IPIX was a photo-hosting service for E-Bay and various other sites in the late '90's -- that was a very big chunk of their revenue, I believe, and sounds a lot like Chute's product area as well.
It looks like E-Bay discontinued the IPIX integration and brought all that in-house, effectively killing IPIX's main cash cow (which was already anaemic after the dot-com crash). See this article from 2003: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i22/s01 . I wish the YC company best of luck in addressing this similar market.
I think IPIX' original product idea was a special camera to take 360-radial or 360-spherical photos and let people host those images on their website. Web clients needed a special plugin to view the results. Using these became popular on various real-estate websites for a while. It looks from IPIX website (http://www.ipix.com/) that that's their main focus again.
A former IPIX employee, Adam Sah, took some rudimentary log-aggregation tech he built for monitoring the IPIX servers, got permission to start a new company, and founded Addamark, now SenSage (http://www.sensage.com). They implemented one of the first columnar databases to minimize large-scale log aggregation storage space (logs take 2.5% the space required in a traditional DB) and to speed up queries. Many other companies are adopting this strategy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS). Here's the columnar-database patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
I worked at Addamark/SenSage for almost 4 years, it was a very good experience.
Adam Sah is pretty awesome -- he also built the Google Gadgets product, and is now doing a gourmet food wholesaling service (like etsy for artisan food vendors, I think).
The Internet now is a lot different from 2003 -- there are more sites than just eBay and a few hundred others -- back then you needed to raise Series A of $20mm to run a big startup, now you can do it by getting rid of your car payment.
Presumably Chute is going to be the kind of tool which would have let eBay build their in-house photo tool faster. This might not have worked in 2003, and maybe can work now.
It looks like E-Bay discontinued the IPIX integration and brought all that in-house, effectively killing IPIX's main cash cow (which was already anaemic after the dot-com crash). See this article from 2003: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i22/s01 . I wish the YC company best of luck in addressing this similar market.
I think IPIX' original product idea was a special camera to take 360-radial or 360-spherical photos and let people host those images on their website. Web clients needed a special plugin to view the results. Using these became popular on various real-estate websites for a while. It looks from IPIX website (http://www.ipix.com/) that that's their main focus again.
A former IPIX employee, Adam Sah, took some rudimentary log-aggregation tech he built for monitoring the IPIX servers, got permission to start a new company, and founded Addamark, now SenSage (http://www.sensage.com). They implemented one of the first columnar databases to minimize large-scale log aggregation storage space (logs take 2.5% the space required in a traditional DB) and to speed up queries. Many other companies are adopting this strategy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS). Here's the columnar-database patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
I worked at Addamark/SenSage for almost 4 years, it was a very good experience.