Don't worry, it's not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we've chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year's big trends: the real-time web. Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web. Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009 , due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company , as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. Sponsor This is the 6th year we've done this and many of the small companies we choose each year go onto much bigger things. Here's a quick look back at previous winners: In 2008 we chose web office vendor Zoho as Best LittleCo and Brightkite as our Most Promising. Zoho is still competing well above its weight bracket against office software giants like Microsoft and Google. However it's fair to say that Brightkite hasn't delivered as much on its promise as we thought it might, due in part to the emergence of Foursquare as 'the next big thing' in mobile social networking. In 2007 Twitter was Best LittleCo and in a break from tradition we named "the open source movement" as most promising. Twitter, of course, has since gone on to make a huge impact on the Web and media. In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising. YouTube was acquired by Google in October of that year. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp , creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both went on to be acquired, by Yahoo! and Google respectively. Now let's find out who is ReadWriteWeb's Best LittleCo of 2009. Then on page 2 we name our Most Promising company for 2010. Best LittleCo of 2009: Aardvark Aardvark (our initial review and then a comparison review ) is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." The company was founded in 2007, but the product only launched in March 2009 at SXSW. It quickly became one of the companies we point to most when we discuss the Real-Time Web , one of the most significant trends of this year. In our report on the Real-Time Web released in November, we described how it works: "You can ask Aardvark any question, and it will try to find a person in your extended social circles who knows about that topic and is available to answer at that moment. Aardvark facilitates these conversations through a very polite IM bot, an iPhone app with push notifications, the company's website, Twitter or email. Instead of broadcasting your question to every one's stream of information, Aardvark delivers the question only to people who are relevant and available." Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered. As we noted in our report, Aardvark's got an all-star team of engineers from Google and Yahoo and high-profile investors. It's already cutting deals with major tech brands and is rumored to be on Google's acquisition list. Whatever happens to the company, the use cases for Aardvark are just beginning to be explored. In short, Aardvark impressed us a lot this year and it made no fewer than 3 of our 2009 best-of lists : Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 Aardvark's iPhone app was also popular with our writers, two of them putting it in their top 5 mobile web applications of the year . Next page: ReadWriteWeb's Most Promising Company for 2010... Most Promising: Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha launched in May and ended up making our list of the Top 10 Consumer Products of the year . It was also the most hyped, with the possible exception of Google Wave. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer . But Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. It also enables users to compute and calculate things off that information. While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too - although not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. Wolfram|Alpha also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price. We listed some initial use cases for Wolfram|Alpha in July, but it's a safe bet to say that the best of this product will be seen in 2010 and beyond. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data, so we think it's a product to watch in 2010. Now let us know your thoughts on our picks for Best LittleCo (Aardvark) and Most Promising (Wolfram|Alpha). Discuss

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Best LittleCo of 2009 & Most Promising for 2010

At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation; it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users

The Twitterati have spoken! Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about. Sponsor 1. Google Wave The most-talked-about app of the year - on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter's general trending topics on multiple occasions. If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign. 2. Snow Leopard Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year. 3. Tweetdeck This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more. 4. Windows 7 The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues - and the top of trends - for several months running. 5. CES The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek's version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely. 6. Palm Pre Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn't yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans. 7. Google Latitude In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master. 8. #E3 Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven. 9. #amazonfail Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren't "adult" in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie! 10. Macworld And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free. And that's it for Twitter's top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Discuss

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Twitter's Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009

Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media , one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow , to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one of Demand Media's flagship properties, but Herrick became frustrated with the focus on quantity over quality. So he created another business, wikiHow , which he claims produces higher quality articles. wikiHow has today unveiled a redesign (screenshot below). However we were more interested in the content quality question, so we asked founder Jack Herrick what makes him think wikiHow is any better than Demand Media's content farms? Sponsor The newly re-designed wikiHow How Jack Herrick Went From eHow to wikiHow "When I ran eHow," Herrick told us via email, "we produced content in a manner somewhat similar to the way Demand Studios does today (although at a much, much smaller scale.)" However Herrick ultimately became frustrated with that model when he realized that "it would fill the web with a bunch of mediocre content." "It's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal." At the time Herrick thought that the mediocre content production would hurt eHow's long term brand. Although he now concedes he may've been mistaken on that point, given Demand Media's success over the past couple of years. When Herrick sold eHow in 2006, he began to work on wikiHow - a wiki how-to manual which now competes with eHow. wikiHow currently generates 19 million unique visitors per month, according to the company (it's about to hit 20 million monthly uniques). Demand Media's eHow is still the market leader in how-to content, however wikiHow is a small unfunded company with only 7 employees. Herrick is convinced that the wiki model for producing content attracts "passionate volunteers." He thinks that the wiki way will "ultimately result in a higher quality product," compared to eHow. The other prong of Herrick's argument is that eHow gets what it pays for in terms of content quality. "When you pay $15 for an article, you get a $15 product...and nothing more," he noted archly. Wikis Aren't Perfect Either Jack Herrick admits that "wiki content typically starts out as low quality," but claims that "once it matures and receives enough edits it can be amazing." And that is really the crux of this argument. A quality wiki article, whether it's found on Wikipedia or wikiHow, will generally be one that has received a number of edits from people who know the topic well. wikiHow itself has done research which shows this. Herrick told us that in previous research, wikiHow found that "the more people who edit an article, the more readers it attracted and the higher quality the article became." The problem is, there's no guarantee any given article will attract passionate volunteers to edit it. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and so it's more likely to be attractive to volunteers - they're contributing to the world's knowledge base and no corporation is profiting from that. wikiHow, on the other hand, is a commercial enterprise. It calls itself a "hybrid organization," meaning a "for-profit company focused on creating a global public good." But it's a company nonetheless. While the content of wikiHow has a Creative Commons license , the company profits directly by it. The company vs. non-profit issue may not be a big influence on many of wikiHow's current volunteers, but it may prevent wikiHow from scaling to Wikipedia's size. Next page: We compare wikiHow to eHow and ask which is better... Comparing wikiHow to eHow Although by no means a perfect approach, I decided to choose a random topic and compare wikiHow and eHow. The topic I chose was: decorating a room using Feng Shui. The wikiHow article had been contributed to by 8 authors and it was a comprehensive, helpful article - complete with diagram and video. A comparable eHow article was helpful too, although much less comprehensive and with no accompanying media. The verdict? In this case the wikiHow article was better. But your mileage may vary per topic and article. Which Approach is Better, Wiki or Paid Content? When done on a large scale, is paid-for content (such as Demand Media's eHow) better than volunteer wiki content? Herrick makes a good case, but in reality it isn't black and white. The most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, generally produces quality content - although there have always been instances of contentious content on the site. wikiHow founder Jack Herrick: eHow content "lacks soul." Herrick contends that wiki content is inherently better because "volunteer writers are passionate about their topics and we allow anyone to continuously edit articles." In comparison, he claims that sites like eHow produce "static, low quality" content that "lacks soul." Herrick even used the ol' McDonalds analogy: "it's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. having your friend who happens to be a great chef cooking you a wonderful, home cooked meal." Ultimately I don't completely buy Jack Herrick's argument that wiki-produced content is necessarily better than paid-for content from "content farms." Both types of content could be either good or poor quality, depending on the quality of the people who write and edit it. How-to content needs to be precise and well-researched, which requires time. The best wiki how-to content is likely to be articles which have been edited by multiple people. But equally, well-informed writers can easily produce quality how-to articles in one go. However, the feng shui examples above showed that (in this case) multiple wiki authors produced better results than a single paid contributer. Let us know your thoughts about which is better: wikiHow or eHow? Or neither? Discuss

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wikiHow vs. eHow: Is The Wiki Way Better Than Content Farms?

With only one day until the Le Web Conference , ReadWriteWeb invited editor of ReadWriteFrance Fabrice Epelboin to share his thoughts on this year's theme - the real-time web. While many choose to focus on the negative aspects of real-time technologies including information overload, Epelboin offers a positive view of how the real-time web offers French netizens an effective tool for political commentary. Sponsor In a Facebook post marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that he'd taken part in the event at Checkpoint Charlie on November 9, 1989. Nevertheless, according to Epelboin, after some fact checking, journalists discovered that the date of the event was unlikely to be true. In protest to what appears to be Sarkozy's effort to rewrite history, bloggers across the country got creative. Nicknamed, "Sarko on the Moon", real-time netizens tweeted their best rendition of the President Photoshopped into historic scenes. While a fun exercise in citizen-driven political satire, the campaign renewed criticism of Sarkozy. Many netizens have openly railed against the President for his aggressive enforcement methods. Most noticeably, Sarkozy enacted the internet policing agency HADOPI, an organization authorized to monitor innocent citizens for illegal downloading. For more on the real-time web, check out ReadWriteWeb's latest report Discuss

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ReadWriteFrance and the Power of Real-Time Political Commentary

2009 may be remembered as the year that enterprises truly understand the importance of social software. This manifested with the rise of enterprise collaboration services, cloud computing technologies and the growing importance of mobile technologies for the enterprise. Web-based services are moving fast into the enterprise, raising questions about document-based environments in a world increasingly influenced by real-time information. We saw this time and again as the year rolled on. It played an important factor in how we developed our top ten list. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Our list includes three companies that made the list last year. We expect that this list may have some surprises. We welcome your feedback on the products that made the top 10 and your thoughts on ones that didn't make it. Microsoft Windows Azure and Sharepoint Microsoft has made huge strides with Sharepoint 2010. It is expected to continue its march into the enterprise this coming year. It may not be a best of breed application by any means, but its API is attracting a healthy number of third-party vendors. These companies are developing services to bring a level of transparency to enterprise data, which has historically been trapped in data silos. But Windows Azure is Microsoft's most exciting development. Ray Ozzie unveiled the cloud-based platform at the Professional Developers Conference last month and it is living up to its promise. It supports Ruby on Rails and MySQL, another sign that open-source is welcome on the Azure platform. Dallas, its mashup service, embraces the computational power of cloud computing, giving developers the ability to create their own applications that they may sell via the Azure platform. All in all, the services Microsoft is providing makes it a natural fit for the Top 10 list. Jive Software SBS 4.0 This Portland-based company continues to make strides into the enterprise. Earlier this Fall, the company unveiled Jive SBS 4.0 , its most significant update to date. SBS 4.0 is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. Jive may be the most threatening competitor to Microsoft Sharepoint. Its platform integrates with Microsoft Office, the iPhone and provides a social layer that users find compelling. Jive recently raised $12 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Salesforce.com Salesforce.com took a deep dive into the social space this year, culminating with Salesforce Chatter , a real-time service that acts as an internal social network for its customers. It was the culmination of a big year for the cloud-based service. Force.com, its application platform, saw significant growth. To date, developers have launched 135,000 applications on the platform. Further, a growing number of third-party services are integrating with the platform, showing again how important Salesforce.com has become in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SocialCast Social Business Intelligence One of our favorite companies in the web space, SocialCast is one of those services that just seems to understand the market and execute accordingly. What sets it apart is the user interface and SocialCast Social Business Intelligence , its sophisticated analytics environment, which will be a critical aspect to any service providing a real-time feed in an enterprise environment. Google Apps Google is making a clear move into the enterprise in a number of ways. Most recently, it enhanced its integration with the Blackberry. Google Sites recently had a major upgrade. Overall, Google is investing heavily in features to give enterprise customers more incentives to switch from Microsoft Office. We'll see how 2010 turns out for Google, but the path looks pretty clear for Google Apps to make further gains in the enterprise. Next page: Top Enterprise Products of 2009, 6-10 MindTouch MindTouch continues to find traction with its open-source services. Its most recent offering, MindTouch Cloud , is an open-source alternative to Sharepoint. Its ability to stitch together different data elements gives MindTouch an advantage in the enterprise, as customers seek additional ways to create dashboards that provide views into their internal systems and external environments. Cisco Collaboration This choice may be a bit of a surprise, but we feel that Cisco's investments in VOIP and collaboration services position it as a major player in the market. The company is acquiring Tandberg, it launched a social network service for internal use in the enterprise, and its VOIP service is now integrated with Salesforce.com. We see 2010 as the year that Cisco must tie it all together. It needs a glue to connect all of the services that it offers. Unlike Microsoft or IBM, Cisco lacks an underlying data structure. Still, the company's deep commitment to collaboration technologies in 2009 shows how it is transitioning to a new market that is built in many ways upon a social fabric. Socialtext The Socialtext story dates back to the days before Web 2.0. It began as a wiki provider and has since transformed itself into a collaboration service with real-time, microblogging integrations. In the past year, the company has continued to innovate - most recently with SocalCalc , the spreadsheet service that allows for multiple users to collaborate simultaneously across multiple documents. The challenge for Socialtext is to move past its perception as a wiki provider. The market is far larger for a collaboration platform and Socialext knows it. It will face steep competition in the enterprise against entrenched players like Microsoft and newcomers like Jive Software. present.ly Another company that may be flying under the radar to most, but is taking a smart approach with enterprise customers. Present.ly is an enterprise collaboration service that provides a real-time activity stream. It is profitable and growing, by taking the steps required to gain the trust of enterprises. Its security is tight and it offers the choice of an on-premise solution. present.ly is one of those elegant services that we admire for its smart fit with services like Twitter; and its compatibility with an array of mobile and web-based services. Apple iPhone Perhaps one of the mist revolutionary consumer products of our time, the iPhone is now also having a dramatic impact on the enterprise. Waves of business users have adopted the iPhone, creating demand for a new generation of enterprise applications. It's the Web that matters. Apple understands that dynamic far more than RIM and its Blackberry, which has a tough fight on its hands in 2010. There is no slowing down the iPhone - it's quickly becoming the app of choice for the enterprise. In Conclusion In 2009 we saw the rise of collaboration services, the maturing of cloud computing and advances in SaaS platforms. The rise of mobile technologies will continue in 2010. And social technologies in the enterprise? Well, they're here to stay. ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Discuss

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Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009

According to the recent predictions from analyst firm IDC, mobile web usage is set to explode over the course of next year due to market forces like the tripling of iPhone applications, the quintupling of Android applications, and the introduction of Apple's long-rumored tablet computer. This statement was made among the firm's many year-end predictions released in a report which offered a broad overview of what's to come in 2010 in terms of the IT industry, cloud computing, the mobile web, and the overall technology marketplace. Sponsor Mobile Web Continues Growth One the more notable predictions in the near 20-page report is in regard to the growth of the mobile industry. Under the headline "Mobile Devices on a Path to Eclipse PCs," the analyst firm claims that in 2010 mobile devices will become more strategic platforms for both commercial and enterprise developers. However, the report backs away from the implications made in that eye-catching title by clarifying that they're not (yet) predicting the "death of the PC," rather that mobile devices will no longer be seen as "subservient to PCs." Instead, says IDC, mobile devices will be viewed as primary client platforms. However, IDC does believe that in 2010 mobile devices will eclipse PCs in several areas - or at least come very close. For example, the firm claims we'll see over a billion mobile devices connected to the web by year-end. That's almost as many mobile devices as internet-connected PCs, the latter which will total 1.3 billion. Also, the growth rate of mobile devices is 2.5 times that of PCs. For the most part, the growth will be spurred by the proliferation of smartphones such as Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry as well as the lines running Nokia's Symbian operating system (OS), Windows Mobile, and Google's Android OS. In 2010, 200 million more smartphones will ship, representing 16% of the market. By 2013, that figure will rise to 20% or more. In addition to the sheer number of phones produced in the coming year, application development will continue to see explosive growth too. IDC believes Apple's iPhone will have 300,000 applications available by year-end (up from the 100,000 they have now) while Android will offer 50,000-75,000 (up from 10,000 now). They also believe that Google's strategy with Android - that is, an open OS that can run on different hardware - will help make it a strong iPhone competitor. Apple "iPad" Will Launch Of course, the one prediction which everyone wants to know about is the Apple tablet. IDC dubs the device the "iPad" and says it will be more like an oversized (8-10 inch) iPod Touch than a downsized Mac computer. The device will allow for web surfing, videophone applications, gaming, reading books, magazines, and newspapers, and watching videos. Last year, IDC said the iPad would not arrive in 2009 - and since it's now December, they appear to have been right. Now they claim 2010 is finally the year for its launch. They also note that it would not be surprising to see Microsoft launch its own tablet device next year too. In addition to the introduction of the so-called "iPad," IDC says the netbook market will continue to grow with major manufacturers expanding their lineup to include different pricing levels for the ultraportable machines. This "good, better, best" lineup will allow netbooks to move away from being just considered value-oriented systems (cheap with low performance) to being decent alternatives to traditional notebook PCs. Do You Agree? The IDC report involves predications of what's to come, but it was created after studying this year's data in detail and extrapolating on that to peer into the future. We think their findings sound credible - even the one about the mythical "iPad," although that may just be wishful thinking on our part. Do you agree with these predictions, too? Share your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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Analysts Predict 1 Billion+ Mobile Web Users by 2010