800-Free-411
800-Free-411
first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.
| Company: | Jingle Networks |
| Website: | free411.com |
| Launch Date: | June 16, 2007 |
1-800-FREE411 was created to provide callers with a free alternative to the skyrocketing rates being charged by phone companies for directory assistance (411).
The service is made possible by thousands of national and local businesses who sponsor… Learn More
Animoto
Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.
| Website: | animoto.com |
| Location: | New York, New York, United States |
| Founded: | August, 2006 |
Animoto generates custom, professional-looking slideshows from user-uploaded music and photos. Their “patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design” drives the web app. They say the Cinematic A.I. analyzes… Learn More
Delicious
Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.
| Website: | delicious.com |
| Location: | Sunnyvale, California, United States |
| Founded: | November 1, 2003 |
| Acquired: | December 1, 2005 by Yahoo! |
Delicious is a social bookmarking website – the primary use of Delicious is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On Delicious, you can use tags to… Learn More
Digg
Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.
| Website: | digg.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | October 11, 2004 |
| Funding: | $40M |
Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for… Learn More
I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.
| Website: | facebook.com |
| Location: | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Founded: | February 1, 2004 |
| Funding: | $516M |
On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More
Friendfeed
Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.
| Website: | friendfeed.com |
| Location: | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Funding: | $5M |
FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google… Learn More
Gmail
I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.
| Company: | |
| Website: | gmail.com |
| Launch Date: | April 1, 2004 |
Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service with innovative features like “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface and plenty of free storage (almost 7GB). Gmail opened in… Learn More
Google Reader
Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.
| Company: | |
| Website: | google.com/reader |
Google Reader is an online RSS feed reader. Learn More
Hulu
Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.
| Website: | hulu.com |
| Location: | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2007 |
| Funding: | $100M |
Hulu is NBC Universal and News Corporation’s online video joint venture. The site focuses exclusively on professional content and does not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site… Learn More
iPhone 3G
The first gadget I’ve included over the years - the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.
| Company: | Apple |
| Website: | apple.com/iphone |
| Launch Date: | July 11, 2008 |
Announced at the 2008 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone 3G is the successor to… Learn More
MySpace Music
MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.
| Website: | music.myspace.com |
| Founded: | September 25, 2008 |
MySpace Music is a joint music venture, with equity stakes from major labels, that allows users to stream music on demand, create playlists, and add widget music players to their profiles. The streaming will be advertising supported - at first via… Learn More
Pandora
Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.
| Website: | Pandora.com |
| Location: | Oakland, California, United States |
| Founded: | January 1, 2000 |
| Funding: | $21.3M |
Born out of a love for music with 99% of its employees at one time or another working as musicians, Pandora is truly a company wholly dedicated to music. With a database of more than 600 thousand songs, each digitally annotated with musical… Learn More
Scribd & Docstoc
We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.
| Website: | docstoc.com |
| Location: | Santa Monica , California, United States |
| Founded: | August 1, 2007 |
| Funding: | $4M |
Docstoc is the premier online community to find and share professional documents. Docstoc provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety… Learn More
| Website: | scribd.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | September, 2006 |
| Funding: | $12.8M |
Scribd is a social publishing site where people upload and share creative writing and various documents, regardless of file format. The company claims more than 50 million unique users to the network each month and well-known users such as Barack… Learn More
Skype
Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have - I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.
| Website: | skype.com |
| Location: | London, United Kingdom |
| Founded: | August 1, 2003 |
| Acquired: | September 12, 2005 by eBay for $2.6B in Cash |
Skype is a peer-to-peer Internet telephony service that is free for Skype-to-Skype calls. The service also allows Skype users to call mobiles and landlines, and vice-versa. Skype has special charge plans for non-Skype-to-Skype calls. Skype is… Learn More
TechMeme
TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.
| Website: | techmeme.com |
| Location: | Menlo Park, California, United States |
| Founded: | October 16, 2004 |
Launched in 2005 as Tech.Memeorandum.com, the site that is considered by many as the blogosphere’s daily tech newspaper was later renamed Techmeme (pronounced “tech-meam”). Stories often hit Techmeme days before the New York Times and other… Learn More
TripIt
If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.
| Website: | tripit.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | October 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $6.1M |
TripIt is an intelligent travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans so that their trips go more smoothly. Travelers simply forward their purchase confirmation emails to TripIt and TripIt automatically creates… Learn More
Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.
| Website: | twitter.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $55M |
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted… Learn More
Wordpress
We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend - without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.
| Company: | Automattic |
| Website: | wordpress.org |
WordPress.org is the community site for the WordPress blogging platform. This is the place to go for bloggers who need help or resources for their WordPress blog.
On March 29, 2008, Automattic launched WordPress 2.5, a major upgrade to their… Learn More
Yammer
Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.
| Website: | yammer.com |
| Location: | West Hollywood, California, United States |
| Founded: | 2008 |
| Funding: | $5M |
Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”
As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location… Learn More
YouTube
YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.
| Website: | youtube.com |
| Location: | San Bruno, California, United States |
| Founded: | September 11, 2005 |
| Acquired: | October 9, 2006 by Google for $1.65B in Cash |
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload… Learn More
Zoho
Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.
| Website: | zoho.com |
| Location: | chennai, India |
| Founded: | September 15, 2005 |
Zoho offers Office Suite, which includes Writer, Projects, Sheet, CRM, Show, Creator, Wiki, Planner, Suite, Notebook, Chat, Meeting and Mail. All products are offered through dynamic webpages that allow for rich online applications.
Zoho’s parent… Learn More
1 comments:
thank you for your efforts!
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