The activity on the list has increased significantly this year, which is supposed to be a recession-year, so why so many startups? One theory is people are seeing opportunities and just taking more risks. Another theory is the laid off from Microsoft people are founding their own startup. But I actually think it’s a bit more tricky reason: Startups don’t built products and launch in a couple of months, it still takes 6-9 months to build and launch a decent startup. What I think is happening is that startups are seeing this recession in two ways: Launch new and get benefit of the lower number of competitor, or get the product out of the door now and get traction because it will be a tough funding environment without traction.
Now, for the non-sharp-eyed observer, Seattle 2.0 also made the list for the first time ever. We just officially became the “Seattle 2.0, LLC”!
Besides Seattle 2.0 LLC, the other 22 new startups are:
TweetStats (from Damon Cortesi),
Common Craft (by the great Lee LeFever and the amazing “In Plain English” series),
Serra Media,
Timu,
Opscode,
Glympse,
MangoSpring,
Clop.in,
Truth to Power,
XBDiff,
Performance Phones,
GolfingMyWay, Creative Journey (
DropWidget),
Meosic,
Blue Utopia,
Media Tuner,
ViaFo,
Plategro,
ValueAppeal,
Hivebrain,
PeopleFlip and
Clarity.
On the top 10 on the list, there is a big move by Survey Analytics moving up from position #12 to #9 and breaking into the top 10 for the first time ever.
FlowPlay had a move of 137 positions, but the reason is that we were not tracking one of their games, ourWorld. Socrata, former blist, also saw a growth of 39 positions on this list.