I've recently have started using Balanced Payments. It is by far the best marketplace payments processor ever however it is never covered by anyone in the tech media.

There are lots of gems out there, I wish TC and others would stop the bullshit and just write about the best start ups not just the ones funded or founded by rock stars.

No wonder TechCrunch didn't cover these. Most of them only have a landing page up.

Travtar: way too beta to be featured

- no popup to choose a date, none of the date format variations I entered (US and ISO) were accepted, got an opaque 'your search parameters are not valid'

- search for 'San Sebastian', get 'did you mean San Sebastian, Spain' which is unclickable

- forgets form fields between http requests

Is it just me, or looking at that list does one get the feeling that the golden age of web 2.0 is behind us? I'll grant you that there were quite a few weak companies back in the day, but there was always something exciting that you'd run across in the pages of TechCrunch: And looking at that list not only don't I see the next Facebook, I'm not even sure that I see the next bit.ly. Am I just jaded or am I missing something?

Loved the Arden-Reed mock, although frankly I think providing style for pasty guys with excess mass is probably a more interesting angle that no one seems to go after. I means Kim Dotcom used to have serious money, you could liberate some of that with something targeting that space. Too many folks trying to capture the hipster chic it seems.

OpenEra.net looks like it could be a killer service, especially if they can integrate with more services (Google Drive, Skydrive, UbuntuOne, etc.)

Loving Openera.net!