Hopstop is a privately held company that was established in 2005. The company is headquartered in NYC and was founded by Chinedu Echeruo. Hopstop provides a wonderful service — public transit directions. The information is free and customizable which makes it  a valuable resource. Currently, Hopstop provides transit directions in — New York, Long Island, Metro North, New Jersey, Boston, Providence, Hartford, CT (new), Philadelphia, Delaware (new), Baltimore (new), Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco (updated), London and Paris. Hopstop also provides other services like City Guide, Mobile, My Hopstop and Maps. The service that I use most often is Mobile Hopstop for the iPhone.

NYC can be a very difficult city to navigate — whether that be by car, bus or train. As such, many new Yorker’s prefer taking the subway. New York City’s transit system moves 1.6 million riders, annually over 840 miles of tracks, 365 days a year — you can now see why Hopstop is such a great resource for a New Yorker.

The Hopstop application can be downloaded to your iPhone from the App Store.  You will immediately notice a simple and clean user interface.

The most convenient option of the application is how the “Starting Address” and the “Destination Address” are pulled from from your iPhone Contacts (otherwise you can enter it manually). “Options” and “Departure” selections are simple to use. “Options” allows you to make choices on the method of travel, i.e. bus only, walking only, etc. “Departure” simply sets the time you would like to leave — this is helpful when catching a train on the LIRR or Metro North.

The “Map” selection is rather useful. If you don’t know what trains are in the area you can pull up an address from your Contacts (or enter it manually). Once this information is entered you will see a map with what trains are in the area.

What I would like to see in future releases of Hopstop is an integration with other services like Yelp, Foursquare or Gowalla.

Pros: Very easy to use. The ability to pull the addresses from your iPhone Contacts is very useful.

Cons: It does not support landscape mode. It does not save your directions — although it does keep (not save) your last directions.

Google is one of the best-known brands in the world. When we think about Google we immediately think Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. Although these are three of the most popular Google properties in its portfolio – it’s a small subset.

Google has over 200 products and services in its collection. They range from AdWords to Google Trends, and as of January 5th 2010, to its latest product the Nexus One.

Google has been a technology company since it was founded back in 1998. Over the past decade Google has been able to leverage search into a multi-billion dollar company. This financial flexibility has allowed Google to venture off into other vertical markets.

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