It’s time for my annual list of technology products that I love and use every day. This is the (wow) fifth year I’ve done this. Here are my previous lists: 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. The scope of the list has changed over time. In 2006 it was just about websites. Now the list includes other web services, some desktop software and even a few gadgets.
These aren’t necessarily newly launched products (see Daniel Raffel’s post yesterday for a solid list of great new products). This is a simple list of the tech products that are an integral part of my day – work or play. Some have withstood the test of time and I just can’t live without. Others are newcomers that have captured my imagination.
I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. There are now 24 products on the list.
Just three of these products have been on the list all five years: TechMeme, Skype and Wordpress. As I said last year, TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news (although Google News is becoming more important over time). Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often at work and with friends. And Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added 13 new products to last year’s list: Android, Apple Magic Mouse, Dropbox, Evernote, Foursquare/Loopt/Gowalla, Google Docs, Google Voice, Kodak Zi8, MOG, Skitch and Spotify.
I’ve removed seven products from the 2009 list: 1-800-Free-411, Digg, Friendfeed, Google Reader, iPhone, MySpace Music and Zoho.
There are lot of products that I use daily that aren’t on the list for various reasons. My iMac and MacBook Pro and Droid phone, for example, aren’t on the list specifically even though all three products are exceptional. I don’t really have a browser preference, although I suspect Chrome will be on the list next year. And there are lots of websites and services, like Posterous and Amie Street, that I use regularly but just didn’t make my arbitrary cut. We also use Bit.ly extensively on the site for URL shortening, and EventBrite and Amiando for event ticketing.
Here’s my 2010 list of tech products that I love and use every day:
Android
I gave up the iPhone this year and switched to Android mobile phones. First the MyTouch, then the Droid. I’ll soon be upgrading again. What I like best about Android is the deep integration with Google Voice, which I talk about below. These two products go hand in hand.
Website: android.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Acquired: August, 2005 by Google In July 2005, Google acquired Android, a small startup company based in Palo Alto, CA. Android’s co-founders who went to work at Google included… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseAnimoto
I first put Animoto on the list last year. The service makes beautiful slide shows of photos, and this year they added videos (here’s one I made). Their iPhone application continues to impress. This company is now profitable and my guess is someone like Apple will acquire them in the next year.
Website: animoto.com Location: New York, New York, United States Founded: August, 2006 Funding: $5M 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
Information provided by CrunchBaseApple Magic Mouse
The Apple Magic Mouse is the best computer pointing device ever made. It functions as a normal mouse but also has multitouch on top. Once you use it you’ll never be happy with an old mouse or touchpad again.
Website: apple.com Location: Cupertino, California, United States Founded: April 1, 1976 IPO: 1980 Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computer maker to include consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseDelicious
Delicious, the social bookmarking workhorse, has been on my list every year except 2007. It’s not perfect but it’s better than anything else out there.
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
Information provided by CrunchBaseDropbox
Dropbox is a new addition to the list this year. It’s just dead simple file syncing across all your computers, mobile devices and the cloud. It’s also a great way to privately share big files. Dropbox is now one of my must-have productivity tools. I just wish Google offered something similar so that I could have an integrated dashboard for my Google Docs files and Dropbox stuff.
Website: dropbox.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Funding: $7.2M Dropbox is a software product that makes it easy to securely share files with other people, sync them across multiple computers, access them from anywhere, and keep them safe.
Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseEvernote
Evernote is also a new addition this year. Like Dropbox it is an amazing productivity tool that lets you capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. You can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable.
Website: evernote.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Funding: $25.5M Evernote allows users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. Users can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseThis is the third year in a row that Facebook has been on the list. Facebook has won the social wars, and even the biggest companies are now surrendering to them. Facebook Connect is turning into the defacto online identity solution for tens of millions of people.
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $716M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 350 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseFoursquare, Loopt and Gowalla
These three startups (Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla), among others, are battling to control mobile social networking. They all have variations of the check-in model, where users are encouraged to note where they are for their friends to see. Foursquare has all the early adopter momentum, But Loopt has millions of users and Gowalla has a compelling product. All three are likely to win.
Website: foursquare.com Founded: 2009 Funding: $1.35M Foursquare is a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Learn More
Website: loopt.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Founded: January 1, 2005 Funding: $13.3M Loopt is a mobile social mapping application. Using cell phones and mobile devices, it displays the locations of a user’s friends along with their presence status (available, away, etc) visually on maps or on lists. Based on GPS and related data,… Learn More
Website: gowalla.com Location: Austin, Texas, United States Founded: August 28, 2007 Funding: $10.3M Gowalla, also known as Alamofire, creates games and game-like experiences for the social web.
Gowalla is a location-based social networking game launched as a public beta in March 2009. Gowalla uses a large catalog of virtual goods to encourage… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseGmail
This is the fourth year in a row for Gmail. It’s the best webmail out there, and I appreciate the free imap support and forwarding. Enough said.
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
Information provided by CrunchBaseGoogle Docs
This is a new addition for me this year. I never bothered installing Office on my new laptop, and find that Google Docs has all the functionality I need, plus easy sharing with others and storage in the cloud. I may never install Office again. I previously had Zoho on the list, a competitor, and removed it only because I find that centralizing as many services as possible at Google makes things easier for me as a user.
Company: Website: docs.google.com Launch Date: October, 2006 Google Docs is Google’s free web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. The online app allows users to easily share documents and collaboratively work on them in real-time.
On March 31st, 2008, the Google Docs team… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseGoogle Voice
This has been a big year for Google Voice, previously called Grand Central. The mobile apps let Google Voice completely take over Android phones. I’ve ported my mobile number to Google Voice and now any time someone calls that number I can direct it to any phone I like based on where I am, who’s calling and when. It has changed my life, and I will never use a mobile phone that doesn’t have deep integration with the service.
Company: Website: google.com/googlevoice/about.html Google Voice is a free Internet service that uses VoIP technology to link phone numbers together. GrandCentral was relaunched as Google Voice on March 11, 2009 with new features, including voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing.
Users of… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseHulu
This is the second year in a row for Hulu. I’d love for them to add a paid model and let me watch HBO shows or pay per view new release movies. And I wish they could secure rights to archived libraries of shows, but even as it currently exists, Hulu is a great entertainment service.
Website: https://www.hulu.com Location: Los Angeles, California, United States Founded: March 1, 2007 Funding: $100M Hulu is an online video provider held by NBC Universal, News Corporation, and, as of April 2009, Disney. The site focuses exclusively on… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseKodak Zi8
This digital video camera beats the pants off the current Flip models. The best feature is the ability to add a microphone. Flip doesn’t have this, and the audio quality is often terrible. The Zi8 is a full generation ahead.
Location: Rochester, New York, United States With the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest,” George Eastman put the first simple camera into the hands of a world of consumers in 1888. In so doing, he made a cumbersome and complicated process easy to use and accessible to nearly… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseMOG, Pandora and Spotify
MOG and Spotify are new this year. Pandora has been on every year except 2008, and with hindsight I should have added them that year, too. These are three streaming music services that are awesome. MOG, which is $5/month, is the best music experience on the Internet. Spotify, a desktop streaming service that hasn’t launched in the U.S. yet, lacks the radio and social features of MOG but is currently free. And we hear it will launch on a limited basis in the U.S. very shortly. Pandora is still a very cool place to just sign in and listen to music that I love quickly and easily.
Website: mog.com Location: Berkeley, California, United States Founded: June 1, 2005 Funding: $12M MOG is a place for people to publish thoughts about music, as well as a place to share the names of the songs they play on their computers (using a downloadable program called MOG-O-MATIC that runs in the background and automatically detects songs no… Learn More
Website: Pandora.com Location: Oakland, California, United States Founded: January 1, 2000 Funding: $56.3M 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
Website: spotify.com Location: Luxembourg, Luxembourg Founded: December 26, 2009 Funding: €71.6M Spotify has created a lightweight software application that users will simply download and then log onto their service enabling on demand streaming of music. Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseScribd and Docstoc
Scribd and Docstoc, two services that let you upload office files like PDFs and Word documents and then embed them on sites, are very useful to bloggers like us. When we have a document that we want to share with readers, we use one of these services and embed it into the post. Both services were also on the list last year.
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: March, 2007 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 55 million unique users to the network each month and well-known users such as Barack… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBaseSkitch
I’ve been using Skitch for years. It’s Mac software that makes basic image manipulation a breeze – sort of a very light version of Photoshop. For 90% of our images, Skitch works just fine. It’s easy to add text, resize and crop images, etc. And it automatically uploads them to the website for you, too.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Solid Selection! From TechCrunch. 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
via techcrunch.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment