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2009: Products I Can’t Live Without

by Michael Arrington on January 4, 2009

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

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by Michael Arrington on January 2, 2007

A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I’m updating the list this year.

Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

Jingle’s Free 411 Service Hits 100 Million calls

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by Michael Arrington on November 30, 2006

Jingle’s free 411 service has announced that users have now placed over 100 million 411 calls.

The company, which we profiled in October 2005, has raised over $60 million in capital to date, has taken over 3% of the U.S. 411 market.

We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October at TalkCrunch. Jingle isn’t creating a new market – they are destroying an entrenched, $8 billion market with a free product.