Startups June 17, 2009, 3:12PM EST

Fifty Best Tech Startups

BusinessWeek and YouNoodle's list of 50 tech startups includes young companies like Cloudera, Project Better Place, and Scribd that are poised for growth

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When Christophe Bisciglia worked at Google, the 28-year-old computer scientist quickly became the company's top evangelist for cloud computing, teaching academia and industry how to churn through mountains of data to discover new insights by shifting heavy digital workloads from islands of PCs and data centers to the globally interconnected Web. As a founder of startup Cloudera, he's aiming to capitalize on those lessons.

Bisciglia's eight-month-old Cloudera teaches companies how to "compete at Google scale." Cloudera sells technical support for open-source software called Hadoop, which analyzes huge amounts of data much faster than traditional computers by distributing the work across hundreds of machines. For companies in fields that routinely require heavy number-crunching like biotech, online advertising, and finance, Cloudera's service could help find opportunities that might not be apparent using traditional computing methods.

With a management team made up of Google (GOOG) and Facebook veterans and $11 million from venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and high-profile angel investors including VMware (VMW) co-founder Diane Greene and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, Cloudera is emerging as a player in the nascent field of cloud computing and a resource that companies dealing with quantities of data should be aware of.

fledglings attracting buzz

There are plenty of young companies just like Cloudera. That's why BusinessWeek and market researcher YouNoodle have teamed up to identify 50 promising startup companies flying below the radar in 2009. You won't find Twitter or Facebook on this list. Instead, you'll discover new tech companies from the U.S., China, India, Israel, and Russia that are attracting some early buzz. Most of these fledgling companies started in 2005 and later, and all are poised to grow beyond their regional or niche-market origins.

The companies on our list may be well-known among the digerati, but they haven't achieved wider fame that would make them household names. Others on this list may never achieve that level of celebrity status but are worth watching because their top-tier investors and experienced management teams could make them significant players in their industries.