PG’s Foresight in hindsight, almost 3 years later..

I recently re-read this post (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html) by PG from 2008, listing ideas YC would like to fund back then. I thought it’ll be interesting to revisit and discuss what he was absolutely right about, what is still relevant today and what didn’t pan out as anticipated. I realize there’s a new set of RFS’s out there, I still think this is an interesting exercise simply because the no. of startups he was right about. Some obvious winners:

2. Simplified browsing: I’d say iPad fits the bill. My mother, who’s never touched a computer in her life is quiet happy browsing our pics on the ipad.

9. Photo/Video sharing: Besides posterous and tumblr, there’s also instagram and picplz that have generated a lot of excitement in the area.

16. Some form of search that depends upon design: Not perfect, but this seems to the main USP of Bing.

17. New payment methods: Seems like the field is wide open but there’s been lot of activity in the area. Square, Zong and NFC related hype are good recent examples.

19. Application/data hosting: There’s been a recent gold rush in this area, Heroku being the poster child. As PG said, there’s room for more.

27. Hardware/Software hybrids: Well, square is one good example. This is something that I’m very keen on tackling personally as I believe there are a lot of opportunities still wide open in this area.

Would love to hear more from others..