delays, and confusing gate changes all commonplace. The information necessary to alleviate many travel headaches is actually available, but it\'s not integrated in one place in a usable format, and certainly not in one place that travelers have easy access to. Fortunately, business travelers tend to have money to spare, and they are willing to do anything that will make their traveling experience less painful, however incremental the improvement to their life may be.','The iPhone is the perfect medium to deliver an integrated view of a travel itinerary. Far beyond the dates and times that most people assume itineraries to be limited to, Think\'s iPhone application would bring in data from airlines\' baggage tracking databases, flight arrival and departure information, frequent flier mile numbers and historical information, historical gate, flight number and airline delay information, and weather maps. It could also eventually be used to check into flights without having to wait in line to see an agent or use a kiosk. The bar codes that almost all airlines currently print on paper to create boarding passes could be easily displayed on an iPhone\'s high-resolution LCD screen. Essentially, the iPhone could keep track of every aspect of a traveler\'s life, and it would become an essential business tool as a result. The buzz surrounding the application could boost sales for Think, Apple, and even the airlines themselves, who desperately need the revenue.','Think Computer Corporation has a number of existing technology assets that would be helpful in the development of a web-based solution for the iPhone. Its Lampshade® LAMP framework makes web-based application development quick and easy. Think\'s CommonRoom social network is designed to give professionals and academics a secure way to share data and communicate. (It could be a useful integration point for Think\'s iPhone Travel application later on.) Think also has developed Exponent, a full-fledged business accounting system, similar to Oracle Financials or NetSuite. It could be extremely helpful for providing an easy way to track employee reimbursement expenses in the long term.','The Blackberry could also be used to provide similar features hypothetically, but no application exists to date (to our knowledge) that integrates everything in one place as proposed above.','Aaron Greenspan started Think from his bedroom in Shaker Heights, Ohio at the age of 15. While he attended high school, Aaron grew Think to support more than 150 businesses, individuals and schools across the United States and Canada. He subsequently changed the focus of the company from IT consulting to software development. Today, Think sells a line of web-based applications and software development tools including Lampshade, CommonRoom, Exponent, and Whiteboard.\r\n\r\nIn 1999, Aaron was the first place winner of the Junior Achievement Young IT Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He was also awarded the Kodak Young Leaders award, and has spoken at the NASA Kennedy Space Center. In October of 2000, Aaron spearheaded the creation of Think Computer Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with the goal of helping children through technology. Aaron invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College in September, 2003. He graduated cum laude from Harvard in three years (Advanced Standing) with an A.B. in Economics in 2004.','Joel Sadler is a graduate student studying Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He previously worked at Apple, Inc. in the Digital Hub Product Design division, and is familiar with the Cocoa programming framework. Joel received his bachelor\'s degree from M.I.T.','','New',0,20080306125835,20080306125835);
This one is pretty interesting also... and from someone with real world experience.
66,'Rahul Patwari,'I am not a company, but a physician who works in an urban emergency department. Every day I see the costs of inefficient health care delivery. There is a monetary costs in unnecessary tests and the time delays they cause. There is a cost to patients in that the stretched resources end up inappropriately distributed. There is a cost to physicians who are burdened with an ever growing fund of knowledge which is impossible with which it\'s impossible to keep up. This eventually leads to medical malpractice lawsuits which are a drain to our legal and medical systems. ','A small but significant step in improving all of these problems is making it easy for physicians to practice with the latest standards-of-care. My solution is to use the iPhone as a platform to deliver diagnostic and treatment plans based on the current literature. For example, imagine a patient with a stroke. The physician, using his iPhone, can determine if he meets the criteria to receive blood-clot dissolving medication, or determine if that would pose too great a risk of fatal bleeds in the brain. X-rays can be ordered according to established guidelines instead of the gestalt/gut-feeling of the physician. These rules have been shown to be very sensitive in finding fractures, yet at the same time reducing the number of unnecessary x-rays. The applications are quite broad. ','There is no product like this available. The technology isn\'t difficult, just a bunch of algorithms organized properly: cardiovascular, neurological, orthopedics, etc. Right now the information is there in the medical literature and unwieldy text books. My idea is simply to bring them together into one easy-to-use program. The iPhone is a device many physicians already carry, and if not, are looking at buying. This would be a reason to do so. What makes this device unique is that these decisions/calculations can be done bedside (with the doctor holding the iPhone). When done, it can be easily slipped back into a pocket. ','There is no product like this available. There really won\'t be competition for this product as I intend to give this away for free. There is no reason that the patient in a poorer urban hospital shouldn\'t have access to the same care that a patient coming to a richer hospital would get. If everyone can practice the same degree of quality care, I sincerely believe we can improve our delivery of health care and possibly even to more people. It will be a long while before concrete changes in health care delivery will arrive, but this may help. ','Rahul Patwari, MD. Board Certified Emergency Physician, Chicago, IL. I received my BS in Engineering, Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Subsequently I did my medical training at the University of Illinois at Chicago and completed my residency in Emergency Medicine at Chicago\'s Cook County Hospital. ','','','New',0,20080306165443,20080306165443);
It is very hard to build software like this which is both accurate and easy to use. Especially for general use. There are a lot of expert systems for medical diagnosis, including some which were accessible on the web (hundreds were at Revolution Health), but they are really not useful: they take far too long to use and are not sufficiently accurate. In fact Revolution Health removed most of them. One of the main problems is the terrible bandwidth of answering questions posed by a wizard.
But, at least, if it's on the iPhone, the huge costs of building and dealing with hardware are dealt with. I wish them luck, though I expect they are ignorant of the challenges ahead.
Some time ago, my strategy was to focus on high priority automated diagnosis, using much higher bandwidth channels, like microphones and cameras and so on. I had some machine learning algorithms for detecting skin cancer that I thought would significantly improve on the best existing algorithms, reaching 80-90% accuracy on a single viewing (higher than physicians which get around 60%), and nearing 100% if the moles were tracked. There were two major, but surmountable problems: I needed to do a lot of preprocessing to remove the variability of different cameras and shots and conditions, and I needed to get a good dataset to train and test (those are hard to acquire.) Ultimately I shelved the project because my cofounder wanted to work on something else (which I shelved because now I'm working on compressed air powered vehicles.)
How difficult were the regulatory issues around your software? I've been lead to believe that the FDA is quite difficult to work with on this type of software.
Furthermore, wouldn't legal liability be quite high?
The regulatory issues were very difficult, and I wasn't able to figure them all out before suspending the project. There wasn't an obvious precedent. My suspicion would be that if you built it, you could find some way to make money with it, but it would take years before the world would open up enough for people to, say, use it online.
It is very hard to build software like this which is both accurate and easy to use.
I would expect that a doctor that is used to dealing with the diagnosis process directly would be the best candidate to design one of this things. Although I'm sure there are quite a few challenges ahead.
though I expect they are ignorant of the challenges ahead.
He has a BS in Engineering and CS from a pretty good University, in addition to the MD. He should have at least some idea about what he is talking about, but this might just be wishful thinking on my part.
"There is no product like this available. The technology isn't difficult, just a bunch of algorithms organized properly: cardiovascular, neurological, orthopedics, etc."
Actually, people with good qualifications and lots of funding have been working on those algorithms for more than two decades. Products have been on the market for more than two decades (e.g. http://www.lcs.mgh.harvard.edu/projects/dxplain.html, http://scienceline.org/2008/01/04/doctor’s-diagnosis-version...). Almost all of these are not ready for use. Additionally medical experience is usually quite broad: not so focused on a particular disease. Some of the biggest successes in diagnostic process come from people specializing in diagnostic processes doing computer analysis (For example, Brenden Reilly's work on heart attack diagnosis, as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink).
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