My Favorite 5 Apps from 2014

Christmas is a great chance to relax, spend some time with friends & family. It’s also a great opportunity to reflect on the year passed and collect your thoughts for how you want to impact the world in the coming year. With that in mind, here are my favorite 5 apps from 2014. (Tap the icons to go get the app!)

5. Product Hunt

We’re all junkies for new stuff, but finding it used to be so hard. You’d read TechCrunch, Endaget, watch Techmeme and you’d find a lot of cool stuff, but you’d accidentally absorb a lot of industry nonsense too. Product Hunt is a focussed place to just find cool new things, curated & voted on by the community. I’ve discovered at least a half dozen of my top-2o products through Product Hunt & am excited to see what they can do with the $6M from a16z.

4. Mailbox

It’s rare that an App competently replaces the built-in iOS offering for core functionality like messaging, email, calendar etc.. Mailbox has done just that, and it has legitimately changed my life. I now live at (or near) inbox-0 and it’s made me a more effective communicator & worker. It’s awfully nice of Apple & Google to ‘borrow’ a lot of their innovations in the new OS-provided clients but for me, Mailbox is still ahead of the curve. Now if they could just integrate better with Sunrise etc..

3. CUPS

CUPS is probably the least well-known on this list. I use CUPS multiple times every day, it’s how I pay for coffee & chose which spots to go to. With coffee being as a big a part of my life as it is, controlling my coffee gets you into my top-5! CUPS allows you to pre-buy coffee at participating coffeeshops, checkout with your phone (and if you’re a caffeine fiend, their unlimited coffee offering is sure to work out well.) CUPS is a great example of card-on-file being a powerful tool to change the way we purchase & I think we’ll see this sort of disruption in more industries in 2015.

2. Slack

Slack is amazing. It has changed the way that our team communicates, drives sidewards-visibility and generally operates. On top of that, Slack is now expanding (entirely organically) into interest & expertise groups to provide self-operating support & learning communities. Slack isn’t a chat app, it’s a communication revolution.

1. Uber

Despite the fact that Uber gave me one of the best days of 2014 when they became Button’s first big partner, Uber’s position at #1 is sealed by their service alone. Uber is the single largest-ticket expense for me in 2014 & that’s because it gets me everywhere I go. We truly live with a level of luxury that would only have been able to be provided just a few years ago by having a private driver on retainer

These are my top 5 apps of 2014, what are yours? Tweet with #2014top5 to share!