At the end of 2007, Wired made a list of companies to watch in the upcoming year. Despite the economic worries of the time, there were also many advantages, like Web 1.0 IPOs willing to help out, and the opportunity of attracting Google. Here are a few on that list that are still making waves.

  • Founded in 2004, BitTorrent, Inc.‘s technology was initially used by many for illegal file sharing. While companies crack down on that aspect of the technology, the company is focusing on the opportunity for easily transferring legal content. Their product is popular because it reduces bandwidth costs and can be added without any changes to hardware. In 2009, the company had grown to 20 employees and shows no signs of going anywhere.
  • Dash Navigation was a GPS navigation company which developed the Dash Express, a revolutionary GPS device which not only receives information, but transmits info on traffic and accidents back to the main servers. Last year, Dash was acquired by Research in Motion, and while support of the Express ended last month, it will be exciting to see what they come up with next.
  • LinkedIn was founded at the end of 2002 and in 2008 had 16 million users. Today, more than 70 million people use the site for business networking. Employers can put up job openings and easily search listings, while employees can personalize their profile to their hearts’ content. Other features, like LinkedIn Answers, improve the experience by allowing community discussion of important issues.
  • Spock was founded in 2006 as a search engine focused on people. The engine brings data together from networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as sites like Wikipedia and IMDB. In 2009, Spock partnered with Friendster to power their search engine, and was also acquired by Intelius.