As the new year approaches, we look back on 2010 and ask: Who have been the stand out startups?
About.me:
About.me was bought out by Internet giant A.O.L, less than week after the year-old company went live. The site serves as a homepage for a person’s online profiles, which guarantees it a huge potential market. Brad Garlinhouse, president of AOL consumer applications, said in a statement:
“About.me is more than just the aggregation of social profiles, it allows people to easily express themselves in an increasingly noisy environment full of disparate social experiences. Creating smart online identities for consumers can have an incredibly positive impact on AOL’s content and advertising strategy as it gives us the ability to provide relevant and meaningful content to consumers. The team at about.me has built an incredibly compelling product and we look forward to having them join the team.”
About.me is definitely one to watch for 2011.
Wooga:
Wooga, the Berlin based social game startup, is quickly turning into the Zynga of Europe. Wooga was set up in January 2009 and in the summer of the same year received VC funding of over €5 million from Balderton Capital and Holtzbrinck Ventures.
Its latest social game on Facebook, Happy Hospital has reached a massive one million players. And its Monster World and Bubble Island games both now have one million Daily Active Users each. The only other social game makers with similar numbers to Wooga are, Zynga and EA/Playfish. They are the only other developers with more than one game with over one million daily players.
Cloudkick:
Cloudkick are a two-year old startup, offering management solutions for enterprise cloud computing applications. The company was funded by Y Combinator, which is best known for funding consumer-focused startups like Reddit and Loopt. Cloudkick’s customers are mostly technology companies, such as Vimeo and Mozilla. The startup was recently bought by Rackspace, who provide hosted services, ranging from email to cloud computing infrastructure, to more than 90,000 enterprise customers.
With the boom in cloud computing, we anticipate this to be a particularly good move for Rackspace, as their move into cloud computing has brought it into sharper competition with the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Tippr:
If you’re Google and Groupon don’t want to sell, what do you do? Simple, you buy a rival with a similar business plan. This is where Tippr comes in. Emerging in February this year, Tippr is very similar to Groupon and other group buying sites. The only real difference is that it offers not one, but three deals per city each day, with the company claiming that its “Tippsters” have bought every single item featured on Tippr’s page to ensure top quality. The company is also said to have bought several intellectual property patents, stretching as far back as 1997 and covering price optimization, demand curve modeling, and buyer-seller interaction models.
With Google said to be fishing about after their Groupon rejection, expect to see plenty of Tippr in the coming months…
Playdom:
Another social gaming company, Playdom were set up in 2008 and sold to Disney for up to $763.2 million this year. Good effort Playdom! The purchase price included a $200 million earn-out if Playdom hits its targets. Mickey and friends were the winners of a fervent bidding war to buy Playdom, which has grown to the third-largest social game company on Facebook and the largest on MySpace.
A company that a year ago had just 60 employees, Playdom now has the rights to make games based on Disney’s characters. This can only mean Playdom growing and growing over the next year.
Do you agree with us, or any you think deserve to be on our list? Please let us know your thoughts…
22/12/10
