Even Cooler List of mostly Early Stage Companies

Scott Kirsner the well respected chronicler of all that is Tech in Boston, recently published his "Cool Half-Hundred" Companies list. In the same spirit, we are putting together our own purely subjective, no logical reason or diligent analysis list of companies that we think are worthy of the "Even Cooler" tag.

Web Fun:

Doink.com - Online art and animation with a social component.

Viximo - Virtual Goods Market

Swaptree - Online trading of CDs, Games and Books, with 3-way trading algorithm.

Web Services:

Kayak - Huge and successful online comparison shopping for airline tickets.

SecondRotation - sell and recycle electronics at an agreed upon price.

Good2Gether - Online distributor of Non-Profit information and donation mechanism.

Web Media/Advertising:

Affine Systems - technology that analyzes the visual content of videos and images ," not just the metadata "

Lookery (sorta Boston) - demographic advertising for Social Networks

Product Design / Web Design / Marketing

Bokardo.com - Social Web Design

Hunt & Gather - Interactive Media Agency

SimpleBits - world recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design

Research & Development

Arts Alliance Labs - build highly scalable, advanced technology products

Virosity (BetaHouse) - ruby on rails development for early stage startups

Hacker Homes (where senior hackers go to play)

Abinitio - massively paralell financial analysis applications

ITA Software - advanced algorithms and distributed computing techniques for airline industry

Software:

Acquia - value-added software products and services for the Drupal platform

Autovirt - state of the art solutions to the problems of Data Migration and File Server Consolidation

Cilk Arts - products that allow rapid development of reliable, high peformance applications for chip multiprocessors

Tokutek - accelerate key database operations by orders of magnitude

Vertica Systems - column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS)

Mobile:

Aylus Networks - MediaShare family of products and applications to enable a new class of real-time multimedia sharing solutions.

Envio Networks - mobile social networking?

Geezeo - Social on-line finance


Mobicious - best place to find anything for your phone

Communications:

Auraria Networks - products that are at the leading edge of content management and information identification and analysis