Alice.com recently launched its service that allows consumers to purchase household items online. But this isn’t your everyday online retailer. Alice.com has many reasons why its different and could be a huge hit.

First of all, there are no shipping fees. In most cases, if you want to order something like napkins online, a lot of the money you pay would go towards shipping. That isn’t the case at Alice.com.

Next, Alice.com offers very competitive prices. They do it by cutting out the middle man and letting manufacturers market and sell directly to the consumers.

“By eliminating the traditional retail layer,” said Brian Wiegand, Alice.com’s CEO and co-founder, “we allowed the companies that produce these goods to connect directly with the people who use them. The result is a neutral platform for (consumer packaged goods) manufacturers to work together as an industry and channel their resources in exciting new ways for the consumer.”

Third of all, Alice.com has a feature that remembers orders and offers warnings when household items may be running low.

Finally, this service makes it much easier to use coupons. You don’t have to take coupons to the store with you. Instead, coupons can redeemed easily using their online interface.

If you don’t like going to the store to purchase your household items, Alice.com gives you an interesting alternative.

Alice.com (Image: Alice.com Screen Cap)

YuMe has been chosen by MSNBC.com to provide advertising for the website’s videos. YuMe, a startup located in the California town of Redwood City, will be in charge of the targeted advertising for the Today show and Nightly News — both of which are aired on NBC.

Claiming to be the world’s largest dedicated video advertising network, YuMe has the ability to give extreme reach to advertisers through their network. Publishers who have chosen YuMe include Glam Media, egoTV, blip.tv, JoeCartoon and RedOrbit.

Per month, YuMe handles about 560 million video streams and more than 63 million unique viewers.

As video on the internet continues to grow in popularity, YuMe is definitely a startup to keep an eye on.

YuMe (Image: YuMe.com Screen Cap)

Ooma.com, an online startup that offers free home phone service, has reportedly received more than $18 million in additional funding. The grand total that the company has now received in funding is believed to be in excess of $61 million.

According to the Ooma.com website, once you purchase their device, you can plug it into a high-speed internet connection and you will be able to call anywhere in the United States for free. The quality is supposedly landline-like and has features such as voicemail, call waiting and caller ID.

While there are many other comparable services on the market, the reviews for the Ooma.com free home phone service have been very positive.

Recently, Ooma.com won the Innovation Award from the Technology Marketing Corporation and presented by Internet Telephony.

Said Richard Buchanan, Ooma.com’s chief marketing officer: “At ooma, we are committed to providing excellence and innovation within the IP communications industry through technologies that forever change the home phone experience. We are thrilled that the ooma Hub and Scout received the 2009 INTERNET TELEPHONY TMC Labs Innovation Award – as it validates our dedication to pioneering advanced technology like superior call quality and reliability, unique telephony and networking features, all at a significant cost savings to consumers.”

It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on this startup and see if they can get a significant portion of the lucrative free home phone market.

Ooma (Image: Ooma.com)

The rise of Twitter has spawned a number of Twitter related startups. One such Twitter related startup is BreakingTweets.com.

Founded in the beginning of 2009, Breaking Tweets says that their philosophy is “hyperlocal gone global.” The setup of their website uses tweets from Twitter to help expand the view of global events. It also allows gives world news multiple voices to get all different sides of the stories.

Instead of bringing in tweets automatically, Breaking Tweets has a group of editors that select and arrange the Tweets in a way that a news story is formed. In addition to tweets, outbound links are present to other stories that help give additional information.

BreakingTweets.com got a lot of publicity recently with the happenings in Iran. If you tried to follow the Iran news on Twitter, it was a bit confusing and a lot of the flow was flooded with spam and shouting. Breaking Tweets, on the other hand, was able to find the useful tweets and put them together in a useful manner.

Overall, Breaking Tweets is a Twitter related startup to keep an eye on.

Breaking Tweets (BreakingTweets.com Screen Cap)

The newspaper industry is dying a slow death. In the last few years, a number of newspapers have been forced to shut down. With the proliferation of the internet, instant information and less advertising revenue, newspapers have found it difficult to monetize their content.

JournalismOnline.com is attempting to change that. According to the company, they hope to monetize newspaper content in a way that could generate millions of dollars. If they are successful, they may be the saviors of the newspaper industry.

The model that JournalismOnline.com is a password-protected members area that will supposedly make it easy for both newspapers and consumers to get what they want. While this startup is still in its early stages, it’ll be interesting to see if they are able to make any headway.

With the amount of free news that is available, it seems unlikely that people will suddenly be willing to pay for newspaper content. But if JournalismOnline.com can get enough newspapers on board, consumers may have no other choice.

Journalism Online (Image: JournalismOnline.com Screen Cap)

Jobvana.com, a social networking marketplace for small businesses, service providers and individuals, has received further funding for an unspecified amount. The funding comes courtesy of Hawkeye Investments LLC, Rally Capital LLC and angel investors in Seattle, Washington.

Jobvana.com (Image: Jobvana)

The startup said they will use this funding to help launch their national marketing efforts and to speed up the production of their website development.

While Hawkeye Investments LLC had previously provided funding, Rally Capital LLC is new to the mix.

Said Nathan Casey, the President of Jobvana.com: “It’s tremendous to add a partner like Rally Capital. Dennis Weibling and his team have a proven track record of growing successful companies.”

Jobvanna.com boasts more than 30,000 businesses that are using their service. According to the company, their traffic increase has been rapid in recent months.

Said Weibling of Rally Capital LLC: “We were excited about Jobvana’s growth in this type of environment, and their ability to mold their product to the customers’ needs. Every time we looked at Jobvana we saw great leaps forward, in terms of product development, and a user base that was excited to grow and evolve with the site.”

Today, Xiant.com was launched and introduced its first product to the world. Xiant.com was founded by Paul Allen. Yes, the same Paul Allen who co-founded Microsoft.

Xiant.com’s first product is called Xiant Filer. Available for free on a 60-day trial, Xiant Filer allows you to quickly and easily organize your email inboxes. Simply integrate it with your Microsoft Outlook and it begins doing its work immediately.

Allen, who left Microsoft more than 25 years ago, currently is the chairman of Vulcan Inc. — a project management and investment company.

Said Chris Purcell, the VP of Vulcan Inc.: “It’s a return of sorts to Paul’s roots. Xiant Filer started as a personal project to help Paul keep up with heavy e‐mail traffic. It worked so well we all started using it, which led us to take it to market.”

The Xiant Filer won’t be the only product released by Xiant.com. The company is said to be working on a number of tools that will help computer users become more organized, connected and ultimately more productive.

It’ll be extremely interesting to see how a startup led by billionaire Paul Allen will do in this current market.

Xiant Filer (Image: Xiant.com Screen Cap)

Recently, BusinessWeek and YouNoodle collaborated to list the top 50 online startup companies in the tech world. The resulting list is comprised of many promising startups that could eventually become household names like Google, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

While some somewhat well-known startups are including in the list — such as Project Better Place and Cloudera — many of the online startups are unknown to the vast majority of internet users.

Their list, which they call “Fifty Tech Startups You Should Know”, they list the company name, the headquarters location, the amount of funding the startup received, the year the startup was funded and the name of the company’s CEO. Additionally, the chart lists the YouNoodle score, which mearures the progress of the startup.

While most of these online startup companies are located in the United States, other companies represented in the list include England, Spain, India, Israel, Brazil and Argentina.

YouNoodle (Image: YouNoodle.com Screen Cap)

23andMe.com received more than $2.5 million in a recent investment from Google. Considering that 23andMe.com is co-founded by Anne Wojcicki and she’s married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin — this can’t really be shocking news.

A startup based in Mountain View (just like Google), 23andMe.com is a very interesting biotechnology company. It’s slogan is “genetics just got personal”.

For $399, you will receive personalized genetic information. Once you order the $399 kit, you’ll soon receive it in the mail. Then you spit into the provided tube and send it back. At the lab, they’ll analyze your idea. Four-to-six weeks later, you go back to 23andMe.com and you can explore your genome.

By exploring your genome, you can view traits that may affect your health. You can also get information on your ancestry. There are also a lot of Web 2.0 features that allow you to interact with 23andMe.com and the rest of the community.

Overall, this is an online startup to definitely keep an eye on. With Google behind it, a very interesting (yet simple) business model and the latest social technology, 23andMe.com could quickly become a popular service.

23andMe.com (Image: 23andMe.com Screen Cap)

With Twitter become more and more popular, there are an increasing number of online startup companies that are trying to find a symbiotic niche. One of the newest startups that is gaining notoriety is CrowdEye.com — which is being billed as a new and improved Twitter search engine.

A main reason why CrowdEye.com is getting so much press is due to the team behind the startup. Ken Moss, who is a co-founder, worked for Microsoft for 13 years on startup projects such as MSN, MSN Money, MyMSN and even Bing. The other co-founder is Becca Moss, who also worked at Microsoft — most recently on software that could recognize handwriting.

So what exactly is CrowdEye.com? Here is what the company says in its “About CrowdEye” section:

CrowdEye is a new generation of search engine which looks at the worldwide web in a new way. By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created innovative technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions.

We’ll try to contact CrowdEye.com to learn more about this startup. Stay tuned!

Is Twitter the future of search? (Image: Flickr)