Ask YC: Your favorite startups lately

Picwing (http://picwing.com) is probably the one that has improved our life the most lately. It is the perfect thing for people with new babies. Your relatives get a regular stream of new prints with near zero effort.

I like Etherpad, but I'm not sure why. I'm a big G Docs user, or at least was in college, and use both for the same features (don't do too much heavy collab). But I use Etherpad Pro to consolidate all the random text files I have lying around usually. I think I like it because it's simple, non-nosense and logging into google docs is a pain. I have it on google apps and i never remember the URL so i have to log into mail, click the icon, etc. Granted I could setup a CNAME but I digress..

Maybe I like em more than gDocs b/c they're also a startup..

Tarsnap is unique among the startups that get play here in getting me to open my wallet to the tune of more than the price of a T-shirt.

GitHub really impresses me.

Heroku...

After that I'm a bit partial to launchly but that's probably because it's mine. :-)

thesixtyone, probably. It's replaced Pandora for me. It's a little too social networky (I just want to listen to music!) but it works.

280 North for re-inventing how web apps can be developed.

Posterous. It just works.

dropbox. still.

Spideroak impressed me. It's a service similar to Dropbox, but with more emphasis on privacy. I found their devs really accessible and interesting to talk to.

I'm really finding Evernote a great tool for syncing my daily to-do lists.

Github takes the cake for me. It makes reading and finding code a breeze, and for the relatively unexperienced (like me), it has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for OSS.

A Facebook for hackers, I love it.

cloudkick, I think those guys did a great job.

Delivered something of value, freemium business model that I believe will work extraordinarily well for them.

My hat is off to them! Just wish I would've thought of it first.

Aardvark for potentially kicking off a new way to search (and even if not, for having awesome diction)

Kickstarter for being beautiful and the first crowdfunding site that looks like it has a chance to explode.

Billmonk, for splitting restaurant bills with friends.

Chatterous. I have it hooked up to my IM, and I use it for group chat all the time.

grooveshark, still wonky interface but its as close to spotify I can find on our shores.

..of course I still use dropbox .. who doesn't? I stopped using evernote as I got tired of having to use Wine to run it..

Favorite Startups of 2009

vark.com listia.com saynow.com

Cloudera! Their tutorials kick-ass :)

I like the following (may not as cool as some of those listed, but they're great startups and driving real revenue):

1. ZenDesk 2. Freshbooks 3. 99designs

Rightscale. They put out such a solid product and make using ec2 so easy, it's not even funny.

not to denigrate the smart people and great work done here, but i think this is a pretty depressing list when looked at from on high. this is the creme of the crop of all the yc hacker intelligentsia? suprisingly banal imhop.

Makerbot is pretty awesome

Twilio. Top notch.

Shapeways

YCombinator.

Dropbox

Angstro