Sowmya's favourite "new" companies

Startups are in fashion again - thanks to Web 2.0, the second wave of the Internet or whatever you want to call it. Everyday my RSS feeds throw up links to companies I've never heard about before. I’ve compiled a list of my favorite new (I deliberately refrain from calling them Web 2.0 – I don’t want to spark off that debate.) companies. I am curious as to where these companies are headed. I admire the guts, worry about revenue models, marvel at the idea, love the underlying technology, and wish for growth. I hope they just don’t get acquired and merged (some are, but continue to retain their identity), but continue to challenge the Goliaths. I suppose some will, but Dear God, not all of them. This list is in no particular order, doesn’t contain detailed product or company reviews. I’m just declaring my love for them.

Six Apart: These are the guys who make Typepad, MovableType, Vox and LiveJournal. I personally think Typepad is the best blogging engine available, if you are a professional blogger. Any corporate looking for a hosted blogging engine should seriously consider Typepad/MovableType. I just signed up to Vox for my personal blog. Combining blogging and social networking is quite powerful for an individual as well as for a community of users. That’s what makes Vox promising.

37Signals: Just creating a framework like Rails is enough to get me all ga-ga about these folks. For a living, they create productivity software tools for small businesses and individuals: the Fortune Long Tail, if I may call it. BaseCamp is the flagship product: it’s a web-based project management tool. They follow it up with more lightweight, collaborative and cheap tools like a collaborative Writeboard, and a chat tool (Campfire). The DNA of these tools: lightweight (web based), collaborative and simple.

ROOT Markets: In the Gold Rush, it was the toolmakers that made the money. Take Levi’s for example. ROOT Markets is a company focused on Attention. (If you aren’t aware of what Attention is, in the internet sense, then you should read this article.) They have an exchange called ROOT Exchange which is like a trading platform for online leads. This is one company that could make it big, as a platform provider.

Pluck: I love my Pluck RSS reader. It’s tucked into my browser (IE and FF), has a client side install that subtly informs me of new feeds, and helps me categorize my feeds. I see my list of subscriptions in a neat tree on the left and the feeds (summaries) on the right. Google Reader now does something similar, but I’ve been using Pluck for almost a year and a half, and I haven’t got a reason to move, until now. [See update at the end of the post.]

Zillow: Started by ex-Expedia employees, this company recently received 25 million USD in second round funding, (a total of 57MM till date). They provide free estimate (or Zestimate, as they’d like to call it) for property buyers and sellers in the US. At first, I thought that what Expedia did to travel agents, Zillow was attempting to do to real estate agents. Apparently not. They think of real estate agents as one of their consumer group, because a real estate decision is a more calculated one than a travel decision. This is the best part: revenue generation is through online advertising. Will they be a billion dollar (value) company by making money through ads?

Zoho: With a name derived from “SOHO”, this company creates office productivity tools with an aim to create affordable software for business. Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet are in direct competition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I wonder if this is on Yahoo!’s shopping list. One big reason this company is on my list is that these products are “Made in India”. Lage raho, Innovation. Zoho’s challenge is going to be promotion: How do they compete with the marketing prowess of Google?

Flickr: Photo tagging and sharing. Got acquired by Yahoo. Subscripton-based revenue model. One of the best communities. But all that is known. The reason I feature it here because of their interestingness solution. When you search for photos, you get them sorted by most interesting. Flickr has managed to algorithmize (if I may use the word), interesting. A photo’s interestingness quotient is based on a combination of how popular the tags associated with it are, how many views, how many comments, how recent and so on. Doesn’t this remind you of Google’s PageRank?

These are my top Web 2.0 picks. If you think there is a company that should be included in this list, drop in a comment. There’s a good chance that I may not have heard of the company yet, and will certainly take a look at it.

I conclude this post by mentioning two companies that I have admired almost all my life. (These have nothing to do with the Web).

Bose: Has a unique, hard to clone DNA. Lives and breathes sound. So focused, it rubs onto you. You read their brochures and you see the underlying passion that goes into creating such world class products. The only thing they’re not too loud about is promotion. You don’t see in-your-face ads from these guys. And when you do, it’s the product that gets the max screen space, not some celebrity or model.

National Geographic: I’d do anything to work for NatGeo – anything: Narration, production, program design, cameraperson. I’ve admired this company ever since I was a kid and would read the magazine in my school library. There’s so much learning and discovery in what they do, I don’t know if any other company has so many new things happening everyday.

Update:
Pluck is withdrawing its support for the RSS reader from Jan 07, to focus on its (revenue generating) products. Browsers (FF 2.0 and IE 7.0) now have built in support for RSS reading - thats the way of the future, I guess. I'm going to move to Google Reader (second best, imho). Goodbye Pluck, it was good while you lasted.

On a friend's recommendation, I'm going to add Jobster to this list. Again, a clear business model, and really a shift in the way one would think of job sites. It is a focus shift from a traditional “upload and search for resumes” to a “create your online profile” one. Well funded, and steady revenue growth already, and 10% of Fortune 100 as customers.