ReadWriteWeb

What happened to startups in 2011? E-commerce and mobile payments continued to grow, and group buying startup Groupon went public. Facebook, the biggest social network around, expanded in a huge way, announcing Timeline, frictionless sharing and a settlement (finally) with the FTC. It also swallowed up many promising startups, including group messaging service Beluga, social network-enhancing service Friend.ly and software company WhoGlue.

The mixing of social gaming and mobile payments, social network alternatives to Facebook, consumer cloud storage and apps that actually make you feel productive (read: not like you're just wasting more time online) came out on top as just a few of the most important startups of this year.

This year's top 10 startups list is a combination of companies that launched in 2011, and others that gained considerable attention. We chose these startups based on how they've changed or disrupted their niches and how they've influenced trends this year and for the year to come. They are listed in no particular order. Take a look after the jump.

Back in the 1980s, one of my first publishers asked me for a quick biography paragraph to place at the end of a story. "Tell your readers about yourself," an editor said. "He fills infinite pieces of paper," I wrote. (It was the shortest piece I ever composed.)

Since that time, I've been presented with a countless number of form factors of strange components vying to replace my use of paper for keeping notes. Paper is wasteful, it gets lost, it reduces the number of trees, it consumes space. Think of how the environment would love me if I rid myself of the romance that I could record the passing parade of the world with a pencil.

When the much-loved screen shot and image annotation Mac app Skitch was purchased by Evernote a few months ago, an iOS version of the service was said to be forthcoming. Evernote has made good on that promise by launching Skitch for iPad, with an iPhone-friendly version coming soon.

On the iPad, Skitch lets you pull up photos, screenshots and Web pages and annotate them with arrows, shapes, text and lines. It's a stripped-down offering compared what Skitch can do on the desktop, but for the tablet form factor, it works quite well.

If you need remote access to your desktop from your iOS phone or tablet, now you can get there for free. Starting today, LogMeIn has a new app in the Apple App Store and it is free. This replaces their low-end Ignition app that they previously charged $30 for. It doesn't give you everything that the current paid app provides, such as file management and cloud storage and HD video/audio streaming. But if you just need remote access, then the free app will do quite nicely. You of course need to run the free version (or the paid version) of LogMeIn on your Windows or Mac desktop, and set up an account online with them to complete the connection.

What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

Evernote has expanded its read-later browser extension, Clearly, to Firefox. The extension first launched on Chrome in November. Clearly slides in a cleaned-up view of Web articles without ads or navigation, making content more pleasant to read. It automatically turns multi-page articles to single pages.

It's also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.

For the last few years, many everyday folks who've been asked in surveys, "What is a cloud application?" have either guessed wrong or said they don't know. Folks don't know what "the cloud" is, and for the most part, that's not their fault. Unlike the Internet, which truly is a single network of interconnected resources, "the cloud" is more of a concept, one which can be leveraged by marketing departments to mean just about anything.

For this year's ReadWriteWeb list of the most important and influential consumer-grade cloud computing apps of the year 2011, we focused our gaze on services that truly fit the formal definition: specifically, services that 1) utilize a remote resource of 2) variable capacity 3) which the user can provision for herself, 4) which is mostly or totally independent of programs installed on the user's devices or PCs, and 5) which is not just a Web site with a big server. You may have seen Facebook on some publications' Top Cloud lists already; by our definition, Facebook is not a cloud service. But we did look for providers that perform innovative, discrete functions built around their services.

Evernote Hello is a fine example of a really good idea that, when executed, doesn't work at all well. In concept, Hello is brilliant. Who doesn't have a problem with remembering names, especially when you're at a party or work function and being introduced to a half-dozen people simultaneously?

As I said, it's a really good idea, and the execution is almost perfect. However, Hello doesn't seem to have seen much real-world testing. While this seems like a perfect app for folks working in IT and meeting lots of people for business, it has a lot of problems that need to be sorted out first.

Evernote has announced two new apps to help you remember what you ate and the names of the people you are eating with, dubbed Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. The two new apps were released at LeWeb in Paris Wednesday morning. While neither of these new apps are incredibly original, both go to show that Evernote wants to become the destination for all the notes you ever want to take in your life, from a memorable meal to an interesting person. We explore Evernote Food and Hello below.

So far in our series exploring cloud computing for consumers, we've looked at calendars and music. In the multi-device world we now live in, files from your computer are also increasingly being stored in the cloud.

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

We wrote last week about Fetchnotes, a new reminder service. Today a slightly different take on task management can be found from Asana, and while not new it is now free. It might take you two minutes to get started, it is that simple.