July 29, 2010
Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr - a few giants so dominate the web app world that it's hard for anyone else to make an impression.
We've spent some time looking beyond the leading sites, though, and discovered a host of interesting tech startups.
Some take existing web app ideas and add a new spin of their own. Others are more innovative, using fresh concepts to deliver powerful new ways of using the web. But they're all worthy of your attention - and here are 20 of the best.
1. TeamLab
Big business has long understood the value of powerful and efficient collaboration tools - and now TeamLab is making them available to everyone. Project management with tasks and milestones; instant messaging via a built-in web client; blogs, forums, news, polls, photo albums, a wiki and more, are all yours for free.
The service is perfect for small businesses, clubs, or any group of people who need to work together online. And the platform is open source, too, so you can alternatively host TeamLab yourself or extend it in any way that suits your needs.
2. Roc
Roc is a free online music creator that's entirely browser-based, point and click - no musical ability required. It looks like most other loop creators, in that you choose from a decent selection of instruments (there are 10 drum types alone), assign them to tracks and then click to create notes.
Editing options are unsurprisingly on the basic side, but Roc is a lot of fun to use, offers plenty of scope for creativity and lets you save the results as an MP3 file when you're done. (The instruments are all Creative Commons-licenced, too, so whatever you create can be used in any way you like, no royalty restrictions to worry about.)
3. BuzzVoice
Time. There's really never quite enough, is there? But maybe BuzzVoice can help. This clever app grabs news from your choice of more than 1,600 top blogs and news sources, and converts them into audio files in real time. You can then stream the audio directly to your PC, listen to it on the go via the BuzzVoice iPhone or iPod touch app, or save it to your MP3 player for playback any time.
The free version of buzzVoice has ads and some limitations - you're allowed a maximum of 10 web sources in your personal playlist, for instance - but it worked for us. And if you need more, then the commercial BuzzVoice Pro can be yours for $3.99 monthly. ...
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