Travel startups Silicon Valley
Matt Lynley for Business Insider
Either way, everyone is pretty excited about them.
We spent the past week hanging out in Silicon Valley. Here are the startups people are talking about right now.
Hipmunk is the cleanest flight search startup out there.
Hipmunk
Year founded: 2010
Space: Travel and lodging search
Why it's buzzing: Hipmunk is already one of the most popular travel search sites. It has a slick interface that sorts out which flight or hotel is the best with metrics like "agony" and "ecstasy."
Card.io completely removes the need to type in a credit card number.
Year founded: 2011
Space: Payments
Why it's trending: Card.io is flat out cool. Instead of having to type in a credit card number or swipe it across a connected dongle, you just take a picture of the credit card to process a payment. It's one of several approaches to knocking out payments.
Waze is one of the most useful apps out there.
Year founded: 2008
Space: Traffic tracking
Why it's trending: People in the valley will tell you Waze is something that is actually useful, compared to a lot of the apps that are coming out now that seem to just tack on a new feature to their daily lives. It's one of those startups that actually solves a pain point.
Buck is a pretty quick way to pay for stuff.
Buck
Year founded: 2007
Why it's trending: Similar to the excitement about Square, Buck is another way of streamlining payments. When you pay for something once with a Buck-enabled merchant, it remembers your credit card information so you don't have to enter it again. You just use the app to make purchases with a few taps.
Circle is like a more elegant version of Highlight.
Space: Location-based discovery
Why it's trending: Highlight generated a lot of buzz heading into South by Southwest, but hit some growing pains with a few bugs and battery life issues. Circle does something similar, but has a much cleaner interface and has investors in the valley salivating.
Skout just raised a ton of money.
Skout
Space: Location-based dating
Why it's trending: After being at death's door, Skout turned around and raised million from Andreessen-Horowitz and others. That came after it changed itself into a location-based flirting app.
Exec has one of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs at the wheel.
Exec
Year founded: 2012
Space: Crowdsourced task completion
Why it's trending: This is the third company started by Justin Kan, who previously founded Justin.tv and then handed the reigns over to new CEO Emmett Shear. Instead of using an auction system to find someone to complete a task, you hire one of Exec's specially-picked professionals.
Postmates is great for short-range deliveries.
Space: Delivery
Why it's trending: Postmates was a big topic of discussion when it launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. It seems that excitement hasn't died out yet. It taps into an existing big network of couriers that just used Craigslist and makes it way more efficient.
Socialcam, a spinoff of Justin.tv, is a top-ranked free application.
Space: Video sharing
Why it's trending: It's the equivalent of Instagram for video. You can take short clips and apply filters to them and share them pretty easily.
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