2010 was a good year for Web startups. Deal flow, particularly at early stages, was active, and even though valuations were high, investor dollars were seemingly at the ready. Of the companies that made headlines and that led some of the major tech trends of the year, many were startups: Zynga (social gaming), Groupon (group buying), Foursquare (location-based networks), Tumblr (micro-blogging), and GetGlue (semantic Web), to name a few.
In pulling together our list of the Top 10 Startups of 2010 for ReadWriteWeb's "Best of" series, we've decided to look beyond some of those big names and "established" startups (the term gets applied so broadly). Rather than lumping together new companies no matter their age or size, no matter whether they have an acquisition offer by Google or have a Hollywood biopic about their founder, we've decided to restrict our list to those startups who were founded or who launched in 2010.
Popular voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service Skype says that the worst is behind them and that the service has been stabilized. The voice and video chat system was down for most of its users over the past day, experiencing its greatest outage since 2007, when it went offline for nearly two days.
The company now says that the service is stabilized and running at roughly 90% of normal user volumes and it will give out free minutes to pay users and subscribers to make up for the downtime.
"Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life."
-Spanish painter Antoni Tapies
IPad art browsing app Art Authority (iTunes link) has added several new features that make this little treasure all the more enjoyable: the masterpiece shuffle and favorites. One of the iTunes staff favorite apps, Art Authority looks a little clunky on the outside, but now lets you enjoy more than 50,000 great works of visual art. The vast majority of the pieces are paintings and from the Western canon. Full screen viewing of public domain works around the web and one-click launch of Wikipedia articles about the artists make this a great example of a simple interface as a big value add.
IPhone photo sharing application Instagram announced today that it has hit 1 million registered users, a mere 10 weeks after the app launched to the public. The company had all kinds of odds against it, yet here it is - fast growing and widely loved. As M.G. Siegler wrote in a good profile of Instagram today, it took Foursquare a year to hit 1 million users and Twitter, two years.
Only time will tell how well this relatively simple app holds up its market share in the crowded world of mobile photo sharing. Its users like the filters it offers, the community they find there and the ease of cross-posting Instagrammed photos out to other networks like Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare. It's really as simple as that; and look at all the reasons that logic would imply that it shouldn't have worked.
If, as some say, a deal can only be called successful when everyone involved leaves the table unsatisfied, then the net neutrality rules approved at a meeting this morning by the Federal Communications Commission may be a success.
Under the rules, two years in the making, no provider may block another company's traffic, however, it may offer "faster" access to companies willing to pay more.
In 2010, we've seen the rise of so-called "social shopping" services. They rely heavily on technologies such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart phone scanners. Here we present five of the main social shopping developments of 2010. This kicks off a series of posts that will be published over November and December, looking back on the biggest web technology trends of the year.
The Web has of course always had an impact on shopping, from the dot.com flame and burns (Boo.com anyone?) to e-commerce success stories like Amazon.com and eBay. So what's new in 2010?
Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best 'little company.' In past years we've given this honor to Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube (in 2006, the year it was acquired by Google), Twitter (in 2007, before it went mainstream), Zoho, and Aardvark. As you can see, many of these companies have gone onto much bigger things. When we select the Best LittleCo winner each year, we look for small companies (less than 100 employees) that have set the online world alight.
This year there was plenty of competition. Foursquare won the battle of the check-in apps, Flipboard created an innovative iPad app that caught our imagination, Instagram burst onto the scene with a mobile photo app. The LittleCo that impressed us the most though was New York-based Tumblr.
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. The latest installment is the top 10 stories of the culture of technology.
These are the stories that answer that question you sometimes hear from tech skeptics or those who mistake advances in computing and communications for Beanie Babies and Segways. The question is "So what?" Here's what.
In 2010, it felt like the flurry of new startups and Web tools only accelerated, with more and more products popping up every week. For business owners, it's not always easy to stay on top of it all, let alone take each of these new offerings for a spin to see if they're worth using.
As 2011 approaches, ReadWriteWeb takes a look back at 10 of the last year's most useful or promising Web tools for small and medium-sized businesses.
Location-based check in service Foursquare has just announced the addition of photos and commenting features, due to arrive within hours to users of its iPhone application. The features have already gone live on the Foursquare.com website.
According to Foursquare, these two features were among the most requested from its users for months, a signal that, perhaps, folks are beginning to demand more social elements from check-in apps: rewards, either virtual or tangible, are just not enough.
