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Top 10 Startups of 2010

2010 was a good year for Web startups. Deal flow, particularly at early stages, was active, and even though valuations were high, investor dollars were seemingly at the ready. Of the companies that made headlines and that led some of the major tech trends of the year, many were startups: Zynga (social gaming), Groupon (group buying), Foursquare (location-based networks), Tumblr (micro-blogging), and GetGlue (semantic Web), to name a few.

In pulling together our list of the Top 10 Startups of 2010 for ReadWriteWeb’s “Best of” series, we’ve decided to look beyond some of those big names and “established” startups (the term gets applied so broadly). Rather than lumping together new companies no matter their age or size, no matter whether they have an acquisition offer by Google or have a Hollywood biopic about their founder, we’ve decided to restrict our list to those startups who were founded or who launched in 2010.

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We chose some of these startups due to their great features and impressive momentum. We chose some for addressing important consumer and business pain-points in particularly innovative ways. Whether any of these companies are the next Facebook or Google hardly matters. These startups left their mark on 2010, many of them helping to foster some of the most important trends of the year.

In no particular order…

Instagram: Photo Sharing Goes Viral

instagram_logo.jpgi can’t look at my Twitter or Facebook stream without seeing a flurry of shared links from Instagram. And I even confessed in October, the app has made me an iPhone photo addict. The free app allows users to snap photos, apply one of 11 filters, and then quickly and easily publish them to a variety of social networks, as well as follow, comment, and like within the app itself. The new camera that came with the iPhone 4 this summer spawned a lot of great mobile phone apps, and Instagram is hardly alone in the photo-sharing space. But it has had incredibly viral adoption – growing by about a 100,000 users a week after its release in October according to a thread on Quora, with rumors of 1 million users to date.

Quora: High Quality Q&A

quora_logo_dec10.jpgDid you notice that reference in the Instagram entry above? “According to a thread on Quora.” It’s something we heard a lot this year as the Q&A site, founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, became an important new communication and knowledge-sharing tool for the tech industry. Quora launched in private beta in January and opened to the public in June. As with Instagram, Quora is a startup in a crowded space; there are no shortage of Q&A sites. But Quora has attracted a very high caliber of respondents during its beta, particularly those “in the know” in Silicon Valley, and the site has become a real treasure trove of news and advice. Quora allows you to subscribe to topics, users, and questions, and the ability to vote up good answers, along with the ability to offer edits on questions and answers, have helped to build a smart network on the site.

Flipboard: Curated Reading, Built for the iPad

flipboard_logo_NEW.pngWe already recognized the startup as one of this year’s Top Semantic Web Products, but Flipboard – along with the iPad – helped usher in a change in the way in which we consume Web content. The free app lets you curate various feeds – RSS, Twitter, Facebook – and presents them to you via a beautiful, touchscreen UI. Rather than scrolling through the Web as we have been trained perhaps to do, Flipboard allows us to more easily browse and read. Having acquired the semantic technology startup Ellerdale, Flipboard’s technology delivers a more personalized reading experience.

Chatroulette: Spontaneity, Chat… and Dicks

chatroulette_logo_dec10.jpgFlash in the pan? Maybe. Launched in late 2009 (too late and too obscure for the “Best of” lists for that year), Chatroulette took off in early 2010, and at the peak of its popularity this year, Chatroulette boasted a million-plus users. Chatroulette connects you randomly with another person via your webcam, so you can chat via text, audio, and video with a stranger. If you don’t like the conversation, the “Next” button places you with someone else. A post on Techcrunch surmised that the site was “89% male, 47% American, and 13% perverts,” the latter figure seeming a tad low based on my experience. Despite – or maybe because of – the dicks, the site gained a lot of buzz, spawning a number of memes as well being a topic on South Park – high honors. Chatroulette also spawned a number of clones as the idea of random, spontaneous encounters became popular.

Rapportive: The Gmail Plug-in I Am Thankful for Every Day

rapportive_logodec10.jpgMarshall Kirkpatrick wrote this headline back in March: “Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-in: Rapportive. And honestly, I’d issue the same command today. Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail side bar – which is cool enough right there – but then, it fills that space with a wealth of info – a picture of the person who sent you an email, their job title from LinkedIn, recent Twitter messages they’ve sent and more. It’s become an indispensable tool for me, giving me background information right within my browser for the people with whom I communicate via email. Rapportive demonstrates some of the useful tools that can be built with our social data.

Next page: Top Startups of 2010, 6-10

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