Also cool is Shazam Entertainment's music recognition software. http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_...
Apparently, if you hear something on the radio or whatever, you dial up shazam and they can tell you what it was. Magic, I tell you.
Then there's Heroku, which is kind of 'wtf amazing' to me.
Oh yeah, Johnny Chung Lee's future startup is also pretty technically impressive.
"2007 Young Innovators Under 35
Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world." http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/index.aspx
P.S. I vote for the Roomba - bringing robotics to consumers in a safe, friendly non-Robocop kind of manner
Might be a silly argument, but I love stuff like Irfanview that opens up in milliseconds and works really fast.
Jing is anyway a cool piece of software. Technically impressive? Maybe...
Client - IntelliJ (yes, it's an IDE that I use but they hired smart, some near-wizard-level Czech/Russian programmers and did the marketing from the states - to impressive success on both ends)
Client - Portal - ok it's a cool game but shows that ground-breaking ideas can come from students [Digipen] (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/721/721542p1.html)
Yahoo! Pipes
Wikipedia
Powerset (touted as the Google search killer)
