Folks, it happened. It might have been the Time article, or the MSNBC interview, or the appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show. Who knows and who cares? Who cares if they are making seven-figure revenue every month? The only thing that’s important is how do you stack up on the Seattle Startup Index, and finally, Pet Holdings, Inc., the makers of FailBlog and I Can Has Cheezburger made it to the coveted position #1 on the SSI taking over Zillow.
I got a lot of criticism for adding Pet Holdings to the SSI because quite a few people called it “a blog”, but they failed to see the UGC elements and the massive technology to serve all those pictures, videos and RSS feeds. You can’t scale to the level they are today using out-of-shelf components.
But that’s not the only big change on the top 10, probably since the Index was first published in 2007, iLike was on the top 10 startups and this time they aren’t anymore. MySpace acquired them. We also removed Others Online, acquired by the Rubicon Project. We are always happy to remove startups because they were acquired or IPOed (hasn’t happened yet).
This month we added 11 new companies to the list which include: Judy’s Book (it was taken off the list after it shutdown a while ago, and we forgot to add it back when it was reborn as a new startup), Foodista, Mindbloom, Learn That Name (the company that came out of Startup Weekend and was the attendees choice winner), CompareFurnishing, Finder Development (RunwayFinder), Spidr Mobile, BlueCapp (SyncAcross), Bravura Softare and Adoozle.
We added TweepML.org – a simple way to create and follow a list of Twitter users – part of Seattle 2.0 LLC, which debuts the Website index by ranking at #148.
We cleaned up many issues with websites, names, companies that moved out of Seattle, companies that shutdown, etc. Danielle Morrill did a good amount of research for that. The most obvious fix we did was for EVO Media Group, the makers of DevHub. We were tracking their corporate website instead of DevHub.com, so on this month you see them jumping 100 positions to #64.