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.<p>Also cool is Shazam Entertainment's music recognition software. <a href="http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_profile.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/template/pages/p/company_...</a><p>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.<p>Then there's Heroku, which is kind of 'wtf amazing' to me.
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..<p>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)<p>Client - Portal - ok it's a cool game but shows that ground-breaking ideas can come from students [Digipen] (<a href="http://ps3.ign.com/articles/721/721542p1.html" rel="nofollow">http://ps3.ign.com/articles/721/721542p1.html</a>)
Haha, sorry I'm missing the web/client question, but <a href="http://www.memjet.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.memjet.com</a> is technically impressive to a ridiculous level.<p>Oh yeah, Johnny Chung Lee's future startup is also pretty technically impressive.
PeakStream (now part of google) - <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7763.html" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7763.html</a>
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.<p><a href="http://jingproject.com/" rel="nofollow">http://jingproject.com/</a>