Top Web Apps for the Real World: Seattle and Boston Startups Make 2008 List

Gregory T. Huang12/19/08Comments (1)Follow @gthuang

Seattle and Boston, two of Xconomy’s network cities, have something extra to be proud of today—at least when it comes to Internet startups. Each city contributed two companies to a popular list of the year’s best Web applications for improving customers’ real lives.

That’s according to the tech-news blog ReadWriteWeb, which has published its list of the “top 10 real world Web apps of 2008.” These are Web services that help keep people’s offline lives more organized and efficient. The categories were finance, health, education, politics, nonprofits, and travel. Without further ado:

—In Seattle, the teacher/student community site TeachStreet won in the education category, while the airfare-tracking site Yapta won in travel. TeachStreet expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, from Seattle and Portland. Yapta is in the process of closing a funding round of at least $2.7 million.

—In the Boston area, the social-networking sites PatientsLikeMe and Sermo, both based in Cambridge, MA, won in the health category. PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, and Parkinson’s disease. Sermo is a site where 90,000 doctors exchange information about medical practice. Sermo recently signed a deal to open up access to this network to financial industry experts who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional information service.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's National IT Editor and the Editor of Xconomy Boston. You can e-mail him at gthuang@xconomy.com, call him at 617-252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at @gthuang.