Top Ten Start Ups Watch Out For

1. www.stumbleupon.com

FOUNDERS: Garrett Camp, Justin LaFrance, Geoff Smith

Launched in 2002 by three 20-somethings in a Calgary, Alberta, apartment, StumbleUpon now has 2 million registered users drawn by its knack for finding websites that match their interests and those of others with similar tastes as they "stumble" around the Net.
2.
www.bebo.com

NEXT NET INNOVATION: A social network, more than 30 million members strong, that keeps users' pages private but still allows them to share things like video and drawings made on an online whiteboard.

FUNDING: $15 million (Benchmark Capital)
3.
www.meebo.com

NEXT NET INNOVATION: Managing multiple instant-messaging services from one site. Meebo's killer app is a widget that places an IM window on your blog or webpage.

FUNDING: $12.5 million (Draper Fisher, Jurvetson, Sequoia Capital)

4.
www.slide.com

NEXT NET INNOVATION: Customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver.

FUNDING: Not disclosed (Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, others)

5.
www.wikia.com


NEXT NET INNOVATION: A hosting service for ad-supported community sites that use the same software and collaborative content model that made Wikipedia a Web phenomenon. (See "Building a Wiki World,") Launched in 2004, Wikia communities range from fans of 24 to politics junkies. Wikia is also working on an open-source, user-generated search engine.

FUNDING: $4 million (Amazon.com (Charts), Marc Andreessen, Bessemer Venture Partners, others).
6.
www.joost.com

FOUNDERS: Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström

Forget the three-minute video blog. The 30-minute, broadcast-quality Web 2.0 TV show is coming in all its full-screen glory. And if serial disrupters Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström have their way, neither television nor the Internet will be the same. The duo behind peer-to-peer services Kazaa and Skype will officially launch Joost this spring, aiming to merge the best of TV with the best of the Net. (See "Make Way for Must-Stream TV") .
7.
www.blip.tv

NEXT NET INNOVATION: A platform for syndicating serialized online shows such as Starring Amanda Congdon and TreeHugger TV. Blip provides producers with software, ads, and distribution to websites and blogs. A deal is already signed with Web TV service Akimbo, which lets producers send their videos to TV sets.

FUNDING: Not disclosed (Ron Conway, Mark Gerson, Ken Lerer, Peter Thiel).
8.
www.dabble.com

NEXT NET INNOVATION: A tool for organizing videos into playlists of favorites. Users share them across the network, so, say, food lovers can dabble in one another's video collections.

FUNDING: $750,000 (Hank Barry, Evan Williams, others)

9.
NEXT NET INNOVATION: A service that ranks uploaded videos by popularity and feedback from a community of 17 million monthly visitors--and pays the creators for the success of their work. The auteurs get $100 after 20,000 viewings and $5 for every 1,000 subsequent views. Since September, Metacafe has paid a total of $250,000 to 200 contributors.

FUNDING: $20 million (Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital)

10.
www.revision3.com

NEXT NET INNOVATION: A production studio for geek-oriented online shows. Started by Digg founder Kevin Rose and its CEO, Jay Adelson, Revision3 sells sponsorships to companies like Go Daddy, Microsoft (Charts), and Sony (Charts) for as much as $10,000 per episode.

FUNDING: $1 million (Adelson, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, others) .