Photo: Matt Lynley for Business Insider
Like clockwork, there’s usually a new batch of startups everyone is talking about every month or so.Sometimes they’re older startups that are finally finding their feet. Sometimes they are just coming out of an incubator like Y Combinator.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
Year founded: 2007
Space: Payments
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.
Year founded: 2010
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.
Year founded: 2007
Space: Location-based dating
Why it's trending: After being at death's door, Skout turned around and raised $22 million from Andreessen-Horowitz and others. That came after it changed itself into a location-based flirting app.
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.
Year founded: 2011
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.
Year founded: 2012
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.
Year founded: 2011
Space: Car sharing
Why it's trending: No one thought people would be willing to rent out their cars. Now Getaround has a fresh new office and is growing like crazy -- and it builds all its technology in a lab in-house. Founder Jessica Scorpio hopes to keep a billion cars from hitting the road.
Year founded: 2008
Space: Location-based dating
Why it's trending: Ignore the stereotypes, first. But Grindr is one of the most-talked about apps in the San Francisco Bay Area because it's widely used. It's a location-based dating app for the LGBT community, thought a lot of its users don't use it for exactly that purpose.
Year founded: 2008
Space: Online reputation scoring
Why it's trending: Love it or hate it, everyone checks their Klout scores in the San Francisco Bay Area. When Klout throws a party, everyone has to wear a badge that has their Klout score on it.
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