1. Good manufacturers are Asus , Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock and some few others. i personally prefer to use Asus and Gigabyte motherboards in any computer i build as you can see in the one i have.
2. Ivy bridge is the processor the Intel will be releasing for LGA1155. It's going to be 22nm (i think) and it can just be dropped straight into existing motherboards with a simple bios update. Thus theres still life left in the socket unlike LGA1156 which has been killed off and is basically dead with no upgrade paths.