Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days. But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply "that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of really-newness it would take to satisfy you?
Here are a few "cool" ventures I have in mind:
On the other hand, they'd be stupid not to go where the money is (that is, were all the MySpace generation kids are).
Then again, I guess that's true for all kinds of reality TV we've seen so far, including justin.tv.
At the moment though, they just aren't set up to make short snippets of content from different broadcasters easily findable.
The distribution of tech is a problem as well. Another random idea; I wonder if they could set up a post based rental of equipment for one off events.
The first example which comes to mind is powerset.
Anyway, they're probably at +3 standard deviations for "newness" compared to all tech startups. Kind of a high bar to match.
But natural language search that works would be HUGE.
Let me remind you that Google was a small startup very recently, and that was during the "dot com bust".
Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.
For universities with medical programmes, I'd say that UToronto is at the top, closely followed by UBC and McGill. If you're not interested in medicine or law, though, I'd say that Waterloo and SFU are pretty much tied, with UVic coming second.
>Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.
I'm sure you could find people who think that any of the universities I've mentioned are Canada's best university; to a certain extent it will depend upon their field. That said, few would dispute that all the above are better than UCalgary, UManitoba, York, or Carleton.
The largest advantage of a great university like Oxford is in increasing the range and depth of ideas presented to students. It's impossible to completely separate the teaching role of a university from its research role: Teaching (and inconvenient questions asked by irritating students, like yours truly, in class) informs research, and research informs teaching. And quite apart from the "indigenous" research, if you're at a minor university without a strong reputation for research, you don't have Knuth dropping by for a few months, or Rivest visiting to give a lecture (albeit about the rather odd notion of obtaining forward security by using a stream of broadcasted random numbers which is too fast to be stored).
There are undeniable advantages to being at a great university in being exposed to new ideas. Why haven't PG et al. noticed this? Probably because their measurement -- can someone create a successful startup? -- is just as biased as everyone else's measurements. After all, when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?