What’s the most successful new company out there of the past two years?

I’d argue it’s iLike, a music sharing and discovery service that came out on Facebook first, but has moved other places.

When I quit Microsoft they had no users.

Today they have 30 million.

How did THAT happen? It wasn’t because they got bloggers all hot and bothered about them. They didn’t win any contests. I don’t even think they showed up at Demo or TechCrunch or other industry conferences. If they did, they didn’t cause any headlines on blogs about how they were going to be THE next hot thing.

What did they do? They were first out the gate on Facebook’s application platform. That was a real paradigm shift. It was the first application platform I remember where I could see the apps YOU had loaded.

Second datapoint?

Yesterday I ran into the founders of Posimotion. Their company didn’t exist a few months ago, but today they are seeing 50,000 downloads a day of their iPhone apps. I don’t remember THEM being talked about anywhere, or on any famous tech blogs, but they are kicking but and well on their way to being a dominant software firm. How did they do it?

They were first out of the gate on the iPhone.

By the way, talking about the iPhone, Posimotion has some awesome iPhone apps.

Almost all of their apps are NOT free ones, so you can guess how much revenue per day is flowing into this very small company (which isn’t venture funded, by the way). Here’s my favorites from their 12 apps:

A level is a leveler which uses the iPhone to level picture frames and stuff like that. It’s a very cool use of the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Ever forget where you parked your car? If you used G Park you’d never forget again (it uses the GPS to memorize where you parked).

Golf Flyover is for golfers who want to know where to play golf and it uses the GPS in the iPhone to tell them information about the courses they are playing.

Pool is a fun game and well done using iPhone’s touch surface.

Well, since I’m irrelevant, I think I’ll take the rest of the day off! Heheheh.