Many of the startup companies have been highly under-estimated, at one time. Here is a list of few companies which were under-rated by Ranker.com, but are performing really well, and gaining accolades for their innovations.
Evernote
Evernote is an assemblage of software and services, designed for note-taking and archiving them. The company aims to give people the ability to capture any moment or idea easily, whenever they want, using a platform of their convenience (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS and WebOS), and make it easy to find.
Evernote is a privately held company, having its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Its major investors include Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Troika Dialog, and DOCOMO Capital.
The Evernote web service was launched into open beta on June 24, 2008 and has reached 11 million users. It is available in a paid-version, and a more-restricted, ad-supported, free-version. Evernote won the 2010 Webby Awards for the Best Mobile App--both the Webby and the People's Voice Webby. It won a Webby Award, 2011 for the second year in a row for the Best Productivity App.
Hipmunk
Hipmunk is a travel search site, which aims to take the 'agony' out of travel planning, help people book travel faster and more efficiently. It was designed to help people who have been over-flooded with irrelevant search results. It presents flight results with a visual 'timeline', which allows people to select the best flight at one glance. It also provides hotel results on a map, so that people can view the place where they will be staying and know the nearest landmarks.
It was co-founded by Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman in June 2010. Its investors include Ignition Partners, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Webb Investment Network, Erik Blachford, Simon Breakwell, Rob Glaser, Jim Hornthal, Rich Barton, Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Raymond Tonsing, Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Geoff Ralston, Sizhao Yang, Amitt Mahajan, and Gabor Cselle.
According to the company, it has passed 1 million searched and its search traffic is growing by around 15 percent each month. It orders flights by a hodgepodge metric, called 'agony', which includes delays and connections, saving more than 150,000 hours of 'agony' since its launch. The company won the GBTA 2011 Business Traveler Innovation Award--Judge's Choice.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat is a real-time analytics services (real-time analytics is focused on understanding the usual behavior across persistent content, the peaks and troughs of the social web, and it focused on transient content--content that might not have existed yesterday, might not be looked tomorrow but is driving your site today.), enabling people to understand the emergent behavior in real-time and exploit or mitigate it. The New York-based company was launched in April 2009. The number of users across all chartbeat sites has crossed 2,027,778 concurrent users already.
Tools like Google Analytics and Omniture tell site owners about which content performed well in the last day, or maybe the last hour.
Chartbeat accelerates the process to show real-time activity arcoss a website. It is up for a Crunchies award for the Best Internet application for the year.
Foodzy
Foodzy is a self-funded start-up based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, launched in April 2011, which helps users to keep a track of what products they eat during the day, and reward certain healthy eating habits with badges. This helps them to maintain a healthy lifestyle, start losing weight or simply keep a track of their eating habits.
It helps users to enjoy food with their friends by competing with them for special badges, like the Hangover badge for too much alcohol in one night, or a BBQ badge for barbequing more than 5 times during the summer.
It offers the possibility to view detailed statistics of the user's food habits, like the amount of bits (a simple conversion of calories) they eat per day, the favorite products and friends having similar eating habits. Foodzy has thousands of users in over 58 countries and has a current database of over 100,000 food products, and plans to launch a mobile app for both iPhone and Android soon.
The company--one of the 18 finalists at this year's The Next Web (TNW) conference--was soft launched at the TNW conference earlier this year, and has gone global
Chocri
Chocri is a German startup, founded in Berlin in 2008 by Franz Duge and Michael Bruck. It allows users to create their own chocolate bar online by choosing from different bases (dark, milk, white or a combination of these chocolates). It has over 100 toppings ranging from chili to candied rose petals. All the customized chocolate bars are hand-made with fair trade, organic chocolate from Belgium.
With the mass customization market exploding across the U.S. retail, the Chocri founders have expanded their market to U.S. also, starting January 2010. The company donates one percent of every chocolate bar sold, to the children of the Ivory Coast, through the organization DIV-Kinder.
The company won the top prize (among a hundred applicants) at the Grnderpreis (or "Founders") Awards, held by the weekly German business news magazine WirtschaftsWoche, which holds annual competitions for innovative startups trying to win over the global market with their unique and creative ideas.
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