The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are also in the pipeline. The app is available from the iTunes store here. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr’s own content as well as your social network. The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts.

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The first major feature offered by TripIt Pro is enhanced flight monitoring. TripIt will keep tabs on any delays, cancellations, and gate changes for every flight in your itinerary, and send you an SMS message to alert you as soon as there’s a change (you can also choose to receive reminders for check-in 24 hours before your flight). TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz ackowledges that some airlines offer similar notification services, but says that you have to set these up for every carrier you fly on. With TripIt, you only have to sign up once for it to work across all airlines.

The service can also recognize when a delayed flight you’re on may cause you to miss a connecting flight, and alerts you to any alternative flights leaving from the same airport (TripIt also knows how many seats are available on each flight, so it won’t suggest any full ones). Of course, you’ll have to still go through your airline’s booking agent and ask to be placed on one of these flights, but Hintz says that generally if you can ask for a specific flight with available seats, these agents are more likely to help you out.

Another new feature is the ‘Inner Circle’, which streamlines the service’s sharing functionality. Before now you’ve been able to share an itinerary with friends, but there hasn’t been a way to designate someone as a permanent buddy who can always see your plans (Hintz says users often wind up having to re-share plans with spouses and close friends for every trip they take). With Inner Circle, you’ll be able to grant permanent access to a select group of friends.

Finally, TripIt is adding a new point tracking service for your frequent traveller points. The service keeps tabs on airlines, hotels, and some car companies, presenting your points in a single interface. TripIt isn’t the first service to do this, but Hintz says it’s been one of the site’s top three most requested features.

TripIt Pro is going to cost $99 per year, but the site is offering a special introductory rate of $49/year for anyone who signs up by July 31st. And if you sign up at the cheaper rate, the site will offer the cheaper $49/year renewals for life. Frequent travelers are always looking for a way to take the burden out of flying, and now that they’ll no longer be able to pay $199 to skip airport security lines, this might prove a good alternative for reducing those headaches.

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At Launch Silicon Valley this past week, I saw a demo of Gliider, a Firefox plug-in and tool that allows you to drag and drop travel information you collect from around the web. The video explains the concept behind Gliider, which is still in private beta, fairly well. While the travel 2.0 space is nearly saturated with a plethora of competitive products, Gliider’s tool is incredibly useful and its focus is narrow (Gliider only wants to help users with planning), which could make it standout in the crowd.

After you download the plug-in, you can pop-out the Gliider trip planner box from your browser when you need it. Within the planner box, you can create a trip, specify where you are traveling to (Gliider’s search box offers auto suggestions), and when you plan to go. Gliider will automatically create folders for each type of information, including flights, hotels, shopping, transport and food. You can also create customized folders.

When you come across useful travel info, like hotel, restaurant, or flight listings, you can highlight the text and images and simply drag and drop the info into the box. Once the item is in the organizer, you can make insert comments to each item. It replaces bookmarking for travel and automatically organizes links, sites, and listings for you. Once you’ve finished the planning process of a trip, Gliider will email you all your details in a PDF file. The startup will also be rolling out a iPhone app that will let you view your planned trips.

Gliider’s proprietary technology will read where and when you will be traveling and provide customized hotel deals for you. And Gliider will also track hotel deals, letting you know when a price goes up or down. The tool doesn’t yet do the same for flights, which would also be a useful item to track. Gliider will soon have a “ask around” feature, which via Facebook Connect, will let you solicit advice on a trip or listing from your Facebook friends.

Gliider mainly makes money from affiliate fees—when they suggest deals (they have a partnership with Expedia) and a user clicks to the deal and books, Gliider will get a cut from the purchase. The startup’s CEO and co-founder Jordan Stopler, declined to say how much they receive in these deals but also added that the startup will be offering deals on flights as well in the future. Gliider will also be adding functionality for IE8 soon.

The most obvious and serious competitor to Gliider in this space is TripIt, a popular travel site (and one that Mike can’t live without) that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your email confirmations from hotels and airlines. NileGuide also is similar in function. But the beauty of Gliider is that it’s solely focused on planning a trip and not on creating a step by step itinerary for travelers. And the fact that Gliider is a plug-in makes it easy to access and integrate with the browser experience.

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Appropros Mobile has released a Pro version of its popular FlightTrack iPhone application that can automatically pull in your flight itineraries through TripIt’s recently released API.

The original FlightTrack application, which costs $4.99 and is currently ranked third among the iPhone App Store’s top paid travel applications, asks for you to enter an airline, a flight number, and a date. It then displays a travel map with route and weather information, and it tells you whether the flight’s gate has changed or if there’s been a delay.

The new Pro version essentially saves you from having to remember flight numbers by giving you a list of the itineraries you have already emailed to TripIt. You can still look up flights manually (perhaps when you want to retrieve the status of a flight for a friend or family member), but you’ll always have your own travel information ready for quick access.

By releasing an API and deciding not to develop its own iPhone application, TripIt has essentially offloaded its mobile users to Appropros Mobile (TripIt does have a mobile iPhone site but it’s not nearly as functional). Unfortunately, this means TripIt will miss out on the revenue that Appropros gets to generate with its data, not an insignificant amount at $9.99 a pop for FlightTrack Pro.

This could be a strategic mistake for TripIt since travel is by definition a mobile activity. However, travel social network competitor Dopplr hasn’t released an iPhone app of its own either, so perhaps neither company has felt enough competitive pressure in the mobile space yet.

See our previous coverage of TripIt here.

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TripIt, the helpful travel site that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your Email confirmations from hotels and airlines, has opened up an API for outside developers. The API will give third party applications access to TripIt’s itinerary sysytem, which now accepts data from 350 travel sites. Developers can find all the details for joining the program here.

A number of applications have already used the API to implement new features. Expensd, an online service that helps business travelers manage their expenses, will use TripIt to automatically import your transit and hotel expenses. Popular iPhone application FlightTrack will use TripIt to automatically look up your flights to see if they’re on time. And Where I’ve Been, a social network application that plots your travels on a map for your friends to see, will use the API to automatically look up your destinations. Other potential uses for the API include an ‘Add To TripIt’ button that would allow travel sites to transmit your booking data to TripIt so you won’t have to forward your confirmation Email.

TripIt is a great service, especially for frequent travelers (it has been on Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for two years running). I’m excited to see what developers can come up with – hopefully some major travel booking sites will get a clue too, and start offering that ‘add to TripIt’ button so we can skip the Email forwarding.

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An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise.

In terms of features, Bluenity doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you’ll find all the necessary basics: you can edit both your leisure and business profile and you get to share your regular departure airport, favorite destinations, number of flights you take per year, and countries you’ve visited in the past. Bluenity lets users interact with other members, connects to their Facebook profile and enables users to share travel tips with each other. I think they would have been better off integrating tips and reviews from other travel communities that have been around for years and offer valuable content in abundance (e.g. TripAdvisor) and letting you choose which profile (e.g. LinkedIn) you would like to point to.

I also suspect they will moderate the hell out of the service because their Traveler Charter reads “the Bluenity community encourages travelers to choose good humor over conflict and positive advice over negative criticism. Optimism and enthusiasm are essential to maintaining a friendly atmosphere.” So honesty is fine, just be positive when you’re being critical. Right.

(Stowe Boyd even had his profile picture rejected because it was pixelated.)

I still like Dopplr better (other comparable services include TripIt, TravelMuse, TripSay and more), because it doesn’t make a distinction about which airline you’ve chosen to travel with—if you were in doubt, Bluenity only lets you share trips that includes one of Air France-KLM’s flights—and are open to include relevant information and multimedia content from third-party sources (e.g. photos from Flickr) rather than keeping the network a walled garden. Another major advantage to using something like Dopplr instead, is that the service leverages your existing relationship rather than trying to get you to hook up with total strangers.

What’s odd about Bluenity is that it displays travel tips and comments about hotels, restaurants, and attractions in all the languages the service is available in: French, Dutch and English, even when you indicate in which language you would like to browse the social network.

Last but not least, I think it’s a shame that they decided to boast about being the very first airline to launch a social platform for travelers, when that is clearly not the truth (cases in point: British Airways has Metrotwin while Lufthansa operates both GenerationFly and GenFlyLounge).

To conclude: I think there’s value in airlines engaging their customers in a more social way, as long as they realize that people are generally not loyal to either one airline company nor to a single social network. But it would be better for airlines to launch platforms that are open, or plug into existing communities by partnering with social networking services who have been doing a great job at building and maintaining groups of travelers for years now. Otherwise the barriers to adoption are just too great. Would you want to be friends with the people sitting next to you on a plane? No, you want to get away from those people as soon as the plane lands.

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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.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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TripIt, the online travel assistant that debuted at Techcrunch40 and is one of the sites Michael can’t live without, has received $5.1M in Series B funding.

The main contributions for this round come from Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and European Founders Fund. This addition brings the site’s total funding to $6.1M.

TripIt’s main goal is to simplify travel. Users need only forward email confirmations from airlines, hotels, and other travel services, and TripIt generates a simplified comprehensive list of travel plans. TripIt recently launched a mobile version of the site, and also features Closeness Matches, which notify users when they are in the same region as a friend.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which contributed to this round, was also responsible for TripIt’s $1M Series A funding round.

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TripIt, the service that creates master travel itineraries out of your confirmation emails, has become even more traveler-friendly with a new mobile site.

Users can access the site at m.tripit.com with their handheld devices. We’ve been told it works best with Blackberrys, iPhones, and Treos (the shot on the right is obviously how it looks on an iPhone).

The new site will support TripIt’s Closeness Matches, a feature that informs travelers when they’ll be in the same areas as their friends. It’s a feature that may very well have been inspired by Dopplr, another hot startup in the travel space.

Michael recently named TripIt as one of the Web 2.0 companies he couldn’t live without.

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“Who’s Close To Me?” automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road, and “Who’s Coming to my City?” automatically identifies colleagues who will be visiting the users hometown when they’re not traveling.

Tripit claims that the new features “offer a unique social network for travelers and their community of contacts.” The ability to connect with other travelers is a nice addition to what is already a good service.

CEO of Tripit Gregg Brockway said that the service provides a better way for Frequent travelers to keep up to date when they “don’t have the extra time to keep track of their travel as well as the travel schedules of their friends, family and associates.”

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This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, 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). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 was first added to the list last year. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. They have taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. over the last two years. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon’s new music store is just about perfect. With the addition of Warner Music they’ve got 3 million DRM-free songs at prices lower than Apple’s iTunes store (which has only 2 million DRM-free songs). It’s not as cheap as AllOfMP3 was, but at least it’s guilt-free and legal. Plus, it will hopefully drive Apple to improve iTunes (offering no-DRM only search would be a good start).

Amie Street

I have been a huge fan of Amie Street since it launched in mid 2006. They sell songs from unknown artists at variable prices. Every song starts at free, and as more downloads occur the price rises, up to a cap of $.99. Amazon likes the model, too. They invested in Amie Street in August.

Delicious

Delicious was on my list in 2006, but last year I switched to Blue Dot for bookmarking and tagging web pages because it had a semi-private feature that allowed sharing just with friends. This year I’m back with Delicious. They finally got Firefox integration just right, and the new user interface, previewed in September, is a big improvement.

Digg

Digg. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. But it’s an important source of traffic for us, and a great place to find interesting stories. I added it to the list last year, and it stay’s for another year. Competitor Reddit is another favorite source of news, though, and newcomer Mixx is coming on strong too.

Facebook

Just over a year ago I joined Facebook, and it is now a part of my daily routine to check up on what friends are up to, test a couple of new Facebook applications, and just generally be a part of the community. A year ago they were a hot startup, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how much they were to grow (in size and mindshare) in 2007. They constantly push the boundaries – and no one can say they’re boring. Facebook is the only pure social network I actually use regularly.

Firefox

The Firefox browser is being added to my list for 2008. If it seems like I’m a little late to the party, realize that Firefox on a Mac was essentially unusable until Firefox 3 came out (still in beta). Until recently Flock was my Browser of choice. Now, it’s Firefox.

Flickr

Flickr has been on the list all three years. It’s still the place I put all of my photos online. Someday perhaps Facebook could become the repository for my pictures. But since all my photos are already at Flickr, inertia keeps me there. Hopefully someday the two services will talk to each other more effectively. There should just be one place in the cloud for photos, and all my social networks should access them there.

Gmail

At the end of 2006 I already thought Gmail was close to perfect. This year they added IMAP support, which was the final piece of the puzzle. I still don’t like the way Gmail groups email threads, and tagging could be improved. But it’s an excellent service and just barely edges out Yahoo Mail as my favorite mail application.

Google Reader

Two years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Last year I switched to NetNewsWire. But Google Reader is just too good to ignore any longer. It’s quite simply the most elegant and useful feed reader available today. The product actually first launched in October 2005 but had serious flaws. But it got steadily better over time. Recent privacy hiccups aside, Google Reader is a beautiful web application and an amazing way to digest tons of information effectively.

Netvibes

Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle and My Yahoo are all excellent ways to organize lots of important data sources into a single home page. I’ve been using Netvibes since 2005 and I’ve stuck with it out of inertia more than anything else. Any of these products are perfect for your home page. If you aren’t using one yet, try them out. My Yahoo doesn’t work with Firefox 3 for some reason, though. Hopefully they’ll fix that asap.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list for three years running, and I expect it will stay there for the near future. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. It would be very nice if they opened up the API and allowed other applications to use the back end Skype service for IM and calls without opening up the Skype client though. MySpace seems to be the first to crack the nut. Hopefully others will follow, or else Gizmo will someday take their spot.

Techmeme

TechMeme is another three-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I probably generate more daily page views at TechMeme than any other website. It’s amazing that this is still a one man (Gabe Rivera), bootstrapped startup.

Technorati

Technorati was on my list in 2006, and off last year because, frankly, it was just too slow to be useful. But over the last year they’ve refocused and made improvements to the core service, and I’ve started using it again for basic blog search. It’s back on my list of top apps.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

I don’t know exactly how to describe Twitter. For people like me it’s a microblogging platform that allows me to push small bits of information – opinions, links, updates – to people who are interested. It’s become a part of my everyday life, and a great way to stay up to date on what friends are up to.

Wordpress

It would be hard to underestimate how much Wordpress makes my life easier. It is the blogging platform that runs all of the TechCrunch network sites, and has been on the list all three years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

YouTube

YouTube was also on the list last year, and it’s grown exponentially since then. I use it for entertainment (nothing good on TV? There’s always something good on YouTube) and work (we post most of our videos there and embed them here on TechCrunch). Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, particularly the spreadsheet application, has become an important productivity tool for us here at TechCrunch. We used it extensively to organize and discuss the hundreds of startups that applied to launch at TechCrunch40 last Fall. Whenever I open Office on my desktop to edit a spreadsheet, I feel the lack of collaborative features keenly. Frankly, Google Docs is just as useful, although Zoho was quicker to launch offline functionality, which gave them the edge on my list. Either product suite is a huge improvement on basic desktop office software.

Almost on the List

Even though I expanded the list this year from fifteen to nineteen companies, there are a bunch of products that could still be added. In the time wasting category there is Duels and KDice. Skreemr is a great music search engine. We also use Docstoc and Scribd all the time to embed documents into posts. I look up traffic stats for startups on Compete daily. And even though I dropped them from the list this year, I still listen to music on Pandora all the time. I have an idea that 23andMe will be on the list next year, after I’ve gotten back the initial DNA results. Finally, Seesmic would almost certainly be on the list, but I left them off because I’m an investor.

And I haven’t even brought up the gadgets that I use every day. The iPhone, the Philips MP3 alarm clock, my Jawbone bluetooth headset. Maybe next year I’ll break out a separate list for gadgets.

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TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on web-enabled mobile devices.

TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, Plaxo, and others. What this means is that TripIt users no longer need to manually update their calenders with trip information; TripIt now does it all, adding details such as flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurant reservations to supported apps.

Other new features going live today include support for temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit and other international features, with international date support coming soon. TripIt also now supports travel confirmation emails from Aer Lingus, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Tiger Airways, Virgin Blue and Avis Europe, as well as rail providers Amtrak, Eurostar, GNER, UK Trainline and VIA Rail.

See our previous review on how TripIt works here.

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CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.

TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post.

G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit)

SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops.

ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that audits the quality of the click traffic generated by any given ad campaign. This is a community approach to solving a growing problem, although some argue that the click fraud rate is already priced into what advertisers are willing to pay per click, so it is already being taken care of by the markets.

Realius—Combine casual gaming and real estate porn and you get Realius. The fantasy real estate site, which will launch in beta in two weeks (and was also in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit), will take real listings and let people guess how much each house is worth (using a slider that shows where other people have voted). Revenues will supposedly come from advertising, referral fees, and service fees from brokers who can use the game for training purposes. The game is based on actual real estate data. The CEO lost me, though, when he said that you don’t find out if your guess was right until later when they send you an e-mail (which is designed to drive you back to the site). Any game that does not generate instant feedback on how you’ve done is dead in the water, IMHO. Check your e-mail to see if you’ve won! That’s going straight to the junk folder.

Other startups that didn’t quite make the short list include Castfire, Kango, Footnote, Lemonade, Search-to-Phone, WooMe (another TC40 company), Sprigley, and GoXDML.

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It’s dead simple to use and it keeps you organized – all you have to do is forward confirmation emails to them when you purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Tripit pulls the relevant information out of the emails and builds an organized itinerary for you. You can send emails in any order, for multiple trips, whatever. It just figures everything out and organizes it.

The best part is you don’t even need to register to start using it. Just take an email and forward it to plans@tripit.com. Within seconds you’ll get a confirmation email back and you go from there. If it doesn’t recognize the email format from the seventy travel companies they currently support (orbitz, united airlines, marriott, etc.), you can add the information in directly on the website.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit CEO Greg Brockway is launching a new feature that makes the service even more useful, particularly on a mobile device (what you have with you when you travel). You email a basic command to the service and it responds with relevant information. “Get Flight Today” will return today’s flight information, for example. Or just “Get Trip” to get full details of your most current trip. Or just email “Help” to get a list of possible commands and modifiers.

San Francisco-based TripIt has raised $1 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

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Story Blender

Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.

Session 3 starts. CEO is also the founder of Cyworld.

Online video mixing with friends, nice interface.Multi-level relationship model for contributions, friend of a friend sort of thing. Easy to use video mashing with lots of features

TripIt

TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends.

CEO and Founder is ex-Hotwire, along with most of the team.

TripIt wants to eliminate the vanilla travel folder, bringing the travel itinerary into the 21st century. Travel is an information management business, TripIt is not a booking service.

Users send their plans to plans@tripit.com, compiles online itinerary, a sort of travel plan aggregation.

TripIt supports export to iCal and other platforms, also looking at microformats

Friends can share travel calenders. TripIt believes a multi-functional travel planner with collaborative tools will be a much needed service.

Site is live today, out of beta. I’d like to see the site before I pass judgment, but in theory it’s a great idea.

Flock

Flock is a social web browser we have reported on extensively. With Flock, people can discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is offering custom browser modifications as a revenue model. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo.

Flock feels that the browser has not evolved over time, and that’s a market opportunity for them. So interesting new features, Facebook sidebar was something new to me. Drag and drop functionality has improved a lot since earlier versions.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not be a Flock fan previously, the new version demoed here (release in 2 weeks) really is something more than Firefox with plugins. I’ll be taking another look at Flock soon.

MusicShake

South Korean MusicShake is a online amateur music mixing service. The service lets users create their own professional quality music using various tools. They hope to provide personalized music for ringtones, and personal websites (blogs, profiles). The service is developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp.

Korean company. Started with music and the speaker dancing on stage. Funny start, he danced worse than I do

Speaker asked whether it was a Britney Spears track…music was created by a 9 year old girl in Korea with no experience of real music…just like Britney Spears.

Demo of interface. Seems simple to us, based on mixing music tracks and sound effects. Tracks are recommended by “Nuba,” the robot behind Musicshake.

170,000 music tracks, 1 million by 1 million. Also a model for creators to make music and sell it on the 50/ 50 rev share.

One of the best presentations so far, big round of applause. Fun idea.

8020 Publishing

8020 Publishing is a media company that publishes user generated magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. Members of the 8020 community can contribute and critique the content in the magazines. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. The community also gives them a built-in subscription base not to mention loyal online communities.

8020 is aiming to “make magazines better.” JPG Magazine is used as an example.

Launching “Everywhere” Magazine, the “insiders experience”…travel magazine that is submitted by the community.

All submissions are added to the website, best make the magazine. Geographic focused search.

Submissions 300-500 words to make it easy to participate.

Interesting model, you’ll like this if you like JPG Mag.

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Jason Calacanis asks Yossi Vardi for his favorite, answers: two that appealed Music Shake, will appeal to young people, and Flock, presuming that the user interface isn’t too hard to use. He can see himself using TripIt.

Don Dodge favorites: Music Shake and Story Blender, reminded him of his days at Napster. Question to Story Blender: what about copyright on the videos. A: YouTube didn’t block the copyright material from day 1, they will block copyright content at the “community manager” level.

Michael Arrington asks Don Dodge about copyright, A: just because you haven’t been sued, doesn’t mean you wont end up being sued.

Rajeev Motwani loves Music Shake, wish he’d come up with himself. Also likes TripIt, “Useful and solving a real problem.”

Ron Conway: likes TripIt and Story Blender. TripIt simple idea with potential to grow virally + from an investor view point can be easy monetized. Story Blender is in video, biggest growth opportunity on the internet and a Story Blender is unique idea.

Discussion about 8020’s model, how they pay, copyright. Authors hand over their content when they submit.

Audience questions: is video the hottest market online: Ron Conway, yes, and it’s getting easier as the tech catches up in terms of copyright filtering.

Don Dodge to Flock: market is old, entrench, how do you overcome that, and what is the business model. Flock: partner business, we work with others to include functionality. Multi-site membership works for us by making management easier. In terms of choice, Firefox 1.0 launched less than 3 years ago, 100million + users, there is choice and people will switch. They also have a search relationship with Yahoo that is a main revenue stream.

Jason Calacanis: why not just do Flock as a Firefox extension. Flock: most people dont use Firefox extension, we are targeting the broader market.

Michael Arrington to Flock: you’ve taken far too long to release 1.0, over 2 years, given plenty of rope. Can you guarantee that you wont take users for granted in the future. Flock: yes, people love us…and it’s a great product. (didn’t respond directly to the 2 year comment).

Question to Music Shake: will it translate. MS: yes, music is universal and if I hadn’t told you the demo song was made by a Sth Korean girl you wouldn’t have known.

Conclusion: best panel yet, particularly in terms of the qaulity of the startups. Hard to pick a favorite, Music Shake was certainly the most original idea, TripIt for practical use. Flock impressed.

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