Answerist

50 Promising Startups

Posted on 21. Jun, 2009 by Rory McCafferty in Web 2.0

BusinessWeek has an interesting piece on the top 50 technology startups that you may not have heard of. I confess that it is my job to keep up on areas like this I was only familiar with around 20 of them or 40%. There are several that I think are particularly interesting.


1. AdMob is a mobile advertising platform which connects advertisers and publishers. I have been considering it to use in iPhone applications and seems to have an early lead in that area.

2. Etsy, this is a bit of a cheat as this is a site that had $100 million in sales in 2008 so is really beyond a startup. It is a simple site for sales of handmade and vintage goods. An amazing 97% of the userbase is women.

3. Loopt is a favorite of mine although the ‘Big Brother’ factor does give me pause. Loopt works with over 100 phones such as the iPhone using the built-in GPS capabilities to show your friends where you are on a map. Out for the night you can see if friends are nearby, of course you can turn it off if you do not want to be found.

Not all of the startups were promising to me, having worked with some technology companies that were not the next Google (CueCat anyone?) I think I can see when a technology is too difficult for a user. I fear that LiveScribe may fall into that category, you use a special pen and a special paper to convert notes into digital files.

Tags: AdMob, BusinessWeek, Etsy, Loopt, Startups, Web 2.0