Cheetah Alternatives and Competitors Compared in Consumer Apps

Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It's often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Engineering tools should be as streamlined and smart as everything else in your life: as your phone, as your email, as all the apps that help you manage your day-to-day. Your work should be as efficient as possible so you can generate innovative ideas, design elegant technology, and manufacture at scale, all because you can focus on the right things. There should not be any distractions caused by poorly designed websites, unreliable data, or unwieldy spreadsheets of haphazard electronic component information. You should be able to compare components, find important technical information, and easily grasp the spectrum of parts that will be a match for your design. This is what Octopart strives for. Finding electronic component information should not be holding engineers back from bringing ideas to life quickly and efficiently. We believe that pricing, availability, technical specifications, and reference designs should be transparent, fast to find, and easy to understand. That’s why we create powerful, intelligent tools that streamline the engineering workflow and enable fast decision making. Octopart provides accurate and complete data for millions of electronic components in a way that makes it easy to find and compare parts. Focus on the important stuff: building the technology of the future.

Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show. Zenter was acquired by Google in June, 2007.

Auctomatic, a Y Combinator company, offers an auction and marketplace management system for all of those individual sellers on such sites as Ebay, Amazon, Overstock and others. The application lets you list your items as well as manage your sales, but it also helps you understand how to best optimize your selling and maximize profits. The company also received an investment from Paul Buchheit, the lead developer of Gmail.

Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada's largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they're passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

View 3, an active clad-alignment splicer with the world's highest fiber image magnification rate, is the most dependable fusion splicer.

Socialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

Heysan was a free mobile messaging and community based in San Francisco, California. Initially Heysan provided free messaging between phones and computers, bridging IM with SMS. The service expanded into launching a mobile community and has over 1 million users doing tens of million of monthly messages. In the summer of 2007 Heysan raised a seed round from Khosla Ventures and Atomico, the venture funds of Vinod Khosla and Niklas Zennstrom. Heysan was acquired by Good Technology in May 2009.

Xobni makes your inbox and address book smarter. Xobni, and its Smartr product suite, discover all the people you've ever emailed, called or SMS'd, and instantly access a full view of each contact, complete with their photo, job title, company details, email history as well as updates from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can download Smartr for Gmail, Android or iPhone; and Xobni for Outlook and BlackBerry - or connect them all with Xobni Pro.

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Scribd

Consumer Apps

Scribd gives you access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and more, all in one place, for one price. OUR VISION Inspire the world through stories and knowledge. OUR MISSION Build the largest and most accessible library connecting storytellers with their audience. If you love working with smart, motivated people, you’ll love working at Scribd. We value our employees, we demonstrate accountability, and we take action. We’re one team with a common goal: helping our customers flourish.

OMGPOP is a leading developer of social games for facebook, iphone and the open web. With games on multiple social networks as well as its own destination site, the company is recognized as a leader in creating real-time game experiences. Based in New York City, OMGPOP is funded by Spark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Jamglue is an online community allowing users to listen or mix music from a library of user-contributed music.

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Thinkature

Consumer Apps

Thinkature is a SaaS solution for businesses. Founded by Y Combinator alumni, this platform provides innovative tools and services to help companies streamline their operations and achieve their goals. Built with modern technology and user experience in mind, Thinkature offers scalable solutions for teams of all sizes.

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Shoutfit

Consumer Apps

We tried to build a social network around clothing. Also briefly built a search engine for clothing.

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Pollground

Consumer Apps

A social polling site. Pollground allows you to easily create surveys and allow the “wisdom of the crowd” to answer your questions. Questions and comments can be posted anonymously.

Anyone can create their own beautiful catalog pages of products that they want to editorialize and recommend to others. Authors earn a portion of the referral bonus for products sold. Shut down in 2007.

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Likebetter

Consumer Apps

An online personality test game, where you look at two photos and choose which one you “Like Better”.

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Jumpchat

Consumer Apps

A platform bridging mobile text messages, email, and IM communication without needing to download anything. Users can send mass messages on any of the platforms and JumpChat will send it to the platform the receiver activates. They are currently focusing on mass mobile messaging, where users can shoot off mass messages to the groups they define.

Inkling, based in Chicago, Illinois, offers collective intelligence solutions to help organizations make more informed decisions. Inkling's products have been implemented by industry-leading corporations and government agencies worldwide to reduce operational risks, improve forecasting, and gain insights about the organization.

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Clustrix

Consumer Apps

Clustrix provides the leading scale-out relational database engineered for the cloud or data center. ClustrixDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL and an ideal solution for high-transaction, high-value workloads typically found in businesses such as ad tech, e-commerce, gaming, and large web and mobile businesses. Our customers use ClustrixDB for critical business applications that support massive transactional volume. ClustrixDB delivers more than twenty-five trillion transactions per month for customers including AOL, Nielsen, Match, MakeMyTrip, Photobox, Rakuten, and Symantec. Headquartered in San Francisco, Clustrix is funded by HighBar Partners, Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, ATA Ventures, and Y Combinator. ClustrixDB is available in software that runs on commodity hardware and on any cloud. Visit www.clustrix.com to learn more. Follow @Clustrix on Twitter and "like"​ us on Facebook! #BetterSQL

Snipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.

Finding wedding vendors is hard. In 2007, a couple started Project Wedding to tackle this problem and eventually grew it into a full-featured wedding planning site. Now part of the WeddingWire Network, Project Wedding strives to make wedding planning easier, less stressful, and more fun! Over 1 million brides come to Project Wedding monthly to interact with our supportive community and to read our curated editorial content. We know that today's weddings are all about showing off personal style with creative elements, gorgeous color palettes, and unique details. We also know that the contemporary bride is incredibly busy and wants to take care of all of her wedding planning needs in one spot. Enter Project Wedding!

Wufoo is a web application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. No coding required! Founded in 2006, Wufoo was created by Chris Campbell, Kevin Hale and Ryan Campbell on the belief that forms were the starting point for building anything useful on the web. The problem they saw was that one of the most efficient and used interfaces for collecting data, wasn’t very efficient to create. So they decide to fix that by creating Wufoo! In 2011, Wufoo was acquired by SurveyMonkey, the leader in web-based survey solutions, to help complement their growing suite of services to offer amazing data collections tools to their customers.