If Web 2.0 businesses love one thing, other than selling their company for millions of dollars, it's making their business name a verb. I can already point to many examples that I use on a daily basis: Facebook me, Google it, Urbanspoon that restaurant. It's usually reserved for web behemoths, but some startups are trying to join those ranks by entering their name into the new vernacular. Local startup zipzoom is one of those companies - they're encouraging consumers to "zipzoom" items and services.

For anyone who's tried to get quotes on home repairs, services like cleaners or gardeners, or even new products it can be difficult to know what price they should be paying, and whether a business is reputable. Zipzoom aims to connect ready-to-buy consumers with ready-to-sell businesses - consumers can anonymously request quotes for a product or service for free.

I, like many people out there, have a long list of e-mail pet peeves. Unnecessary use of the reply all button, e-mail newsletters that make it impossible to unsubscribe, and spam to name just a few. But near the top of the list is the dreaded e-mail attachment. I've often realized I need to find a really old copy of my resume, or something equally as random. Since I no longer own the IBM Thinkpad that I used to write my first resume, finding an old copy in my e-mail attachments is my best bet (nope, I didn't discover backing up your hard drive until recently). So I search "resume" in my e-mail inbox and find countless search results, leaving me to filter by those little paper clip icons and open each attachment to see if it's what I'm looking for.

But a new local company is recognizing the frustration involved with searching for attachments in your e-mail, and providing a solution that presents an attachments-centric view of your inbox. Attachments.me, currently in private beta, promises to help people hunt down attachments quickly by indexing attachments and making them searchable.

Remember the movie Panic Room? The one where a badass Forest Whitaker and Jared Leto try to rob Jodie Foster and a young (and less brooding) Kristen Stewart, who take refuge in a veritable steel cage designed for emergencies? I always loved the idea of a panic room, but it's not very practical in a downtown condo (unless you consider a bathtub a super-secret hiding place). And I don't love the idea of an alarm system, since they're expensive and rely on the timely response of the alarm company in order to be effective. It was only a matter of time before a tech company capitalized on the mobile trend to improve personal safety, so instead of panicking during a crisis you could simply say "there's an app for that."

It was almost 10 months ago that I first wrote about group buying sites and their growing prominence in Toronto. Back then there were less than 10 daily deal sites, and Groupon hadn't even launched in Canada yet. As a consumer I was excited about the potential of group buying sites, and quickly subscribed to every daily deal site in town. It seemed like a no-brainer for everyone involved - consumers got a great deal, small businesses got new clientele and the daily deal sites made a tidy profit by taking a commission of each deal.

The top 10 Toronto athletes on Twitter are worthy of a follow if only because such an act might help fans to forget the recent crushing Team Canada defeat by the Russians in the World Junior Hockey Championship. In the wake of such disappointment, it's hard not to look local instead of national for sports encouragement.

Yet, the world of social media can be a touchy subject for sports teams. The teams themselves are certainly active on sites like Facebook, and have big followings on Twitter. The Leafs, @mapleleafs, have over 30,000 followers and do a great job of constantly updating, and actually talking to fans. The Raptors, @Raptors, have over 23,000 and share photos and live-Tweet games. The Jays, though in the off-season, are still active on their @BlueJays Twitter account to keep their over 15,000 followers happy. And the Toronto FC (@TorontoFC, over 6,000 followers) and the Argos (@TorontoArgos, almost 4,000 followers) have small but loyal followings.

It's that time of year again - when Tweets are fewer and far between, Facebook photos are all from holiday parties, and year in review articles are aplenty. When I look back at last year's list of the Top 10 Toronto-based web startups it's interesting to see how some of the companies have progressed. Some, like backtype, are still plugging away in Silicon Valley. Some, like Rypple, had a big year - they raised over $7 million in new funding. And some were purchased, including Bumptop, which was acquired by Google in May (not too shabby). This year's list is similar but with a twist - we're still featuring the top 10 web startups, but we're also adding a few categories for companies who made a splash but don't necessarily fit the web startup mold. Read on for my list of the Top 10 Toronto-based Web Startups of 2010.