Like.com is pretty cool. It tries to help you shop for things based on physical similarities, they've got a neat image recognition thing going. I was surprised when I saw it actually work.

Also cool is Shazam Entertainment's music recognition software. http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_...

Apparently, if you hear something on the radio or whatever, you dial up shazam and they can tell you what it was. Magic, I tell you.

Then there's Heroku, which is kind of 'wtf amazing' to me.

like.com is strange, it really does work quite well! but I just don't know that people look to buy things that way :)

Well, I might, except that the price for many of the items is a little bit insane.

Web - YouTube for all its hype made it ridiculously easy to convert video formats into Flash Video. No one I recall had done that before. Ask anyone if they thought they'd see videos embedded in web pages by the normal user..

Client - IntelliJ (yes, it's an IDE that I use but they hired smart, some near-wizard-level Czech/Russian programmers and did the marketing from the states - to impressive success on both ends)

Client - Portal - ok it's a cool game but shows that ground-breaking ideas can come from students [Digipen] (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/721/721542p1.html)

Haha, sorry I'm missing the web/client question, but http://www.memjet.com is technically impressive to a ridiculous level.

Oh yeah, Johnny Chung Lee's future startup is also pretty technically impressive.

I agree. Some of the most technologically impressive startups are doing stuff with actual hardware (note hardware is a broad term to encompass everything from cells to robots)

"2007 Young Innovators Under 35

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world." http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/index.aspx

P.S. I vote for the Roomba - bringing robotics to consumers in a safe, friendly non-Robocop kind of manner

PeakStream (now part of google) - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7763.html

I wish I could play with their technology, too bad Google is hoarding it.

First one that comes to mind is the Jing Project by Techsmith. Really handy way of doing screenshots and recordings. Sounds silly until you actually use it.

http://jingproject.com/

I also like UI, especially the simple sharing to web, but on my machine it is awfully slow (laptop 1,67 GHz / 1 GB / Vista). I don't have it running in the background, and starting it takes about 20 seconds. I guess the .NET framework is not the lightest one.

Might be a silly argument, but I love stuff like Irfanview that opens up in milliseconds and works really fast.

Jing is anyway a cool piece of software. Technically impressive? Maybe...

Google Maps

Joost

Fon.com

Yahoo! Pipes

Wikipedia

Powerset (touted as the Google search killer)