The weekend has brought us some truly cool startups - with some original concepts, too!

The pick of the bunch has to be Expensify - an incredible idea that actually imports your credit card transactions from your account and compiles them together as a complete IRS-friendly expense report. And before you start screaming “YOU’RE GOING INTO MY CREDIT CARD ACCOUNT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!”, this is a PCI compliant app (that’s bank level financial compliance if you didn’t know).

We’ve also got some solid, if not mind bendingly original applications from TeemingPod and InstantCal, allowing you to add interactive components to your website: polls and calendars respectively.

KiiRaa is great looking and has definite allusions of being the ‘next big thing’ by aggregating the best sites on the net (as recommended by its users). You can also win an iPod. (remember, you heard it hear first).

The last app I wanted to throw a shout out to is Balsamiq, a very cool software mockup tool for all of you developers out there. They’ve managed to frakenstein together a very functional package with a hand-drawn cartoon-like UI that just shouts “play with me! Play with me!”

Check out the screenshots, with links below.

Almost Meet - Fully save time, money and the earth
KiiRaa - Suggest, recommend and view the best websites on the Net
Balsamiq - Create software mockups in minutes
Expensify - Import your receipt deets.
Feedmingle - mingle all your feeds into one
Instant Cal - Embed an interactive calendar on your website.
Screentweet - ScreenTweet shares videos, pictures, screen shots, and images on Twitter
Teemingpod - Add powerful social applications directly to your website.
MultiURL - Your one stop resource to file sharing.

I’m exporing a different format today and moving away from the ‘launchpad’ page. From now on, the day’s hot startups will be listed as posts ready for easy digestion.

Today’s startups are a bit of a mixed bag (as always), but there’s some great developments that have just hit the dub-dub-dub. Standing out today was the beautiful looking - and quite overwhelming - almost.at which is a constantly updating stream of content parsed from Twitter, blogs, websites, Flickr and Youtube (and more) relating to a particular event: today’s events included Obama’s speech in Cairo, the anniversary of Tianenmen Square… you get the idea.

From today’s obligatory new Twitter applications we are given Twubs which aggregates hashtag tweets together and Twaitter, allowing you to schedule a tweet to happen in the future. More than the actual development, I pity the unenviable job that Twitter app creative minds have in naming their application. Surely every possible word in the english dictionary starting with T&W has already been used up.

Entering into the search engine foray is the slick DeeperWeb.com which does a great job taking the Google search platform and adding to it tag clouds, entries from Wikipedia, blog entries and the like. A standard Firefox addon will make it easier to remember to use DeeperWeb once the new greatest-search-engine-ever graces our screens (due next Monday, Thursday and two new releases scheduled for a week from Sunday).

As always, click any thumbnail to launch the gallery (and find the URLs below)…

Paystr - Friends pay friends online.
Safe.mn - Security and Transparency.
Deeper Web - Search the deeper web.
Almost At - It’s almost like being there.
Paxonta - Surveys for businesses.
Twubs - #Hashtags made useful.
Superminder - (Remember to) get things done.
Adwhirl - Free your ads.
Twaitter - The Twitter client and scheduling Platform.

RightSignature heralds the annihaltion of the lowly pen as you no longer need to physically sign contracts and other legal documents thanks to this clever solution.

Many businesses needs to sign contracts on a very regular basis. Ever more, contracts are delivered by email in order to bypass the inefficient and slow postal system. With that logic in mind, what better possible solution could there be to complete digital distribution of contracts than to be able to sign and send documents completely digitally?

This is a solution that we’ve all been waiting for - ever since the first contract was PDF’d and sent by email. A simple process and a useful interface sets the grounds for a killer solution.

The biggest problem that I see with RightSignature is that for it to really work, you need to get both parties on board - great if you’re an early adopter, but what if y the other party is a stalwart for the fountain pen?

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Channel your inner Bourne Identity with this secure document transfer system that even Matt Damon would be proud of.

Well, spies, of course. But also any business that wants to keep its intellectual property in the right hands only.

Keeping documents secure in an increasingly shared environment is a real worry for businesses. This is a near-flawless package that executes what it sets out to do to a very high level.

Simple MS Office documents documents work great, but sending a large Excel file went about as smoothly as a wheelbarrow ride down nine miles of gravel road. Hopefully this is a beta bug yet to be squashed. Continue reading »

Tweetmic is a new iPhone app that allows you to upload audio to Twitter. I guess you’d call it ‘Tweetcasting’?

Slowed down by all that time consuming typing and spell checking (it is a whole 140 characters, after all)? This app combines two things loved by almost everyone: Twitter and the sound of their own voice.

At a mere buck for the app and unlimited unrestricted uploads, Tweetmic could be on every iPhone and iPod touch very soon.

Twitter is text. Podcasts are audio. Twitter and the people that love it are flexible, but will Tweetmic bend the relationship just too far?

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Meetsee is a virtual office that allows you to do office stuff with your remote workmates. You might even do some work while you are there.

Home based workers, downsizing companies and distributed workforces may be interested in this cutesy but useful solution.

There is no doubt that offices are out and home-based workers are in - will Meetsee breach the gap?

While developers, small teams and individuals may flock to Meetsee, will this solution just be too much too soon for the corporate world?

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Good.ly is an intriguing and unusual URL shorterner with a charitable difference.

Social network junkies that have a Mother-Tereasa-like bent may be very interested in this service.

Good.ly has several things going for it, namely a sustainable business model, a diverse affiliate network and, importantly, the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from giving.

URL shorteners are the soup-du-jour at the moment, and good.ly’s kryptonite will undoubtedly be competition and user choice. We also need to ask: is good.ly doing a good enough job of establishing an easily understood identity and message for itself?

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byTagg.com is the latest RSS-reader-come-Twitter-tracker-come-web-crawler to hit the market. Keep track of your trackables in one central place.

Blogs, tweets and news, Oh My! With so much content that we follow daily, it makes sense to manage it all from one simple platform. Also, blog owners will be interested in byTagg’s alluring affiliate program on offer.

Although byTagg has definite room for improvement, it ticks all the right boxes with an simple RSS reader, (some) Twitter following capability and - overall - a fairly user friendly interface.

In the world of cloud computing, it’s an interesting choice for byTagg’s services to be provided by a downloaded application. With a non-browser based interface and ad-supported delivery, will byTagg offer enough to the user to keep coming back?

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Pipejump.com offers a web based service that manages the lifecycle of a sales opportunity from drunken pitch you delivered at the pub into a closed deal.

Pipejump’s service will appeal to any small business or sales person that is managing several sales opportunities at any one time — Particularly the ones that suffer from chronic disorganisation. Also, sales managers that want to keep tabs on their team will be pricking up their ears.

Sales managers will undoubtedly be interested in the sophisticated reporting interface that Pipejump offers. Coupled with an attractive ROI proposition, it’s not a far stretch to imagine Pipejump.com as a regular addition to any sales office.

Like anything, the quality of the reports that Pipejump.com spits out is only as good as the data entered in. Will sales people busy wining and dining be able to stay on top of the administrative components of the service? Or will this be a case of gargbage in -> garbage out?

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Task.fm is a notification service that - impressively - talks the same language as you and converts common phrases into reminders.

Considering the site design and branding, as well as the service itself this is an app designed for industrious young executives busy with Blackberries andd cafe lattes.

The engine that translates your phrasing into a reminder is impressive - recognising even the most vague “A-week-from-yesterday-at-the-morrow” type phrases.

I have a deep bond with my phone’s calendar application. It’s a safe relationship. Can this flashy tart break my monogamy?

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