WhereBerry, a Y Combinator-backed startup, launches today to tackle this problem of tracking and sharing plans - both specific and "someday." Friends can be invited to join the activities and can comment on the proposed plans as well.

Recommendations from Friends, Not Algorithms

At this stage, the startup isn't using any sort of algorithm to recommend activities to users. Instead, it uses their social graph to point to what others in their network are doing. That makes these recommendations quite different from, say, Yelp where you are taking suggestions often from total strangers. "Jessica K." might say that this is the best Chinese restaurant in the town, for example, but who is "Jessica K"? Do you trust her?

WhereBerry utilizes your Facebook social graph to build out your friends list initially (and thus assumes you trust your Facebook friends' recommendations on activities). All the information posted to WhereBerry is public, but much like Twitter's model, you can choose to follow different people.

This publicness may seem different than a number of new startups like Path that are emphasizing smaller, more private social networks. But according to WhereBerry co-founder Nick Baum, the sorts of data that people will share via the site isn't really that private. Moreover, by opening up this information and by revealing potential future plans with their friends, people might find others who are interested in coming along.

Baum told me of an elaborate Google Doc that he'd created and shared with friends - a spreadsheet tracking concerts he was interested in attending, with columns for dates, friends with tickets, and friends interested in going. Although the shared spreadsheet was a success - Baum attended more concerts than he would have otherwise - he thought there must be an easier way of repeating this sort of planning. Hence the idea for Whereberry.

Baum is joined by co-founder Bill Ferrell. Both are ex-Googlers, opting to leave the search engine giant to start their own company instead.

Thankfully, GIftRocket has rebooted the whole process, with a really innovative solution that should please merchants, gift-givers, and recipients alike.

The recipient of the card will receive a message notifying them of the gift, and when they arrive at the location, they can follow the link in the email, allow their phone to confirm their geo-location, and presto - the money is transferred to them, via PayPal.

Sending and receiving a gift via GiftRocket is incredibly easy, and ease-of-use is one of the main things that the company is trying to address. But there are other benefits too: there's no card or certificate to carry around; there's no leftover change on the card; there's no expiration date.

There is, however, a fee to send a card this way - $1 plus 5% of the total of the card. The works out to $2 for a $20 gift card. While most "traditional" gift cards are free, it's worth paying a little bit extra in order to have the convenience of GiftRocket and the completely open selection of merchants where cards can be redeemed.

Giftrocket thinks this will be a boon for small businesses too, most of which don't have gift card programs. Those can cost businesses a significant amount of money, and since Giftrocket actually doesn't require merchants' participation, there are no set-up fees. There's just a snippet of code that, should they decide to do so, businesses can add to their websites to let customers know that their gift cards are "Powered by GiftRocket."

So Y Combinator alum Chirply is taking on the greeting card industry by crowdsourcing stationery designs. Chirply had its soft launch a few weeks ago, soliciting designs and voting, and the startup is now ready to open its doors to the retail business.

Chirply's greeting card cost $4 (with shipping included in the U.S.) and users can buy any 10 designs in a mix-and-match pack for $25. The cards are all 100% recucled, 100% post-consumer waste. In addition to greeting cards, Chirply also offers the designs printed on notebooks and on wrapping paper.

This is great news for consumers (because, come on, we are socially obligated to buy greeting cards and we spend an inordinate amount of time sighing at the selection). But more importantly, Chirply is great news for designers.

Co-founders Gagan and Neel Palrecha care a lot about the design community, and they want to insure not only that the Chirply has beautiful designs for consumers to vote on and purchase, but that designers can participate in a site that showcases their work and compensates them fairly. Chirply doesn't ask designers to submit their original files, for example, just composites (until their submissions are voted on to be printed, of course). And Chirply pays artists a flat fee ($300) up front when their designs are selected, in addition to paying royalties based on sales.

Since Chirply's soft launch, this approach does seem to be working, as the startup has attracted some high quality submissions. That has piqued visitors interest, who on average cast about 30 votes, often over multiple sessions. The top cards on the sites have received well over 500 votes, in just under 5 weeks.

In addition to opening its retail store today, Chirply is announcing a round of funding, from a lost list of investors including Keith Rabois, Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Charles River Ventures, and others.

An added bonus: ReadWriteWeb readers can get 30% off their orders if they use the code "RWW" during checkout.

Information about debt reduction can be difficult to find, and there are plenty of questionable practices by banks and by debt consolidation companies that just serve to muddy the waters.

So making the task of tackling your debt easy and transparent is a big part of the mission of the YC-backed company Ready for Zero. Ready for Zero a free service with a very simple interface that helps clarify your financial status and plan your way out of debt.

The emphasis here is on transparency and interactivity, and users can see how adjusting payment amounts, for example, change their status. The software also offers other advice, including tips on how and when to approach a bank to renegotiate your interest rate.

Launched last month, Ready for Zero co-founder Rod Ebrahimi says that the system is already tracking $29 million in credit card debt.

But it isn't simply a matter of tracking - and helping users track - debt. Ready for Zero has recently partnered with the peer-to-peer lending network, Lending Club. By monitoring its users debt and their work towards paying it off, Ready for Zero can give a snapshot of one aspect of someone's financial health, and Ready for Zero makes it easy to share that with potential lenders at Lending Club. This means that people can apply for P2P debt consolidation loans at rates that are typically far lower than other banks and lending institutions.

As the startup expands, Ready for Zero says it plans to eventually give users the option to make payments, not just monitor payments, through their interface. "We're just three guys and we're a technical team," says Ebrahimi. But the startup is hoping that by merging that technical expertise with more open data, that Ready for Zero can scale up while helping the rest of us scale back our debt.

Convore is a real-time communication tool, but unlike many other apps that offer group chat, Convore runs in your browser and doesn't require a download or chat client. "Basically, it's a contemporary version of IRC," says co-founder Leah Culver.

Convore supports both public and private groups. Currently, based on the activities of the alpha-testers, the topics of the public groups veer towards tech, movies, and "who's up late at night coding," but users are able to create their own.

Within each topic are a number of threads, and within these are conversations, updated in real-time. This makes Convore feel like a blend of forum and chat. When you log into the site, you can see the conversations that have occurred while you were offline, and - a great feature - when you step back in to chat, Convore scrolls to the point where you left off, so you can read to catch up.

Culver is joined by co-founders Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire. The three have built the real-time technology upon which Convore runs. It uses what Florenzano describes as "long polling, which means that on every page, the browser opens a connection that talks back to some proprietary technology we've built to speak to a cluster of Redis servers. We have some technology that parses each message for links, for embedded images, and constructs some structured data about the message, and then sends it out to everyone in the group via Redis."

You can sign up for Convore now and take it for a spin.

They are: Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, the prototype for Adsense and the Google slogan "don't be evil" and Harj Taggar, a Y Combinator employee who previously built and sold an eBay auction automation software company. Buchheit will reportedly leave Facebook to join the incubator. Y Combinator helps build small startups, runs the widely-appreciated Startup School and owns the startup-focused social news site Hacker News, among other projects.

Liz Gannes wrote an in-depth profile of Y Combinator this Summer at Gigaom. The organization has experienced remarkable success with startups and exercises significant influence over the startup ecosystem. It's a model for many other seed investment organizations, but its strongest competition for mindshare is Colorado-based TechStars.

Buchheit Leaving Facebook

The LA Times says Buchheit's joining Y Combinator means he's leaving Facebook today, as well. That's interesting, because the man made wealthy by his work at Google said this Fall that he believed Facebook has the potential to be worth more than Google. Buchheit has been at Facebook since his startup FriendFeed was acquired by the giant social network. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor has since become Facebook's Chief Technology Officer.

There's a saying that says some people like to help make big companies great and others prefer to help make great companies big. Joining Y Combinator may be Buchheit's best opportunity for the latter.

Known as the premier angel investor, Conway admitted that he had fretted about what the content for today's lecture should be, but with some urging from YC's Paul Graham, Conway opted to simply tell a few stories of how he had met a number of today's strongest tech companies: Napster, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Although going public with Altos was a huge win for Conway, he argued that he defines success by having what was, at the time, the fastest growing company in America. "And that was more satisfying than getting rich."

And the message Conway repeated to the crowd at Stanford today: "You can do it too."

Napster's Shawn Fanning: Superstardom and Borrowed Suits

Conway told of a party at his house in 1999, at the top of the Internet bubble. With 40 million users at the time, Napster founder Shawn Fanning had a large crowd around him the whole time at the party. "I'm going to go talk to the two wallflowers over there, Larry and Sergey," said Conway, who told the investor that "We're going to build a big company too, but we will never be famous like Shawn."

Conway pointed out that Fanning managed to cultivate a strong brand name with Napster, and while Napster didn't survive, Fanning used that brand name to build future companies. When Napster lost its first court ruling, said Conway, Fanning showed up in a suit he'd borrowed, as he'd never worn one before.

But as Conway noted, Fanning was smart enough to know that once Napster found itself in the courts that things were probably all over. And Fanning was perceptive enough, despite his young age, to be ready to move on to his next idea and his next company.

Building a Good Service, Building a Good Brand Name, then Monetizing: Early Google

When Google was looking for its first VC round, the founders told Conway that if he could help the company secure investment from Sequoia that they'd let him invest as well. Criticizing some of the recent protestations about valuations of startups, Conway noted that the valuation of that round was $75 million - "and every one of us felt lucky to get in on it."

Conway talked about the attention that Larry and Sergei paid to learning how to become good CEOs. And he said that the important things to the founders of Google was providing a good service, making users happy, and building a good brand name. And then monetize.

Conway also related an anecdote when Sheryl Stanberg approached Conway as Google thought it was running out of money. Ten days later, Conway joked, Google changed its mind as "AdWords started working."

What The Social Network Gets Wrong about Zuckerberg

"Zuck," says Conway, "meets the definition of 'anyone can do it if they think big.'" Railing against the depiction of the early days of Facebook as chronicled in The Social Network, Conway insists that Zuckerberg was not partying all the time. Nor was he sitting in depositions five days a week, arguing with lawyers. Rather, "he was working his tail off like any good entrepreneur."

Conway argued that Zuckerberg has had a consistent vision about what Facebook is, something that isn't evident in the film. "How are you going to measure success with this thing called 'social networking'?" Conway asked Zuckerberg in an early interaction. "Because some day I am going to have 300 million users using this product," was Zuckerberg's response. Something that demonstrates the founders humility, says Conway.

The Origin and the Definition of "Founder Friendly"

"Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur," said Conway. You don't need to have a business plan or an MBA. All you need, says Conway, is a great idea. Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.

Demonstrating how he has been known as not just an early investor but a strong ally and advocate for startups but also alluding to some of the recent "Angelgate" controversies, Conway ended by saying "entrepreneurs build companies and should be the one who are the focus of the stories" the press writes - not investors.

"Never forget it's your company," said Conway. "It's the founder's company."

Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books

We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.

Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.

"Beyond merely documenting what I observe around me, I hope to provide an honest reflection of what's it's like to create free enterprise from its most humble tenements," wrote Parkatti in the opening diary.

The two Mike's both left what they refer to as "fairly comfortable employment" to pursue their dream of starting a web company through the Y Combinator program; Parkatti left a Canadian startup, and Marrone left Yahoo! "I suppose you could characterize it as a feverish search to find my true professional identity," says Parkatti of his resume.

It's easy to tell that Parkatti and Marrone are smart people. This one is definitely being added to my RSS reader (or at least, it would be if the Globe and Mail site offered an RSS feed of it -- unfortunately, they don't appear to).