I love startups. Why? Because they represent the future of the tech industry and usually you can pick trends that will drive the tech blogs like Techcrunch out of them. Here’s the 25 I picked.
1. Boxee. There are a ton of videos linked off of CrunchBase. Why is it important? Because better than any other company this one is pushing TV in a new Internet-connected direction.
2. Vark. My video with founders. Why is it important? Because it uses humans to get answers to questions that search can’t answer and it does it via an interesting distribution system via IM, mobile apps, and email.
3. Foursquare. Why is it important? Because it brought us a new kind of game: a location-based one, but forget the game, when you check in with it you’ll see who is close to you and what tips about cool things to do near you have been left by your friends. Video of company founder on Gillmor Gang talking about Foursquare. UPDATE: a few people say I should put Gowalla (Foursquare competitor) on the list. But so far I went for Best-of-Breed and in my view Foursquare is kicking Gowalla’s behind. But, indeed, I’m watching Gowalla too.
4. Nextstop. Video of company founders demoing nextstop’s mobile. Watch a more general video overview with the founders. Why is this important? Because discovering interesting places to visit, whether in the places near where you live, or on a trip across an ocean, is something we still can’t do well. Nextstop brings us a way to share, curate, and collect interesting places.
5. Rippol. Video of Rippol’s founders showing off several new features coming next week. Why is it important? Because it shows off something I expect a range of new companies to do in 2010: display a different view of our social networks, in this case it will show you just videos that your Twitter and Facebook users are sharing. I find it invaluable for watching large numbers of users and the videos that they care about.
6. Waze. Video demo of Waze as we drive around Palo Alto. Why is it important? Because it shows off how crowds can be used to compete with much bigger companies, but also how mobile devices can be used to share information with each other to build a new kind of service that isn’t possible other ways.
7. Gist. Video of Gist’s founder on my studio show about future of work and a separate video of my visit to their headquarters in Seattle. Why is it important? Because when you are working with people the more you know about those people the more productive you’ll be able to be. This is particularly true for salespeople and other networkers. Before you make a big call, have you checked all their social networking sites to see what they’ve written? With Gist it’s easy and hooked into your email system.
8. Kynetx. Video with founders explaining why Kynetx is an interesting real-time development system. Why is it important? Because it lets developers augment websites and search engines for their customers. AAA can add new data to Google.com for its members, for instance.
9. Tapulous. Video with Tapulous’ founder talking about having the top grossing iPhone game. Why is it important? Because mobile devices are changing how we play games and the company that best took advantage of that trend in 2009 was Tapulous who had the #1 iPhone game and was first to introduce in-app buying of virtual goods, another trend I expect will be huge in 2010.
10. Posterous. Video of company founders talking about how Posterous makes publishing simple. Why is it important? Because, while Twitter has made publishing short messages super simple sometimes a short message isn’t enough and you want to write a blog, or post a video, or put up a photo. Posterous is one of a handful of companies that have pushed publishing along in 2009 (Tumblr is another one) and that makes them a company to watch in 2010.
11. Appmakr/PointAbout. Video demos of how this works are on their site. Why is it important? Because the iPhone is getting more and more important and having an app is a way for companies to keep relationships with customers up to date. Appmakr lets you make your own iPhone app from a number of different feeds like RSS, Twitter, or YouTube, among others for $99 without writing any code and it looks comparable to apps that other companies have spent tens of millions creating.
12. Payvment. Video. Why is it important? Because this brings ecommerce to social networks in an easy-to-implement way which opens up all sorts of new retail-style opportunities on sites like Facebook. It also shows off PayPal’s new APIs, which make in-app purchasing possible.
13. Cloudkick. Video. Why is it important? Because it helps you monitor your cloud computing servers on Amazon and Rackspace (#1 and #2 in cloud hosting). It helps you visualize your bandwidth allowances and other important metrics and a lot more.
14. Blippy. Video. Why is it important? This is the weirdest choice that I made and seems very stupid on first look, but this system that lets you share your credit card (and other) purchases with the world makes sense in what it potentially enables: crowd buying and predictive buying. “Hey, we notice you visit Safeway every five days, did you know that you can save x amount if you switch to our buying club?” Now it doesn’t do that. Yet. But this is definitely a concept you should watch, especially after Quicken bought Mint which did similar stuff with credit cards, but not in a public way. But I’m not so sure I want you to see what I’m buying. I signed up anyway.
15. Expensify. No videos available. Why is it important? I hate expenses. In fact, this whole post really started as a way to procrastinate on doing my expenses. This system makes expenses easier and more automatic. Big win for me. Trend? That we’re going to share even more info with public in future than we can ever imagine. What are the benefits and costs of doing that? We’ll find out together in 2010.
16. RedBeacon. Video. Why is it important? This TC50 winner helps you get price quotes and book appointments with local businesses. Is this what will take Web 2.0 into bedroom communities around the world? Good chance it is.
17. Citysourced. Video. Why is it important? Because government is being forced to do more with less. How can city managers know where to spend their meager resources to better improve their communities? You can tell them with the mobile app Citysourced has created.
18. Spotify. Video. Why is it important? Instant music. No downloads. Who needs to steal music anymore? Just type in your favorite band’s song into Spotify and it starts playing nearly instantly. When I first saw it I was floored. Not out in USA yet, but VERY popular in Europe and will be released within months here.
19. Plancast. No video available. Why is it important? This service, which lets you tell your friends what your plans are for the future, has instantly become San Francisco’s tech geek social calendar.
20. Evri. Video. Why is it important? This system helps content producers present a better UI to navigating other articles on the web. This helps profitability through more pageviews and more time spent on site and also increases search hits. The newspaper industry needs more ways to help their business, this is one, along with Apture, another company that is proving new UI to content navigation.
21. Square. Video. Why is it important? When you go to an Apple store you’ll notice they don’t have cash registers. Instead the salesperson comes to you and lets you complete the transaction with a hand-held computer. Square does that for the rest of us using an iPhone and a little add on for the top/headphone jack.
22. Aloqa. Video. Why is it important? Because Aloqa is building a platform for mobile phones around your location and it shows you favorite hotspots, friends, vents, and recommended bargains nearby. But it’s the platform part of this that has me interested so companies can add their own apps in easily which makes this different than, say, Yelp.
23. Nimsoft. They aren’t yet on Twitter (bad!). Videos: Part I, Part II, Part III. Why is it important? Because more and more of our applications are built using cloud-computing blocks. A piece on Amazon. Another on Rackspace’s Cloud. Yet another on Google or Salesforce. Yet you are in control of none of it, so you need to know the state of each. Nimsoft shows you that status. By the way, this company isn’t really a startup, founded in 2004, but this product entry is totally a new direction for the company and I wanted to call it out.
24. OneRiot. Video. Why is it important? Because more and more of our life happens on the real-time web ala Twitter and Facebook and other services and we need search to make sense of it. I expect that they’ll face sizable competition this year from Twitter or Facebook or both and it’ll be interesting to see if they can stay ahead and do something spectacular. I picked them because they are the strongest of the independent real time search companies, but there are a few others out there too and we’ll be watching the pack in 2010 to see what happens.
25. Wildfire. Video. Why is it important? Because Facebook got dramatically more important in 2009 to tons of businesses thanks to its wild growth and Wildfire helps businesses build promotions for those companies. Plus it was a Facebook Fund winning company, so is interesting to watch.