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.

By September 2011, Forbes reported that member numbers were up to 600,000 and sales were in the six-figure range. Shellhammer handpicks every product that is sold on the site. It doesn't rely on email blasts or fatigue-inducing daily deals. And unlike other flash sales sites, merchants who sell on Fab.com don't lose money on their products.

To make the e-commerce experience more social, Fab.com launched its Live Feed, which aggregates everything that the site's users are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing about on the Web. The new feature is opt-in, meaning that Fab users don't one day wake up and realize that everyone in their network knows their purchasing habits. As I said in my 2012 predictions post, this social networking-turned-flash sales site will continue to grow. Fab.com's only real competitor in the flash sales market is Gilt Groupe.

Dwolla: Mobile Payments That Act Like Cash

Dwolla sees itself more like Visa than a PayPal type of mobile payments solution, except it uses cash instead of credit. Its main competitor is Square, which offers Square Card Case, except that relies on a user's smartphone and the retailer's iPad cash registers. Dwolla is much simpler.

Users benefit from Dwolla's location and social features, and that it's basically digital cash rather than credit-based money. In that way, Dwolla acts like cash in your wallet, except it's digital and your wallet is your smartphone. And at the end of the day, Dwolla wants to partner with retailers to make this concept work. Its "Grid," which launched back in June, works like Facebook Connect for payments - a user's personal information is stored on Dwolla, not the merchant's servers. If a third-party app wants to connect to Dwolla, it has to first ask permission just like Facebook Connect. That's one way Dwolla makes users feel more in control of their accounts, which are also based entirely on cash. Dwolla transactions are 25 cents regardless of the amount unless it is under than $10, in which case it's completely free. PayPal, on the other hand, always charges 30 cents per transaction plus 2.9% of the transaction.

Zaarly: Mobile Local Commerce Comes To Your Neighborhood

Whereas EBay is entirely bidding based, Zaarly acts more like the local commerce facilitator. Zaarly users don't need to limit themselves to stuff, per se. They can also post about errands they need done and tasks they want someone else to do for them, from "delivering a candle" to "finding an indie music expert to make me feel cool again." The company raised $1 million in its seed round from investors such as Ashton Kutcher, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit and Chicago's Lightbank, which also backed Groupon. In late October, it raised $14.1 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sands Capital Ventures, just to name a few.

BankSimple Finally Launches, Rebrands Itself As Just Plain "Simple"

While the "location optional" feel of BankSimple seemed great, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and people transitioning back to local credit unions, the idea of putting all of your money into the cloud felt a bit less appealing. The service finally launched in late September, but raised concerns about the security and potential sale of customer data. In November, BankSimple rebranded to just "Simple" and officially opened for business. It is not actually a bank, but it does work with FDIC-insured banks that handle a user's money.

Instagram: The Web's Second-Biggest Mobile Social Network

Next page: The next five top startups of 2011

Path: If You're Serious About Not Being On Facebook

As Jon Mitchell wrote in his smartly titled post "Path, Timeline and Worship of the Self," the big difference between Path and Facebook Timeline is that Path is closed, though you can choose to syndicate your content to Facebook or Twitter. Some have said that Path is what Facebook should be, a space for real friends not thousands of Facebook "friends" that you've met twice. In the wake of social Web overload, could Path be the way to bring some balance to your socially networked life?

Pinterest: Start Pinning Pretty Pictures And Forget About Socializing

SCVNGR: The Gamification Of Location-Based Commerce

Evernote: How To Organize Your Life

Everything seemed to be going well for Evernote this year until the introduction of its Evernote Hello app, which is supposed to help users remember people they meet in real life by taking their picture. Unfortunately, it's only available for iOS and it assumes that the user is willing to hand over his or her phone to a stranger. ReadWriteWeb's Joe Brockmeier notes that this could be awesome, if "Evernote is using Hello as a prelude to acing contact management features into Evernote." If it does, this could be a great way to manage contacts. Even better, it could collaborate with LinkedIn's CardMuncher iPhone app to sync everything up. Next up, Evernote wants to conquer the world of "Read Later" apps; it just added its "Clearly" clean-reading extension to Firefox. We named Evernote one of the top 10 consumer Web products of 2011. It is certainly one to watch in 2012.

Dropbox: Consumer Cloud File Sharing At Its Best

Do you agree with our picks? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below.

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.

The app even has a built in Web browser so you can snap screenshots and scribble on them as needed. Of course, you can always take a screenshot of any site or app on the iPad by simultaneously hitting the home and power buttons on the device. Those images land in your "Photos" collection, which Skitch can then pull from.

In addition to marking up images and maps, you can pull up a blank screen and use Skitch like one of the many digital whiteboard applications we've seen. In fact, this application could easily replace most of those offerings while providing a whole slew of handy new features on top of it.

All marked-up images are saved automatically within the app. They can be emailed, saved locally or tweeted out to the world. You can plug in your Evernote account to save things there, but it's by no means a requirement.

The first iOS app for Skitch comes a few months after the service was acquired by Evernote and subsequently launched an Android app.

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.

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.

Clearly brings Evernote into an increasingly crowded market dominated by dedicated read-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Like Clearly, Read It Later turns all articles into single-page views, but Instapaper intentionally doesn't, in order to respect the revenue decisions of publishers.

Evernote Clearly could gain significant traction if users find they enjoy having all their cloud-synced stuff in one place, instead of having a separate app for reading. Content shifting is a new trend, and Evernote, whose basic service is free, is well positioned to introduce the behavior to new users.

Chrome and Firefox are the next biggest browsers after Internet Explorer, so Evernote Clearly is now available to a sizable chunk of the market. Chrome actually surpassed Firefox for the first time this month, only three years after launching, but Firefox renewed its search deal with Google yesterday, giving it a new lease on life.

You can install Clearly for Chrome or Firefox.

Do you use a clean-reading service? Which one do you use?

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.

Hosting services are not cloud apps for purposes of this list; and there are plenty of innovative hosts to consider (we gave serious thought to Wistia), but in the end we decided that a hosting service is not really an application unless it provides a discrete function that goes over and above simple storage or sharing. Analytics, which Wistia provides, is right on the edge, but it's really a measurement of a byproduct of using the service as opposed to a function that users actually perform. That's not saying Wistia isn't a great idea; it just belongs on another list.

10. CloudApp. The largest single category of cloud apps for consumers is storage and retrieval, which is understandable because it's a service that everyone needs to one degree or another. What's interesting is how certain services innovate on this theme, and especially whether they give themselves room to continue innovating.

CloudApp is for Mac OS and iOS users at the moment, and its innovation is that it's building a little ecosystem around itself. It utilizes your choice of quick-and-easy gestures for designating a file or object to send to CloudApp's storage, the most basic of which is dragging and dropping the object to CloudApp's icon in the taskbar. In exchange for this gesture, CloudApp produces a URI which is copied to the Clipboard. From there, you can paste it into an e-mail, a tweet, or an IM message; when your recipient receives the link, she has instant access to the object.

The way CloudApp innovates is by incrementally enhancing what can be easily uploaded, and how those objects can be utilized in their native context. One example is screenshots: You can designate a key for taking a screenshot and uploading it in one fell swoop; the recipient sees your link, clicks on it, and sees your screen. There's no exporting or importing necessary here.

But what hoisted CloudApp onto our Top 10 list this year is how well the company is promoting Raindrops. This is an extremely clever, self-promotional idea for enabling developers to build their own tools that utilize CloudApp in similarly contextual ways, with the help of CloudApp's own API. One example the company created at the time this feature was launched in April 2010 is for Adobe Photoshop; since then, the community has contributed a truckload more, including an intelligent link interpreter for Twitter and a stand-alone CloudApp client for iOS called Stratus.

Here's an example (above) of another add-on you can't even see (which is a good thing): The maker of SparrowMail used CloudApp's API to develop a way to do simple drag-and-drop of attachments into e-mail messages, bypassing Mac OS' sometimes convoluted series of steps.

Building a community around something as simple as an app is a difficult thing for a small company to achieve, especially when it's in competition with a plethora of other vendors in the same category. CloudApp is pulling this off brilliantly. (It's worth noting that the service is built on the open-source Heroku platform from Salesforce, thus answering RWW's question from last year on whether developers will trust Heroku: Yes.)

9. Waze. What would be nice is if someone hired a few thousand cars to drive around each town looking for traffic incidents, and report on them in real-time. Let's see, $25 bucks per hour salary times 1,000 reporters times 50 cities... I'll get back to you on that idea.

Or, what would be brilliant is if someone leveraged the platform that's already in existence to enable a few thousand folks to do this job passively and voluntarily. Waze is a system that utilizes the GPS information being pinged back from iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. It's been in existence since 2006, but last October the 3.0 version of the service introduced a fabulous new feature (so far, just for the iPhone users) that integrates with Twitter. This way, people can tweet on what's happening in their neighborhoods (including the good things, like street fairs) from right where they're standing.

Okay, maybe there aren't a thousand Waze users in a city like mine (Indianapolis) just yet, but it's surprising what you can find. There's updates on traffic accidents and reported police sightings (which are rarer in some cities than others). What Waze demonstrates is that there are ways of making use of data that can be collected passively from a crowd of users, in ways that do not jeopardize privacy.

8. Box.net. This is one of the services that comes to most folks mind when they know what a cloud app is. What's kept Box.net in the news, including just this month - and what keeps Box.net on our list this year - is a constant stream of innovations. Customizable synchronization is one example from last fall; and earlier this month, a completely revamped iOS app that enables features like uploading photos and videos to discrete folders. This puts Box.net on a par with dedicated photo-sharing services that simply can't expand its features list to Box.net's size. And just this morning, the company launched an enterprise-grade option for unlimited storage.

Next: Playing your own tune...

7. Audiobox.fm. My wife and I are both Pandora fans, although last year I found it ironic that both of us had been working - albeit without admitting it to ourselves - to make Pandora play music we actually already owned. Yes, that sounds like a pathetic waste of precious seconds, but there it is.

Audiobox.fm, launched last year, is the streaming service that folks need anyway: one which enables them to store the music they own in the cloud ($3.99 for 11 GB is pretty fair) and also play that music from any device using the service's own media player. ITunes users who were a bit discouraged last year by Audiobox.fm's dedicated player were treated this year to the option of streaming their own M3U files from cloud storage, to their player of choice (with variable results, especially in the case of Winamp, but not for lack of trying).

6. Joukuu. We introduced you to this storage maintenance service last month, calling it a "cloud cloud." It's a Web-based console for displaying in a single list the contents of files stored to Google Docs, Box.net, and Dropbox (Microsoft SkyDrive support still forthcoming). When you work with many colleagues on a project, and they all subscribe to different services (often the case with independent contractors who happen to be paired together), Joukuu is a true timesaver. And the drag-and-drop functionality of its outside-the-browser app saves you about a thousand clicks per day.

5. Hojoki. (If you weren't looking carefully enough, with definitions of Joukuu and Hojoki, you'd think this would be a foreign language course.) Entire billion-dollar-plus industries are built around so-called "collaboration platforms" that enable sharing and versioning of documents among members of teams. And yet there are individual cloud apps (Beanstalk, Dropbox, Evernote, GitHub) that are involved with the individual tasks around collaboration, and which all have managed identity, but which are not linked together.

So it really took more clever observation than creative genius to create Hojoki, but the premise works just the same as if genius were involved from the beginning. Hojoki is a messaging system that looks an awful lot like something you'd see from Salesforce. It builds a stream of people with whom you're already sharing contacts, and lets you organize them into groups for collaborative projects. The activities that all of you share within that group are pipelined through the Hojoki stream to everyone in that group, so it becomes an automatic task progress monitor. The service is currently in beta, although it's already made significant inroads, and there will be a business model attached to a premium service once the beta cycle is complete.

4. Do.com. Nothing more thoroughly demonstrates the rapidly changing state of the applications market in general than the fact that Microsoft Outlook's greatest competition in over a decade comes from something that isn't really an e-mail client. Do.com from Salesforce includes the level and ease of functionality for file sharing and collaboration that enterprises may have already attached to Outlook by way of add-ons, but which aren't available for everyday Outlook users.

And by tying Do.com to Gmail as its primary messaging service, Salesforce is wedging itself beneath Outlook and threatening to uproot it from home users' and small business users' systems. Do.com may not be a threat yet to Exchange, though it may put a dent in Hosted Exchange services for smaller businesses. Nonetheless, it's demonstrating that even an e-mail client with "2010" in its name is looking more and more like "1980."

Next: Is there beauty yet to be found in the cloud...

3. Spotify. The reason for the decline, if not yet outright collapse, of the global recording industry is that it is has not been meaningful or desirable for consumers to own music. The industry's principal delivery system for music, even to this date, remains a container that consumers no longer want; and the system that consumers prefer, and which a majority of them now actually use, is something that the industry has yet to truly embrace. Services like Last.fm and Pandora are more convenient than music ownership and, for more users today, more interesting than radio.

Spotify gambles with the notion that $9.99/month subscriptions to its premium mobile services (estimated last month at about 2.5 million) will be enough to pay down the royalties it undoubtedly owes for all its users, including those who use the free Spotify Radio desktop app to choose the music they want from Spotify's huge library. RWW's John Paul Titlow has been covering Spotify and Spotify Radio very thoroughly, in part 1 and part 2; and RWW's Jon Mitchell named Spotify #6 in his list of overall Top 10 Consumer Web Apps for 2011.

But what made Spotify qualify here again as a Top Cloud App is something it didn't have last year: an apps ecosystem of its very own. If you're thinking we've screwed up and posted a picture of Last.fm instead... well, it's no screw-up. Spotify's new desktop application, with music recommendation apps built-in, is so strong that it includes Last.fm as one of its recommendation providers, along with Rolling Stone magazine and TuneWiki.

When fully built out, the Spotify apps ecosystem will enable what the company is calling an "authentication layer" between record labels, app developers, and users. The technology that the record industry could not find it within itself to build for itself, may just end up being built for it. When that happens, it may have a certain deity to thank, followed immediately by Spotify.

2. iCloud. The establishment of Apple's stronghold in devices, and the services that support them, was deliberate, systematic, and in almost every aspect of its execution, brilliant. The exception was MobileMe, a service whose frequent slip-ups and uncharacteristically dramatic failures led Steve Jobs to openly declare its launch "not our finest hour."

Therefore iCloud could be noteworthy for having (at least thus far) not been a spectacular failure. But the brilliance of Apple's marketing has left many with the impression that iCloud has no direct competition with Android. What Android does lack, and what iCloud does provide, is a context of the service as an ever-present resource that's attached, albeit ethereally, to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Of course it's an Apple-only service, but haven't all Apple-produced disk drives since 1978 been Apple-only? From Apple's perspective, why must a virtual device, by definition, be more platform-agnostic than a physical one?

Because it's just another Apple device, it's programmable like an Apple device. Developers can build apps around it, and create new functions and methods that Apple Corp. hasn't even foreseen. For any other platform, this would be a great thing; from Apple's perspective, it could easily become perceived as an effort by independents to trim their way through Apple's carefully walled garden. Expect some "openness" issues to crop up around iCloud throughout 2012.

1. Evernote. Bill Gates was known to have overused the word "great" during his press appearances as the head of Microsoft, so there are probably thousands of sound bites of the phrase "great apps" just waiting to be compiled into the next great, annoying YouTube mash-up. Only a few apps get to be described as things of beauty.

At its core, Evernote does one thing, and does that very well. It collects clips of data from the Web sites you're reading or the applications you're using, and gathers them into categories that can be synced in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices. I noticed Evernote had pervaded the apps repertoires of many of the Syracuse University students we covered during last month's MLB.com Apps Challenge. Now that laptops, tablets, and in some universities, thin client desktops are the principal research tool of every scholar, Evernote has quickly risen to the level of ubiquitousness among this specific class of users - as invaluable to the work they do as Twitter.

Whether Evernote rises to the level of "beauty" depends on whether it raises its batting average of late. My friend and colleague Joe Brockmeier discovered the latest app in the Evernote ecosystem, called Hello, was perhaps a little less than half-baked. Nevertheless, the core of Evernote has joined Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs as the very definition of "cloud app" among users who know the cloud, and who truly do get it.

You can geo-tag your food events, describe the scenario, take pictures, add caloric information with the food tracker and share through Facebook and Twitter. Basically, if you like to scrapbook your life and especially your adventures through the culinary world, that is what Evernote Food is designed for.

Evernote Hello is a way to remember people's names. It is a lot like an app that came out last month called Namerick, so similar to the point where we wonder if Evernote borrowed the idea or just hired the developer. Hello bases remembering people's names on three key principles: faces, time and context. So, what the person looks like, where and when you met them and what you were doing at the time.

When you meet someone new, you have have them using the forward-facing camera on the iPhone to take a picture of themselves (or take it yourself). The app will take four photos for a mosaic of that persons face. It will then create an "encounter" which contains the person's face and where you met them and any other notes you add at the time.

There are other services available that have the functionality of both Food and Hello. Facebook, especially with the the Timeline rollout set to come, is probably the first to pop to mind. Like Evernote, Facebook wants to be the place where you record your life and share it with your friends. Evernote's two new apps are perfect for people that like to document to their personal cloud through Evernote and do not like the idea of being attached to Facebook's social graph. If you are a heavy Evernote user, you will probably end up using Hello and Food. If not, there is probably no reason to do so.

Are you going to use Evernote Food and Hello? Do you like the idea of digitally scrap booking your life? Let us know in the comments.

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.

I polled my Google+, Twitter and Facebook followers about which cloud services they use for file storage. Many of them mentioned Dropbox. Here's how I myself use Dropbox, probably a fairly typical use case:

I have a group of mainly business-focused folders on the hard drive of my desktop computer. Prior to Dropbox I would either send them to my laptop computer via FireWire (a high speed cord that connects one Mac computer to another) or by emailing important documents. This was both inefficient from a time perspective and also meant that my two computers quickly got out of sync.

Now, I simply connect those key folders on my desktop hard drive to Dropbox. This does two things: 1) it essentially backs up all of those files in Dropbox's cloud; 2) it enables my laptop to download all of those files from my desktop, using Dropbox as the middleman. I can also choose to download the files onto my iPhone and iPad, although because of limited storage I simply download individual files from Dropbox as I need to.

The beauty of Dropbox is that you're using the cloud as both a backup for your files and a conduit to sync files across devices. You don't have to rely on the cloud though, for example when you're offline. That's because the files are optionally downloaded onto the local machine, which I do on both my desktop and laptop (but not for my phone or iPad).

You get 2GB of storage for free on Dropbox, then premium plans start at $10 per month for 50GB.

Google Docs

I use a mix of desktop and online office software, although still with a bias towards desktop software for the heavy stuff (such as monthly statistics in an Excel spreadsheet for ReadWriteWeb). But it's possible these days to go completely Web-only for all office software. Google Docs is the most popular online office suite.

John Pozadzides, the CEO of web analytics software Woopra, told me on Google+ that "ALL new documents I create are done in Google Docs unless there is a specific requirement otherwise." He cited the collaboration features of Google Docs, noting that more than 80% of his documents are shared with others. But the key benefit to Google Docs is that John can access his documents "from anywhere there is a Web browser."

So while Dropbox is the best of breed among file sync and storage services, if you want to take it one step further you can attempt to cut out the middleman completely and create and consume files within Google Docs (or other online office solutions like Zoho and ThinkFree). It's not yet possible to completely eliminate local files. Colin Lovett told me on Google+ that he uses Google Docs and Photos "for everything except my raw audio and video files," for which he uses Dropbox to store.

Other Options

It's worth mentioning Evernote in this discussion, although it doesn't specifically market itself as a storage and sync service. It started out as an online notes tool, but now allows you to upload many different file types - images, audio, documents and more. I'm a daily Evernote user myself (I pay for the premium service), but so far I use it mostly as an online notes and planning tool.

Other options include SkyDrive (Microsoft's solution), CloudApp (a trendy Mac app favored by RWW hacker Tyler Gillies), Bitcasa (which is getting a lot of Valley hype for its "infinite storage"), SpiderOak, Box, Wuala and SugarSync.

If you're a developer or more technical than the average bear, check out our recent ReadWriteCloud post: From DevOps to NoOps: 10 Cloud Services You Should Be Using. Or you can build your own Cloud Drive!

Which Cloud Service(s) For Files Do You Use?

Whichever solution you go with, cloud storage of files is increasingly becoming a necessity for consumers. Even if you only have one personal computer, chances are you use other computing devices - at work, school or maybe even the good old Internet Cafe.

If you're new to this, I'd advise to give Dropbox a whirl. 2GB of storage is plenty to get started on. If you're an old hand already, let us know in the comments which tools and systems you use.

But let's face it, this valuation of Dropbox cannot be relied on. That $4 billion is mostly derived from fat cat VCs competing for a hot deal. It's far more important to ask: who is using Dropbox currently and is there anything in the use cases that justifies such a high valuation? So I asked the tech-savvy RWW community just that.

1. People now access the Web on multiple devices; including the traditional PC, smartphones, tablets like iPad, Netbooks and more.

2. As Web-connected devices proliferated, it became increasingly useful to use cloud computing services for file management.

Startups have attempted to tap into this huge market opportunity as far back as 2006, when ReadWriteWeb named Sharpcast (now known as SugarSync, a Dropbox competitor) as our Most Promising Company. So Dropbox isn't the only file sync service around. Some of the other products mentioned in my informal survey were SugarSync, Box.net, Ubuntu One and Wuala.

However it's Dropbox that has emerged to become the leading file sync service, since launching to the public in September 2008.

Daily Users

Most of the feedback I gathered from Twitter, Google+ and Facebook indicated that Dropbox is a product that is used not only daily, but multiple times a day. That's always a great sign for a startup.

Mickey Mellen is a heavy Dropbox user. Mellen told me via Google+ that he uses Dropbox about 100 times every day. He has over 40,000 files in his Dropbox account, totalling over 30 GB in size. "It's simply my primary drive," he said. "Every file of mine goes in there, so that every device of mine (desktop, laptop, netbook, tablet, phone) has access to it."

Tori Cushing said that she uses it daily, "all through the day." She has "just about all of the folders on my computer on Dropbox."

Dylan Bland is another daily Dropbox user. He uses it as a "default directory for a lot of important saves." He added, "we also use it at work to share common files."

Campbell Yule tweeted that he uses Dropbox "all the time, many, many times a day." His main use case is "for file sharing across locations."

ReadWriteWeb's own Jon Mitchell is a heavy Dropbox user. "Nearly all my primary workflows sync across devices using Dropbox," Jon remarked. Writing is of course Jon's occupation and he told me that he works "entirely in .txt files that save to a Dropbox directory that I can get to and work on from any device."

David Acklin said that for him, Dropbox is "always running, always backing up."

Both Personal and Business Use

The responses suggested that Dropbox is being used for both personal and business file sharing. Michael Schade uses it to store personal files, although he said that many of his business files have "moved to Google for easier collaboration."

But Dropbox is getting a lot of uptake for business collaboration, too. Ben Kepes said that he uses Dropbox multiple times a day, for "collaborating on docs across timezones and geographies."

Professional photographer Gareth Robins uses it every day for a variety of uses, including a shared folder with his accountant and another with his photographer assistant. He also uses it to deliver photos to his clients. He puts the photos in a Dropbox folder and shares the link with them.

My friend Emily Davidow told me on Facebook that she uses Dropbox "regularly for multiple shared projects."

Less Frequent Users

Others use Dropbox less regularly. I myself am in that camp. I currently use Dropbox to save files (mostly PDFs) that I want to read on my iPad. However I'm interested to expand my usage, now that I've heard how others are using it.

RWW writer (and part-time musician) John Paul Titlow tweeted that he uses Dropbox about weekly, "for household file-sharing, exchanging sound clips w/ bandmates and sending very large files occasionally."

Kim Sherrell told me on Google+ that she uses Dropbox "once in a while." She noted, "I'm reluctant to share resources when I'm editing or working on big files."

Workflow & Ease of Use

As Brian Ries rightly pointed out, how much you use Dropbox depends on how integrated it is in your workflow.

The ease of use of Dropbox was another factor that people commented on. "Dropbox just works," remarked Bill Kirby.

That's an important point, because syncing in the modern Web is too often an irksome process full of glitches. Indeed ever since I "upgraded" to Mac OS X Lion, I've noticed that home sharing (Apple's way of syncing your iTunes account across devices, among other things) has been very buggy.

Like any startup that is scaling up fast, Dropbox has its challenges. Dave Parry, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, blogged earlier this year about privacy concerns. But overall, the feedback I gathered from Twitter, Google+ and Facebook was overwhelmingly positive. Many respondents said that they use Dropbox multiple times a day, for both business and personal file sync and sharing.

Big Market - And So Far Dropbox is Delivering...

File sync and sharing is a potentially huge market, which we identified back in 2006 when we named Sharpcast as our Most Promising Company. Dropbox has become the leader in this space, due to its generally frictionless service and excellent usability. Indeed, its usability across multiple devices is probably what has kept it one step ahead of cloud computing giants, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Whether it's worth $4 billion is another matter. Judging on the product alone though, Dropbox has carved out a great niche and it has a good chance of becoming a very valuable company. Let us know what you think of Dropbox's value, in the comments.

The upgrade includes rich text editing within notes, mobile access to shared notebooks, the ability to search within individual notes and, for premium users, the option to lock the app with a passcode.

The new version of the iOS app also includes access to shared notebooks, something that wasn't previously available. The ability to create and edit notes in shared notebooks is something that the team says they're still working on.

Another seemingly small but helpful feature that's been added is the ability to search within individual notes in the app. Previously, you could run a search across your entire account, but never on a note-by-note basis. That changes with today's update.

Users that have upgraded to a paid premium account now have the option to lock their Evernote app using a numeric passcode, much like you can do with the device itself. This adds an extra layer of security on top of what might be private or otherwise sensitive information contained in the app.

In addition to all these new features, the iPad version of Evernote has been redesigned with an improved layout for the "All Notes" view of the app.

Libin posted a candid frequently asked questions on Evernote's blog about the funding. In it he admits that Evernote did not need to raise any money and that it has hardly touched the money it had already raised ($43.5 million to date with a $20 million round last fall). Libin makes the bold proclamation that Evernote wants to be a 100-year company. Will the Internet be around in 100 years?

So, what makes this company think that it can last for 100 years?

In his blog post, Libin quotes Sean Parker (as played by Justin Timberlake) in The Social Network: ""A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars."

"Well, we don't think a billion dollars is all that cool either. You know what's really cool? Making a hundred year company," Libin wrote. "That's a pretty big deal; not many companies make it anywhere close, but we sort of signed up for the task when we started talking about earning your lifetime trust. You plan on living a long time, right?"

A Lot of Things Can Happen in 100 Years

There are so many things that could happen in 100 years. Global warming could melt the planet. Nuclear war could ... well, also melt the planet. Skynet could take over and let the machines rule the world. Do the machines have need of Evernote?

A hot new startup could make online note-taking easier, more powerful and more intuitive than Evernote or a new technology could make the need for digital archives obsolete.

In its short history, Evernote has shown that it can innovate and adapt rapidly to an ever-changing landscape. It recognized mobile as a big opportunity early and now has applications for almost every major platform. It recognized cloud storage and computing early and the necessity of making its service available anywhere and everywhere through the cloud as an essential practice with parallel thinking to what Google wants to do with its applications.

Unlike a lot of startups these days, Evernote uses its own servers to host and make transactions along its database. That means the company is not beholden to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace or any other data center. That is important, as building its own infrastructure will be key to sustaining longevity. The fact that the company now has a fat war chest and a profitable business model will keep Evernote around in the near-term future, even if the economy reaches Depression-era levels.

Evernote Just Might Have The Chops

Evernote has hired Ken Gullicksen (an Evernote board member and formerly of Capitola Ventures, BilltoMobile and Voltage Security, among others according to his LinkedIn profile) to lead its corporate development and acquisition strategy. Here is what Gullicksen had to say about Evernote in a press release.

"It's rare to see a company develop so many high quality products, rapidly grow its user base into the millions and become profitable in such a short period of time. This is a testament to Evernote's leadership and team," said Gullicksen. "With the right strategic decisions, Evernote is in a position to go from popular app to fundamental technology. I'm thrilled to come onboard and be a part of the company's next phase."

So far, Evernote has shown that it is managed well by forward thinking leaders with a cadre of talented developers churning out new features to the platform all the time. The company is already profitable and the new round of funding will be used to compensate long-term investors and employees and then for innovation and acquisition. So far, so good.

But a lot of things can happen in 100 years. Evernote is 1/20th of the way there. Can it continue to grow and innovate uninhibited for another 95 years?

A number of synchronization services are available that handle file transfer, including Evernote, SugarSynch and FileMagnet (see the TidBITS story comparing five of them). Ignition avoids the effort in using a second app for these transfer tasks.

You can download the latest version from the iTunes Store here. You'll need to set up a free LogMeIn account and install the desktop software on the computers that you wish to remotely control first.

Also in other news, Ignition will come pre-installed on new Toshiba Android Thrive tablets and be available for a free 45-day period, and $25 thereafter. Like other Android versions, though, it doesn't include the file transfer feature yet.

An elephant never forgets. And as Evernote's elephant logo suggests, the note-taking platform already sees itself as a tool for storage, yes, but also for enhancing memory.

That couldn't be clearer with a newly release app today: Evernote Peek (iTunes link). The app makes rather ingenious use of the new iPad Smart Cover, creating a new way to make and study flash cards.

Evernote Peek connects to your Evernote account, and you can select which notebooks you want to utilize (or create specific ones for this purpose.) The title of the note becomes the clue, and the body of the note itself, the answer.

The app was designed by Evernote CEO Phil Libin and VP of Marketing as they were Andrew Sinkov playing around with the newly released Smart Cover. "It didn't seem like an accessory so much as an extension of the device. As we sat there opening and closing the cover, a question struck us: could we use the cover to control an app that would make Evernote even more useful?"

The answer is obviously yes.

There are other services that integrate with Evernote to create these sorts of study materials, including StudyBlue, which we recently covered. But the new Evernote Peek app has done something pretty unique here, and we'll see if others can follow with similarly smart uses of the new Smart Cover.

Evernote has raised around $45 million with its latest round a Series C $20 million injection in October 2010 from Sequoia Capital. Developers can use the Evernote API to build extensions or features onto the platform with the grand prize winner taking home $50,000. Evernote developers and users: what do you want to see built onto the platform?

"When coming up with your app, be creative," the company wrote. "We're not expecting an Evernote-powered jetpack (though that would be sweet) but, why not create an Evernote-enabled location-based shopping companion or a game that uses your notes to strengthen your memory? The possibilities are endless."

Busy Growing A Platform

Evernote was founded in 2007 and has around four million users across any operating system or device you can think of. It can clip the web, save personal notes, record audio from a mobile device and upload to the web, store pictures or articles to read later.

It has been busy rolling out updates over in the last couple years. Its Windows app got a social feature, redesigned its iPhone app, made its Android app more secure, updated its Web interface, integrated with StudyBlue, opened an app store, created a Mac interface, will introduce Android tablet functionality, created a Web clipping extension for Chrome and other browsers and created sponsored accounts.

So, it has certainly been putting its funding to good use. Perhaps they are out of ideas after rolling out so many new features, mostly in the last six months. Nothing better to dangle a carrot to developers and have them create new features for your platform. The move is similar to what Netflix started in 2009 with a developer prize of $1 million to create new products, features or technology to its predictive technology.

We wrote in Jan. 2010 that prizes can be a good way to foster a community around your platform, support innovation, gain recognition and create a set of challenges for developers to strive for. Contests are also a sign that a company has matured past just trying to survive the market and trying to conquer it, a la Netflix and its competition.

Another sign of Evernote's maturity is their first conference - the Evernote Trunk Conference in August in San Francisco. Winning apps will be showcased then.

Just before I started writing this, I was attempting to sync data from the online note-taking app Evernote. I had made some notes on my iPad Evernote app while in a cafe, where I didn't have Internet connectivity (I'm a premium subscriber to Evernote, so I have offline access to my data). When I attempted to sync up that content to my Evernote desktop app in my home office, it didn't immediately update. I refreshed... then again... no sync. Perplexed, I moved onto another activity and then checked again 5 minutes later. By then the changes had synced up, but the delay was disconcerting.

However last night I could not get a friend to show as 'online' in imo.im, despite having been chatting with that person moments before using Facebook on my PC. After struggling with this for 5 or so minutes, I switched to Friendly and managed to re-establish contact with my bemused friend. That may've been a bug in imo.im, but regardless it was another example of things not syncing as they should.

How Syncing Across Devices Works

Syncing usually involves using the Internet as the central 'hub' - with apps and/or devices being 'spokes' that connect to the hub. Evernote's approach is fairly typical:

All of your notes (unless stored in a local -- that is, not synchronized -- notebook) are synchronized to Evernote on the Web. Evernote's servers house a copy of all synced notes because all of the Evernote client applications, both mobile and desktop, connect to Evernote on the web to get the latest version of the notes for each user.

Evernote's service and software applications are arranged in what's called a "hub-and-spoke" configuration. This means that every single sync operation that takes place will involve Evernote on the web (the "hub"). For instance, if you initiate a sync from Evernote on your desktop computer, any new or updated content will be uploaded to Evernote on the Web so they'll be ready to be downloaded when any of your other devices initiate a subsequent sync.

Specialist Sync Services

So far we've been talking about sync as a feature of web services, but there are also specialist sync services. Dropbox is probably the most high profile in the consumer market, but another is Sharpcast, which ReadWriteWeb named as our Most Promising Company of 2006.

We chose Sharpcast back in 2006 because it was "solving a big problem (syncing data across Web, desktop and other devices) and also is an integral part of many different trends that will be popular in 2007 and beyond - mobile, rich media, a world of multiple devices, and more."

While we were right about the trend towards multiple Web devices - and that was before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007 - things haven't quite panned out for Sharpcast. It's not because syncing became unnecessary. In fact it's a must-have feature in all apps that work across devices, particularly those with an offline component such as Evernote and Instapaper. Sharpcast had an opportunity to establish itself as the sync glue for other web apps, but it didn't manage to pull that off. Instead, the likes of Evernote and Instapaper built their own sync solutions.

Sharpcast is still plugging away, but now it competes with Dropbox and others as primarily an online storage service. Sync is one of the main features, but it's no longer enough on its own.

Sync Remains a Problem

Evernote is one of my favorite apps (here's an interview I conducted last year, which outlines how the product was created) and most of the time the sync works well on it. But syncing in this day and age should be completely hidden from the user. I notice some kind of sync issue with Evernote every week or two. It still has work to do.

More generally, I am constantly coming across issues where things don't sync up properly between devices. Skype has probably been the worst offender for me over the years - for example, adding someone as a Skype contact on one computer and then not seeing that person display when you log into another computer. To this day, I continue to come across that 'bug.'

What have been your experiences of sync? More importantly, have you come across any promising new sync solutions?

The Evernote Chrome Extension allows you to clip and save Web pages to your Evernote account, and the update includes a redesign of the extension's interface. This makes it easier to handle the data you typically will want to add to these notes - titles and tags for example.

The improvements to the extension make clipping articles from the Web a lot easier. Now, instead of having to highlight the text of a post you want to save to Evernote, the extension will automatically select the body of the post. From there, you can just "Clip Article" and the information is saved to your Evernote account.

If you do want to save just a portion of a Web page or blog post, you can still highlight the text you want, just as you would have before today's update.

Improved Searching and Browsing

You can also now browse through the notes in your account via the extension, as well as see the notes you've clipped from various domains. If you're on a particular website, you'll be able to easily pull up the notes you've clipped from that site.

And one of the most useful features of the extension - the ability to include your notes as part of searches when you Google something - has now been extended to include Bing and Yahoo searches. In other words, whichever of these three search engines you use, your search results will also include any Evernotes you have saved on the topic.

The newly updated Evernote Chrome Extension is available now from the Chrome Gallery. Evernote says that it does hope to extend these capabilities to other browsers too.