

Ask YC: what's the most technically impressive startup you remember from recent memory - rkabir

Web or client. I'm more interested in client software just because we seem to talk about web companies so much. Any takers?
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DaniFong
Like.com is pretty cool. It tries to help you shop for things based on
physical similarities, they've got a neat image recognition thing going. I was
surprised when I saw it actually work.

Also cool is Shazam Entertainment's music recognition software.
[http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_...](http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_profile.html)

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.

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mrtron
like.com is strange, it really does work quite well! but I just don't know
that people look to buy things that way :)

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DaniFong
Well, I might, except that the price for many of the items is a little bit
insane.

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wallflower
Web - YouTube for all its hype made it ridiculously easy to convert video
formats into Flash Video. No one I recall had done that before. Ask anyone if
they thought they'd see videos embedded in web pages by the normal user..

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>)

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whacked_new
Haha, sorry I'm missing the web/client question, but <http://www.memjet.com>
is technically impressive to a ridiculous level.

Oh yeah, Johnny Chung Lee's future startup is also pretty technically
impressive.

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wallflower
I agree. Some of the most technologically impressive startups are doing stuff
with actual hardware (note hardware is a broad term to encompass everything
from cells to robots)

"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

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bayareaguy
PeakStream (now part of google) -
<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7763.html>

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marcus
I wish I could play with their technology, too bad Google is hoarding it.

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thorax
First one that comes to mind is the Jing Project by Techsmith. Really handy
way of doing screenshots and recordings. Sounds silly until you actually use
it.

<http://jingproject.com/>

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asmosoinio
I also like UI, especially the simple sharing to web, but on my machine it is
awfully slow (laptop 1,67 GHz / 1 GB / Vista). I don't have it running in the
background, and starting it takes about 20 seconds. I guess the .NET framework
is not the lightest one.

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...

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kirubakaran
Google Maps

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nreece
Fon.com

Yahoo! Pipes

Wikipedia

Powerset (touted as the Google search killer)

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mixmax
Joost

