Latvia is a small country in Northern Europe, next to Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus. It has a population of 2.3 million, around 38% of whom have Internet access. The ethnicity of the population (Latvians 60%; Russian 30%) is reflected in the small internet market, because most local web sites and apps have 2 versions - Latvian and Russian. Following is an overview of the most popular web apps in Latvia. The information in this post was supplied by Maksim.

Social networks

Draugiem.lv is the most popular web site in Latvia. Originally it was built on the Friendster model, but now it includes services like music and video - so it is more like MySpace these days.

One.lv is the fifth most popular site in Latvia - it"s mostly popular in the russian community. draugiem.lv (above) is mostly made up of latvians.

Klase.lv, Orb.lv and http://amigos.inbox.lv/ are smaller social networks. But generally because the market is so small, most users frequent the popular web SNS like draugiem.lv and One.lv.

Digg clone

Digg.lv is a Latvian digg-like site, based on the open source Pligg CMS. It"s popular amongst bloggers and features mostly tech-related news. Note that they even managed to secure the digg domain in Latvia (which I would guess violates digg.com"s copyright??). 

Youtube clones

Latvija.tv and Mansvideo.lv are the two main ones. As you can see below, Latvija.tv is almost identical to YouTube.

Search

Google is the second most popular site in Latvia and in the search niche it is dominant. Domestic searches like siets.lv and smart.delfi.lv are not very well used.

Photos

Fotki.lv and poga.lv

Del.icio.us clone

saites.lv

Online Classifieds

ss.lv (similar to craigslist)

Portals

Delfi.lv was the first old style portal in Latvia. It is primarily a news site and has a Russian version at rus.delfi.lv.

Apollo.lv and tvnet.lv are also popular portals in Latvia.

Inbox.lv is the most popular web mail service in Latvia and practically alone in this niche, for this language. Perhaps this is why Google is promoting Gmail on its Latvia search page (see screenshot above). Some of the portals also have mail services, but they are not so popular.

Blogs

Klab.lv, six.lv and blogiem.lv are the top blogging platforms.

Bloggers

The highest ranking Latvian bloggers are listed on this page: six.lv/rank. Maksim"s blog is ranked number 1, with an overall Technorati rank of 9,549.

Summary

It"s fascinating how every country we cover has Digg, YouTube, etc clones. Digg is especially clone-able it seems (incidentally a New Zealand digg clone has just been released).

Many thanks to Maksim for all the great info and screenshots. This post is part of Read/WriteWeb"s continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia.

Saul Klein, the former Skype global marketing VP who joined VC firm Index Ventures this week, has a great post on his blog about the European startup scene. I spoke to Saul earlier this week and I will write up a post about that conversation next week. But for now, check out Saul"s post - it really nails why Web innovation is happening more and more outside Silicon Valley.

Remember that our R/WW poll this week is on this very topic: does location matter in Web innovation? So far nearly half of you (47%) think that location does matter, but that several places in the world have just as high a chance of innovation as Silicon Valley (depending on product type and other factors). A third of you (34%) think that location doesn"t matter and that innovation can happen equally everywhere (NZ, Timbuktoo, etc). Only 1/5 of you (20%) think that Silicon Valley has the highest chance of innovation.

As Saul pointed out in his post, there is much more to running a startup than simply having an idea and building a prototype. Silicon Valley definitely has a lot of advantages in terms of networking and the density of smart Web people in the area. But Europe is catching up:

"We"ve always had great talent (especially in academia & research institutions), but now we also successful entrepreneurial role models, sophisticated early-stage financing and the ability to start and test businesses at low-cost as well."

Also Saul notes that the Internet is growing rapidly outside the US:

"The Internet outside the US is bigger than the inside and that trend is only accelerating. Google, eBay and Yahoo all know this and the fact that YouTube is already over 65% international in less than two years from launch shows that the US in no longer an island.

Against many important measures -- broadband penetration, % online advertising spend and mobile phone adoption -- the US is no longer the world"s most important market. This is not for one minute to say that the US shouldn"t part a major part of every ambitious startup"s plans but if for example you want to be in the market with the largest share of online advertising as part of the marketing mix, you want to be in the UK."

Web innovation truly is global these days. What"s more, reporting on Web innovation is global (he says, tapping away at his keyboard on a Saturday morning in Wellington, New Zealand). While a lot of my focus is on Silicon Valley, because it"s still the nexus of Web business, I"ve also been following the Asia scene with great interest - because it"s closer to where I am physically. I"m also involved as an advisor to a Europe startup (Nooked) and I keep in regular contact with many European web 2.0 folks.

Ain"t globalization grand!

Pic credit: Paul Watson and business2blog

Written by Gang Lu and edited by Richard MacManus. China"s QQ.com is the world"s 9th largest web property and in this post Gang Lu talks with Richard Chang, the Founder and Director of QQ Labs, to find out more about their Web 2.0 plans.

Founded by Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China, in November 1998, Tencent is now recognized as the leading provider of Internet, mobile & telecommunications value-added services in China. QQ, Tencent"s instant messaging service platform, officially launched in Feb 1999 and announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has 221.4 million active users. What"s more, the total registered user accounts has climbed to 572.3 million!

Tencent Innovation Center, also called QQ Labs, was founded in May 2005 and acts as QQ"s Web2.0 service incubator. So far it has launched Tencent"s  web2.0 service QQVideo and a social bookmarking service called QQ Bookmark is in public beta testing. So this Chinese IM giant is obviously showing a lot of interest in the web2.0 market. 

We recently interviewed Richard Chang, the Founder and Director of QQ Labs. In this talk with Richard, we cover Tencent"s business model, its web2.0 services and the overall mission of QQ Labs.

Tencent"s Industry Model

Richard told us that Tencent"s industry model is unique in the global market and that all of their current businesses are built on top of the QQ IM service and its user base. QQ is famous for its IM client, but after 7 years QQ has built up several more excellent services - QQ.com, QQ Game, QQ Zone, QQ Show, Paipai.com, and more. All of these services have been seamlessly integrated with QQ IM and can be accessed with a user"s QQ account. QQ even introduced a virtual currency named Q-coin, which can be used by QQ users to buy their IM avatar"s virtual clothes, hairstyles, furniture - and even virtual pet food for their virtual pets! 

QQ.com is in the global top 10 websites in the world, as ranked by Alexa.com. As of now, it is number 9 in the world - just behind Orkut and Windows Live. It has also made some sharp business moves. For example Tencent partnered with China Mobile, the state-owned mobile operator, to offer mobile messaging services such as QQ ringtone downloads, QQ MMS, and similar services. And earlier this year, Tencent and TCL announced a joint iTQQ service - an IPTV solution, bundled with QQ"s other services such as IM and games.

QQ"s Web2.0 Services

According to Richard Chang, Tencent"s goal is to become the most respected Internet company in China. He told us that while you can already see lots of web2.0 characteristics in their current services, he hopes that QQ Labs can offer even more web2.0 services and interesting web-based applications to QQ"s user base. 

QQVideo, a video-sharing site, was the first web2.0 service developed by QQ Labs. There are over 200 YouTube-like services already in China, but Richard Chang thinks that QQVideo can be special. He said that QQVideo has a user base from the very beginning - and it is those users that "help us decide what should and what should not [be] in the video-sharing site". Some neat features in the service are: Online Recording, V-Pub, Views Details (where the user can track on which sites a video is embedded and played).

The QQ Bookmark service is a very nice del.icio.us-like service. But the most important thing about it is that QQ can integrate this service with its hugely popular IM service and so encourage its millions of users to share their favorite websites and stories.

The Mission of QQ Labs

It is an interesting phenomenon in the Chinese Internet that QQ IM might be the first Internet experience for many Chinese netizens, especially for young people who get on the Internet because all their friends are on QQ . If you are a professional or experienced on the Internet, it should be easy to understand the new ideas of retrieving, publishing and sharing content via technology like RSS feeds, blogging, widgets and web-based applications such as online bookmarking. However most Chinese netizens don"t know what RSS is, or how to use feeds, or the benefits of using online bookmarks.

"QQ has a massive user base, and it can be [a] very effective channel to distribute the concept of web2.0 to the Chinese netizen", Richard Chang told us. "Our mission", he said, "is not only to create new services, but also to help the Chinese Internet [become] more mature." 

Chinese Internet ramping up in 2007

The Web space in China is heating up. Myspace.cn will be launched in China this year and will join the existing social network competition there. Also Baidu, the leading search engine in China, has announced it will move into the Japanese market in 2007. So there will be lots of news - inwards and outwards - from the Chinese Internet this year; and as part of that it will be interesting to see how QQ expands its kingdom abroad.

Recently I was contacted by the publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to translate some of Read/WriteWeb"s best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can read and comment on them. One of the founders, Lei Zhang, told me their goal is "to discover valuable contents in foreign languages and to provide high quality Chinese translations for them." I was happy to give my permission, because I really want R/WW posts to be read all over the world - I especially like that Chinese people can comment on R/WW posts in their own language, thanks to YeeYan. Note that YeeYan always links back to the original article and they don"t monetize the translation in any way.

I know that Read/WriteWeb is quite popular in China, Korea and Japan (where CNET Japan syndicates R/WW). So YeeYan is another way for english blogs to really become "worldwide" - and I hope it goes both ways too. I"ve long wanted a way to keep up with my friends in Asia, e.g. Danny Kim"s Korean Web 2.0 blog, but so far there"s been few solutions. Over time, I hope more translation communities spring up to solve this language problem on the Web.

YeeYan is also localized to english, so that bloggers can see which of their posts have been translated. For example, here is the page for Read/WriteWeb posts.

Continuing Read/WriteWeb"s series on international web apps, I bring you a sample of all that the emerald isle has to offer. 20 years ago Ireland was a sleepy backwater with high unemployment and mass emigration. Jobs were rare and the only new startups were farms. But all of that changed when the "celtic tiger" came along. No one can agree what kick started it - low corporate tax rates or our involvement in the EU. I reckon it was Ray Houghton"s goal against England in the 1988 European championships. Either way, things have changed forever.

Today Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell and IBM all have various european head quarters in Ireland. With a population of over 5 million north and south, we are considered in some circles to be the largest exporter of software in the world. We have no shortage of bigco investment and job creation in Ireland, but what"s happening in the indigenous startup scene?

The old timers

Pigsback.com has been running since 2000 and is endeared to the hearts of a large number of internet users in Ireland (and the UK as of last year). In their own words, it"s an "online club of consumers and brands". You sign up for an account and then receive targeted offers, competitions and surveys from the Pigsback network of advertisers. As you interact with these events you build up "piggy points", which you can exchange for goods and services.

Pigsback works, simply because the "piggy points" you collect are really worth something. In little time you can build up enough for a free CD or a discounted holiday, for example. Their advertiser network includes Ford, EBay, Nestle, and Betfair to name but a few.

StatCounter provides web tracking services for millions of websites around the world. Similar to Google Analytics, but around a lot longer, you can sign up for free and start tracking immediately. They also have paid accounts which include more reports and options.

StatCounter is one of the few websites around with a pagerank of 10. They have more back links to their site than anyone else on the web, apart from Google.com!

HostelWorld is one of the most successful Irish startup stories. It was started back in 1999 with the goal of streamlining the booking of hostels anywhere in the world. They take bookings from travelers and backpackers for over 50,000 hostels worldwide. They now have over 70 staff, and by some reports take in excess of $1 million worth of booking on any given day. This contributes to their self proclaimed valuation of anywhere up to $1 billion for their parent company.

The new guys

AllFreeCalls is more of a mobile/telco play, but worthy of inclusion all the same. On their website they provide you with details of how to make international calls from the US, Ireland and the UK for the price of a local call. They are able to do this by exploiting various loopholes in legislation governing the way money is divided between bigger telcos.

I don"t think they are up and running in the US at the moment, due to a confrontation with AT&T - which is claiming that Allfreecalls cost them almost $2 million in subsidies for one month alone!

Nooked have been in the RSS marketing business now for a while, but they recently announced a forthcoming product codenamed "feedshop" - which is all about "Really Simple Shopping (RSS)". They are also about to launch a new widget marketing service, which will allow e-tailers to advertise their products through nooked"s network of blogs, widget partners and social networks. It"s all part of their strategy for a feedcommerce platform. 

Nooked was listed just this week as a RedHerring 100 Europe winner and a company to watch in 2007. Expect to hear a lot more from them very soon. 

[disclosure: R/WW editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to nooked]

Pixenate is a handy free online photo editor. No accounts necessary, just upload your photo and start editing. It"s ad supported, AJAX based and runs smoothly. But the free version of pixenate you see on their website is just a demonstration of a customizable and rebrandable white label version of the application, that you can buy for use on your own website. They even have a widgetized version that you can add to your site or blog and let your users edit photos there and then.

They claim over 100,000 visitors/month to the site and will also be providing a YahooUI-based theme in a forthcoming release.

PutPlace.com is still in private beta at the moment, but it looks like it could be a winner. They have raised a six figure sum from angel investors, to build an online application to help manage your digital media. We all have many different files scattered across our mobiles, pcs, laptops and various other gadgets. Putplace gives all of your files a "digital fingerprint" and helps you to manage and locate them. You can also publish your files to flickr, youtube and a host of other media sharing services.

You can also share your files between sites, so for instance with one click you can pull all your photos off flickr and publish them to your photobucket account. And of course all of these files can be backed up on PutPlace secure server, in case you lose them. Their public beta is coming in April, so keep an eye out.

Loudervoice.com.... I will let their CEO explain this one to you: "LouderVoice harnesses the distributed expertise in blogs to provide quality rated reviews for us all instead of spam, product placements and search results noise. Our site enables bloggers to publish structured reviews to their blogs and in turn aggregates structured multi-lingual review content from those blogs. Users can search for reviews, rate them, relate them and collect them in ways that are useful to themselves and others."

They are currently in private beta and hope to launch in April. I have seen this app and it"s pretty cool. If they get traction, it could be big.

Some Other Interesting Apps

PollDaddy.com, which I developed, has been around for 6 months now. You can create a free poll and place it as a widget on your website, blog, mySpace etc. Disclosure: it"s also where I work, so please feel free to drop by if you need a poll for your site. Also note that Read/WriteWeb uses our service.

zinadoo.com lets you create a free mobile site with their online flash based editor. You can create pages, add text and pictures. This will be a very handy tool for people who just want to get some kind of presence online for mobile visitors to their site. Zinadoo creators Nubiq are also about to launch a mobile site search, discovery and personalisation engine called Mobiseer, where users can search, tag and bookmark their favourite mobile sites.

MySay.com is still in private beta but should be coming online any day now. It"s a sort of social networking app, but through the phone. Once your friends are in, you can all keep in touch, hearing each other"s updates and stories, jokes or whatever - on the phone, on the web, or through the mySay desktop widget. It"s social communication using your phone, with no need to download any software - just use your voice! Should be interesting to see how they get on.

Conclusion

Ireland is a happening place. There have been a lot of big success stories, such as a few of the "old timers" we have mentioned here. But there is also a healthy environment of innovation amongst younger startups. I would like to thank Fergus Burns from Nooked for helping me put this article together. Fergus is also the administrator of web2ireland.org, a blog where you can track the progress of many of the companies mentioned in this article.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb"s continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Latvia.

Even though SecondLife has attracted a lot of attention in China and the first millionaire from SecondLife is Chinese, this western virtual world has still not been officially launched in China. But the rapidly growing Chinese Internet apparently could not wait for it. Last week a Chinese virtual world was launched, named HiPiHi. It"s a SecondLife-like 3D virtual world and it started a limited beta test last week. We had a very nice talk with HiPiHi’s founders, Hui Xu (CEO) and Xinhua Liu, to find out more about this new Chinese virtual world.

HiPiHi was founded in Beijing in October 2005 as a privately held company funded by GCIG. HiPiHi is the only Chinese virtual world and probably only the second company worldwide after SecondLife to offer a truly collaborative, immersive and open-ended experience for users to create, inhabit and govern a new world of their own design.

HiPiHi Team

HiPiHi is very young, only 1.5 years old, and its private beta test just started a few days ago. People might feel it is just a business strategy to copy SecondLife, just as there are over 200 hundred video-sharing sites declaring themselves as Chinese YouTubes. However, unlike most of these startups, the HiPiHi management team is very experienced in this market.

Hui Xu, the founder and CEO of HiPiHi, was the General Manager of MyWeb China and was nominated as one of the “Top Ten China Internet Heros” in 1999. Hui was also the chairman and CEO of JingQi XiShu Co. Ltd, which became one of the most successful e-commerce site in 2000. Xuewei Rao, the Director & COO of HiPiHi, founded Iscreate Communications Co. Ltd in 2000 and was also the vice-president of the Guangdong High-Tech Chamber of Commerce. Its vice-president, Tracy Ji, was the PR director of ZhaoPin.com - the leading provider of online career and recruitment resource in China.  Another founder, Xinhua Liu, was the vice-president of 3721.com (a leading software development company acquired by Yahoo in 2003) and also the co-founder of “EMBA Club International”.  

The HiPiHi World

The Chinese Internet is still not mature and web 2.0 is just heating up here. We asked Hui and Xinhua why they started an online virtual reality. Hui Xu said that while most users will treat HiPiHi as another 3D game, he said they are aiming to build a complete 3D visual background which reflects different environments in the real world. It also provides users with a powerful creation engine and tools, which helps users to create their own world step by step. Hui explained that before the full public beta, they are going to invite around 100,000 users to be the original residents of the HiPiHi world. 

There are four phases involved in the current private test. Note that these four phases reflect Chinese mythical events, but for better understanding here we are translating it into the corresponding Biblical story of God’s creation of the world in 7 days. They are:

Phase 1 - In the beginning God created heaven and the earth = the tools for rendering the terrain, hills, fields, terraces, water, flora etc are introduced.

Phase 2 - God created Adam and Eve and the human race using the image of Himself = the tools for creating more detailed avatars are introduced.

Phase 3 - God created all earthly things = the tools for creating all sorts of objects are introduced.

Phase 4 - The Mirage = the economic system and social system are established.

Hui commented:

“Every phase is given a distinctive theme, in the hope of guiding users in the creation of the virtual world. This arrangement mirrors the real evolution of human society, from barbarians to civilized society. We want to let the users experience the course of civilization, instead of forcing most of our arbitrary creations down their throat from the get-go, which will surely confuse them.”

HiPiHi and SecondLife

HiPiHi has obtained lots of media coverage, most of which inevitably link it to Linden Labs" SecondLife - a few of them even call it a clone of SecondLife. We asked Hui for his thoughts on that:

“When we started discussing the HiPiHi back to 2005, actually we had no idea about SecondLife. SecondLife came to international attention in late 2006, then we studied it and found out we are both working towards a similar direction. It is absolutely a misunderstanding of virtual worlds if people think HiPiHi is a copycat of SecondLife. The virtual world is not just a 3D environment, but a complicated social system including the property policy, financial policy etc. HiPiHi is born in China, [so] we really hope it can embrace our own culture”.

Xinhua also added that “according to the CNNIC’s report (Jan,2007), over 70% of Chinese netizens are under 30 years old, but the average age of SecondLife is reported to be 32. Chinese users have different interests and views on the Internet market. HiPiHi and SecondLife can learn from each other, but neither of us can simply copy the culture from the other”.

The Future of HiPiHi

Discussing the future of HiPiHi, Hui Xu told us: 

“We have invited many sociologists and economists to sit down with our technicians to discuss the future of HiPiHi. We are working hard to improve our 3D environment, and we do hope we can create a perfect society - a shared and fair world which will finally embrace the various cultures of the real world”.

On the economics, while SecondLife created its Linden Dollar, it may"ve been the Chinese Internet giant Tencent QQ which first introduced a virtual currency - Q Coin. It has been reported that the China government may restrict the usage of virtual currencies, because of concerns about undermining the nation’s financial system. So we asked Hui Xu if HiPiHi is going to introduce its own currency - and if so how it would work. Hui said that “[certainly] we have considered this, but it is still too early to finalize this topic. We have to take all sorts of factors - inside and outside of HiPiHi - into account and we will introduce it when the virtual world is ready for trading”.

Conclusion

HiPiHi is very young, but it is very special [to Chinese users] and also unique in the massive Chinese Internet market. I had a chance to pay a visit to the HiPiHi world, and it was actually a very nice experience.

Ozon.ru, which claims to be Russia"s largest e-commerce store for books, audio and video, software, multimedia games, electronic and digital goods, received $18 million in funding this week from Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures (the venture arm of one of Germany"s largest publishing companies) and Cisco. The money will help develop Ozon.ru"s logistics system, expand its product lines and establish new distribution centers across Russia. The investment round was initiated and managed by Baring Vostok Capital Partners, Russia"s leading private equity investor and controlling shareholder of Ozon.

According to The Public Opinion Foundation, Russia has the third largest population of Internet users in Europe - with Internet and broadband penetration rates rising rapidly and retail spend per capita expected to double over the next four years. Ozon.ru today offers more than 260,000 items for sale, divided into 12 product categories from more than 400 suppliers. More than 3,000 orders per day are delivered to its Russian-speaking internet audience worldwide from Ozon.ru"s distribution center in Tver (160km North of Moscow).

The similarities with Amazon.com are striking. Ozon.ru is headquartered in Moscow, but was founded in St Petersburg in 1998 originally as an online book community and shop. Like Amazon.com, Ozon.ru expanded to become an all-round e-commerce site - the leading online retailer in Russia. It currently gets over 120,000 unique visitors per day. I wouldn"t go as far as to say it"s a clone of Amazon.com (like all the digg clones around the world), but Ozon.ru has certainly taken a very similar path to Amazon.

Index Ventures and Cisco Eye Russian Market

Index Ventures is generally regarded as Europe"s leading VC, definitely in web 2.0 investments, and it sees the Eastern Europe region as one of significant growth. It hopes that the Ozon.ru investment "will be the first of many we"ll make in Russia." Index Ventures told me that EU online commerce activities topped $47.9 billion in 2006, growing approximately 25% over 2005 estimates. Index thinks that Ozon "is well positioned to undergo tremendous growth in the next couple of years."

This is also an interesting move from Cisco, which according to Red Herring is beginning to invest in new technologies worldwide to "feed demand for Cisco’s routers and help it stay abreast of new technology in developing markets around the world." In that piece, an analyst says that Russia has "substantial opportunity [for technology], but also a great deal of risk". More on that here (via Alarm:Clock).

Given the passionate response Read/WriteWeb received when we posted our Top Web Apps in Russia article, I wonder if any of our Russian readers can let us know their experiences using Ozon.ru. How does it compare to Amazon.com?

Interesting reaction over at The Guardian blog to our post yesterday about the StartUp2.0 competition for European web 2.0 sites. Guardian blogger Jack Schofield said that he only recognized 1 out of the 15 finalists. Jack wrote:

"What I find amusing is that I"ve only actually used -- or even heard of -- one of them: SlideBurner.

Can you do better?"

Hmmm, well I"m never one to pass up a challenge (particularly if it involves testing my web 2.0 knowledge!). So how many of the 15 Euro startup finalists did I recognize? Er.... [cough] 2. I guess I can console myself by saying that I"m not European! For the record the two I knew were Properazzi (property search engine) and Menéame (Spanish digg clone). Both of which we"ve posted about before on Read/WriteWeb.

One of the commenters on The Guardian post. renaissancechambara, pretty much summed up why even web 2.0 experts hadn"t heard of most of these sites:

"...the combination of open source software and the free flow of information online means that it is easier for services to be created. These can be financed on a few credit cards and a personal loan. So there can be a deluge of products that look much the same as each other.

Many of the services mentioned are me-too products or iterations on existing web 2.0 products."

A little harsh, but true. One of the main themes in Read/WriteWeb"s series on top international web apps is how many Silicon Valley clones there are. Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, eBay, craigslist, etc - all of the top US sites have multiple equivalents overseas. Having said that, another main theme of our top web apps series is that of localization - and in the case of many European countries, that means language. So it"s natural that english-language speakers haven"t heard of sites that run in (for example) Spanish or French. However a number of the 15 finalists are either multi-lingual or in english...Thirdly, it could also be an echo chamber thing - most of the tech news that gets attention in blogs and news sites is US-centric.

It should be mentioned that a few commenters on our post noted that the StartUp2.0 list is not a definitive list - e.g. it was missing last.fm and reevoo.com.

Still, what"s your score? How many of the 15 Euro startups did you recognize?

Editor"s Note: This post was written by Ross Dawson, CEO of Advanced Human Technologies and Chairman of Future Exploration Network. Ross is holding a Web 2.0 event in Sydney, Australia on June 6, which I will be a speaker at. In preparation for the conference, Ross has produced this amazing list of Top Aussie Web Apps. Almost as amazingly, I personally know people from all of the top 9 companies in this list, mainly because they all seem to be in Silicon Valley at the same time as me ;-) Which is to say, hanging out at Web 2.0 conferences and infiltrating Mike Arrington"s house. Australians are a resourceful lot! Indeed, note that Ross almost tries to claim a New Zealand company below (Eurekster), but he admitted it was kiwi in the end... well the technology anyway! Remember Split Enz? :-) Kiwi band claimed by Australians as their own. Anyway, I digress. Here is Ross" excellent post -- enjoy!

At Future Exploration Network"s Web 2.0 in Australia event on June 6, we are including a showcase of the top five examples of Web 2.0 coming out of this glorious country. Identifying who we wanted to invite to the showcase proved a marvelous opportunity to take a good look at what"s out there in the world of Web 2.0. The result is the following list of Australia"s Top 60 Web 2.0 applications.

At the Web 2.0 in Australia event we are showcasing five companies (written up in more detail here) - Atlassian, Gnoos, Omnidrive, Scouta, and Tangler. These fascinating and innovative companies have been chosen for our showcase because they are particularly effective in showing the diversity of the field to our senior executive audience, which gave slightly different results to the Top 60 list.

You"ll find our Top 60 below. The sites are ranked in approximate order of how prominent they are (or should be), based on four criteria:

• Web 2.0 characteristics
• Coolness/ Innovation
• Maturity
• Commercial success/ number of users

The first comment to make is that coolness and maturity are often inversely correlated. What used to be hot is now ho-hum, while the more innovative applications just out the door haven"t had the time to become mature or gain commercial success. That means some extremely cool and promising applications such as Outback Online, Particls, Vquence, or even SmoothBudget (ranked 59) are outside the top tier on the list, not because they aren"t very interesting and exciting, but because they are in alpha or beta, and so don"t yet score well on the maturity and commercial success factors. Hopefully that will rapidly change. In other words, you can still find some very interesting early stage applications further down on this list, so please don"t just look at the top.

Omnidrive garners the top ranking on the list by being both extremely cool (particularly in how it is shifting to become a highly diverse, deeply integrated online utility), while also being a real success story in its profile and user base.

Another issue is what makes an application qualify as Australian. In almost all cases the technology or key executives behind the listed applications have emerged from Australia, though in some cases the companies have since migrated overseas. There are some top-notch companies such as Eurekster that have some Australian capital behind them. However in this case the original technology came out of New Zealand, and it is now largely a US company, so it doesn"t feature on the list.

An interesting feature of the list is that few Australian Web 2.0 companies have been acquired over the last years, making it a considerably less dynamic space than in some other countries. Exceptions include Where 2 Technologies being bought by Google in October 2004, Massive by Microsoft one year ago, and Zookoda by Payperpost a month ago. The acquisition landscape seems likely to change, with most of the major Australian-based media and technology companies currently sniffing around for interesting online ventures, however Australian-based companies find it harder to get the visibility for international trade buyers. As far as I"m aware fewer than 20 per cent of the companies on the list have significant presence or deep connections into the US or other major overseas markets.

Many of the applications on the list are at a fairly early stage in their development, indicating that the field is rapidly heating up and there is substantial development and innovation going on. However, even though many newcomers look like solid and interesting applications, they are entering a crowded marketplace. Some of the applications are clearly being created in developers" spare time, with the absence of any names indicating they don"t want their day-job employers knowing they are up to other things on the side. A number of services that were available a year ago have now disappeared.

Of course many will disagree on the highly subjective rankings. I encourage your comments on the companies, rankings, and any companies not included. There were many more applications we"re aware of that didn"t make the list. Some are very early-stage or have little uptake. Others are interesting applications that do not qualify as Web 2.0. Most simple search, sales, and B2B or B2C intermediaries don"t make the cut. No doubt we"ve missed companies that should be on the list - so please let us know!

Click here to view the Top 60 List (Ed: unfortunately the table killed my stylesheet)

Written by Angus Lau and Gang Lu

Hong Kong, along with much of Asia (with the exception of China), is still playing catch-up with Web 2.0 in 2007. This is due to lack of initiatives by companies and lack of knowledge and interest from the market. It was only late 2006 that we began to see more Web 2.0 information being fed to the public; at that time we also noticed an increase in the number of startups being formed in Hong Kong and releasing services to the public.

Overview of Web 2.0 in Hong Kong

Although many are still new to Web 2.0, Hong Kong is a market that follows the trends. So the people here are familiar with popular services from recognized companies in the US and are likely to adopt those services. In fact, they are less likely to use those from China, including local services, and even more unlikely to create their own Hong Kong services. As such, websites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and others with brand recognition, are popular here.

In terms of innovation, aside from the lack of interest, creativity and the "why build when there are services already available" attitude that many people have, the lack of availability of online resources and localized APIs (e.g. some APIs may only pertain to the US market) are some of the issues that are hindering the development in the local Hong Kong market. The popular mapping mashups with Yahoo! and Google Maps, and other types of mashups, are basically non-existent here. This is very different from China, because we are also less likely to find any clones in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Startups

In the past year or so, there have been a number of startups that have been formed and pushed their services out to the market. As of this writing, there are a handful of startups based in and operating from Hong Kong. There are a few startups that have registered their startups in Hong Kong, but have ventured into mainland China to utilize their workforce and test the waters in China. Even though Hong Kong is part of China, startups from Hong Kong have as much difficulty competing with China as any foreign companies trying to take a piece of the China market.

• EditGrid: Online spreadsheet (profile)
• aNobii: Book lovers social network (review)
• Bullpoo: Interactive stock community and a personalized investment tool (profile)
• Recruit.net: Vertical search engine for jobs in Asia
• Zorpia: Social network
• Frenzoo: Virtual social network (interview and screenshots)
• Lifesterblog: Blog community (profile)
• Wazhua: China entertainment virtual world and social network (profile)
• Roompage: Personalized homepages (profile)
• Jijija: Matching community through discussions (profile)
• China-8.com: Education community - Chinese language
• Moochi.com: Video-sharing site with online video-editing

World market

Just as Hong Kong users adopt services from the US, the majority of the startups here build their ideas to serve foreign markets - and so they largely ignore the local market. Having heard from some of the individuals behind Hong Kong companies, there is a consensus that the Hong Kong market is just too small and the general public still lack interest and knowledge in fully utilizing web technologies.

Funding

The majority of the startups here, like many others around the world, bootstrap anyway they can to get started. Some continue to bootstrap as they ramp up, while others seek out funding. The funding here rarely comes from local or even foreign VC firms, but rather from the Hong Kong Government. The HKSARG offers several schemes to assist web startups, or indeed any startups, including allocating funds and office space to get projects started.

The Big Companies

It seems there aren"t any initiatives by big companies (like Yahoo! Hong Kong, Google and others) to push web 2.0 services to the public. Providing localized versions of their existing global services is usually the path those companies take, instead of developing their own services for the local market.

Yahoo! Hong Kong is the number one destination for Hong Kong people (according to Alexa), but they haven"t been very proactive in providing Web 2.0 services. Localized versions of their popular services include Answers (aka Yahoo Knowledge) and Maps (which does not understand Hong Kong addresses). Other services like Travel and Real Estate are localized versions of the Yahoo! US site equivalents. In addition to the popular Yahoo! Blogs, the Hong Kong office has a web service called Hui Bin Doe - which allow users to rate, review and recommend restaurants, food and stores. However, detailed restaurant articles are still done by a selected source instead of allowing the users to fully contribute.

Google - Similar to Yahoo! HK, Google has only provided localized versions of their popular services - e.g. Docs, Notebook, Blogger.

PCCW - The local Telecom giant has just jumped into the Web 2.0 waters by providing a Flickr-like photo and video sharing service, called Snaap!. However it"s only available for their service subscribers.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb"s continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia and Ireland.

Written by Mircea Goia

Romania is a country of 21 million people and is the biggest from the Balkans (Eastern Europe). The total Internet penetration rate is about 23% (5 million) and it"s the lowest in European Union. However the growth rate is one of the biggest (517% since 2000). Out of the 3.5 million Internet connections, more than half are broadband (cable or DSL is 8.2%, the same as Greece). Broadband and DSL connectivity is localized to cities, while in smaller towns and villages dial-up is many times the only option.

Online advertising spending is doubling year after year (it will be about $8 million in 2007) and half of Romanian web surfers perceive online ads as a good thing. There are two big advertising agencies in the country - Boom and Arbomedia - which share the market along with other small players. Now Google Adsense and AdWords are available in the Romanian language too, so the competition is heating up. The growth rate of online advertising in Romania is the largest in Europe.

There is also a Webby Awards-like festival called Internetics; which rewards, yearly, the best sites in different categories. Microsoft has a customer support center in Romania and also many Romanian programmers are working at its general headquarters in Redmond. eBay opened an office here, but so far they are just observing the market. Google also has recruited some programmers and started making available Adsense and Adwords in Romanian. Paypal just started offering their services to Romanian markets too, however their offer is not yet complete.

Overview of Web 2.0 in Romania

Romania is trying to catch up with the Web 2.0 movement, but most of its sites/applications are localized versions of international sites/applications. The investments usually come from the private sector. The government is investing mainly in the educational system (buying computers for schools and colleges, setting up the infrastructure, etc).

A big investment came from the European Union (cooperation between EU and the Ministry of Education): the network called ROEdunet (Romanian NREN - National Research and Education Network). It"s a network that connects schools, colleges and universities around Romania.

Most of our web applications are built using open-source software (mainly LAMP), because of the low costs. Romania has a good pipe of programmers used to using these tools and many of them are working for foreign companies (outsourcing). Many investors see Romania as the "the India of Eastern Europe" in software programming. Also English is a language many young people have learned since kindergarten.

Romania Startups

Neogen - expanding in and outside Romania

Neogen is one of the biggest players on the Romanian web (and the biggest in the Web 2.0 market especially). The company has the following services:

• personalized startpage (Neogen homepage - Netvibes or Pageflakes like)
• search engine (the homepage also - Google like)
• dating (Noi2)
• social networking (Club Neogen - Myspace like)
• social networking for primary school,high school and college students (Colegi - Facebook like)
• jobsite (BestJobs)
• photo sharing (Foto - Flickr like)
• video sharing (Video - Youtube like)
• online games (Doizece)
• classifieds (anunturi.neogen.ro - Google Base like)
• Business directory (Catalog)
• web statistics (Monitor)
• news (Stiri - Google News like)
• newsletters for their services
• personal websites (Site - Yahoo Geocities like)
• online advertising (Asociati and Publicitate - affiliate programs and Google Adsense like)
• web hosting (Hosting)
• automotive (Auto)
• real estate (Imobiliare)
• internal messaging system for all of the above

Combined, these web properties have 1.8 million registered users in Romania (plus 550,000 in Bulgaria and Serbia) and 3.5 million visitors monthly (according to Trafic.ro, which is the most utilized web stats tracking software from Romania).

Neogen"s acquisition spree brought new web properties to the company in Romania: colegi.ro, doizece.ro, resurseumane.ro, Prohost (hosting), Archiweb (stats), Relatii (dating). They have also acquired services in the countries around Romania: Bulgaria - love.bg, Serbia - Poljubac.com and Moldavia - faces.md.

Recently, Neogen received a capital infusion from Tiger Global Investment USA (which has also invested in Yandex.ru, Baidu.com, Mynet.com, Google.com) and Wouwer Holland. This will enable Neogen to expand more of their services. The same funds made a large investment into eJobs, the biggest recruiting site from Romania.

Netbridge - big investor in Romanian market

Weblog.ro is a hosted blogging solution - although many romanian bloggers have their own solution like Wordpress or are using well-known hosted blogging solutions like Blogger.com, Blogspot.com or Typepad.com. Weblog.ro"s parent company is Netbridge.ro, is one of the biggest investors in the Romanian internet.

Among the Netbridge portfolio are the following:

• boom.ro (online advertising)
• trafic.ro (free online stats)
• t3.ro (advanced online stats)
• okazii.ro (auctions - eBay like)
• myjob.ro (jobsite)
• kestionare.ro (professional online polls)
• curs-valutar.ro (financial informations)
• sfatulmedicului.ro (online medical advices)
• sentimente.ro (dating)

Other Web 2.0 Apps

Trilulilu.ro was the first to enter the video sharing market. But now it faces strong competition from Neogen.

Clipshare is a romanian software solution for video sharing, used by many websites around the world.

myfeedz is an RSS aggregator just released by InterAKT, the well-known Romanian company that built Dreamweaver extensions and was recently bought by Adobe Systems.

MYsport.ro: there are several big sports sites (gsp.ro, prosport.ro, sport.ro, onlinesport.ro, netsport.ro) but what MYsport.ro tries to do is to empower users to create and publish the content. It seems to be gaining traction.

ZuluWriter.com is an online word processor and document manager (it is in the development stages for now). It"s a project of Soft32.com, a very popular software download site.

Bluo CMS is a content management system which was mentioned at the SeoMoz Web 2.0 awards in the Web Development and Design section, along popular things like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Prototype and Yahoo UI library.

Google.ro and the Portals

There are several local big portals like:

• neogen.ro (1st place according to Trafic.ro)
• Kappa.ro, Acasa.ro and Rol.ro are sharing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place (also according to Trafic.ro)

Other general portals include Roportal.ro, Itbox.ro, Home.ro.

But Google.ro (or.com) is the most used search engine, according to Trafic.ro.

Conclusion

Web 2.0 in Romania is gaining traction at a fast pace - almost doubling year after year. We expect to see more Web 2.0 applications being built and more users beginning to use them.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb"s continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Ireland and Hong Kong.

By Heri Rakotomalala of Montreal Tech Watch

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone in the world. According to comScore, Canadians spend on average 39.6 hours per month on the Internet, followed by Israel at 37.4 and South Korea at 34, while the USA is in 8th position with 29.4. Canada also leads in online reach with 70% of households having Internet access. The average pages viewed per visitor is 3800 in Canada, while the U.K. is second at 3300. And at 67%, Canada has one of the highest broadband penetrations in the world, 21 points higher than the US. Finally, while Canada still lags in online advertising, with $28.05 per Internet user and the US with $71.43, ad spending is expected to grow 32% this year (Ernst&Young LLP). So Canada is a sophisticated, and growing, market for Web apps.

As in any other country, Canadians heavily use Google, Yahoo and other global services like ebay and craiglist; each of which has their own english and french canadian localized versions. In social networking, Facebook is the star app of the moment. For instance, Toronto has more than 650.000 facebook users, more than the combined facebook users in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

Top Web Apps

Canada has a lot of startups that are reaching the global market...

Shopify is a simple, affordable and stylish service that lets you create your own online store. It is targeted at inviduals who want to sell online, without any programming.

Freshbooks handles time tracking and invoicing. The service is used by freelancers and consultants in over 100 countries. Mike McDerment, an active canadian web entrepreneur, runs the company.

Stikipad lets you create a personal or a group wiki for free, with an easy-to-use user interface.

Librivox publishes on the public domain audio books, as read by users. The digital library ranges from contemporary to classics, philosophy to novels. Last finished project: James Joyce"s Ulysses, with 32 hours of audio.

DabbleDB lets you create and share a database, and then build an application on top of it, without requiring programming skills. The platform is innovative, with a simple point-and-click interface.

Nowpublic.com is the largest user-written news site in the world, according to the Globe and Mail, thanks to a thriving community. It is based in Vancouver, BC.

Sxipper manages your online identity via a firefox extension and OpenID. It tracks usernames and passwords; and fills in online forms. Sxipper comes from Sxip, which is working on new identity models for the digital world.

wikitravel, which this year won a Webby Award for Best Travel Website, is a free travellers guide. It also is aiming to produce print travel guides. This wiki project was started in Montreal, Quebec, and advises a "fair" (not "neutral") point of view from its contributors.

Cambrian House is an online community where users "crowdsource" an idea. Participants then share the profits if the software is successful. Robhinhood Fund, a "web2.0 charity" website, started at Cambrian House.

ClubPenguin is a virtual word for kids, where they can play and interact. The self-funded company is already profitable via monthly subscriptions, with $60 million projected revenues this year.

GiveMeaning is an online community about news and projects that change the world for good.

ConceptShare is an online collaboration tool for designers and creatives, where they can annotate and discuss current work.

AjaxWhois.com is a DNS lookup service.

ilovetoplay.com is a sports social network where you can find additional players for your team.

YubNub.org is an online command line.

Innovation and startup culture in Canada

Canada has a long history of innovation and success. The most well known is Flickr, which started in Vancouver, BC, and then became one of the key applications in the web 2.0 landscape. StumbleUpon, which was acquired by ebay for $75M in March, was started in Calgary, Alberta. iStockphoto was a pioneer in micropayments in stock photography, and was bought by GettyImages.

Conclusion

The future is promising for Canadian startups. In Montréal, for instance, barcamps, democamps, monthly Tech Entrepreneur breakfasts, and early investors like montrealstartup, have revived the local tech community. We now have promising startups like Standoutjobs which aims to reinvent the recruiting process, by using video and social networking to promote the company"s brand; or Kakiloc, a location-based social network which integrates with mobile phones. These are just two examples of the promising web apps being built in Canada and being presented to the world. Let us know what other web apps you know of from Canada, that we may"ve missed.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb"s continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Ireland, Hong Kong and Romania.

A year ago, I wrote about the State of Innovation in India, keying off an article I had written 10 years previously. Rather than wait another 10 years, ReadWriteWeb has decided to make this an annual review. This time, we have restricted ourselves to web technology. We are looking for breakout innovation, companies creating and getting traction with technology that will change and create markets.

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The Big Change to the Risk vs. Reward Equation

Last year we wrote:

"The fundamental issue in India is the risk/reward equation. It is simply too easy for a young developer in India to get paid a lot by an outsourcing firm; then enjoy being headhunted every year for more money. Those of us old enough to see a cycle or two, can see the parallels between Silicon Valley 1999 and Bangalore 2007, when just being able to spell the words of a popular programming language on a resume meant fame and fortune. It is possible that when this comes back to some reality, the motivation to innovate will come to young Indian developers (yes, young; breakthrough technical innovation tends to come from people under 30)."

This has changed, thanks to the global financial crisis. The big outsourcing firms have hiring freezes, and some firms are laying off. "Big" no longer means "safe." Parents in India will need a while to accept this new reality. In America, many parents would advise their kids to go for start-ups when they are young and can afford to take a risk. In India, all the parents have to do is say "Yes" when their bright kid, who is no longer working for a big outsourcing firm, asks to live at home for a year with free food and bandwidth. Last year"s article was written before the Satyam scam was exposed, and it rings even truer now that SWITCH has become WIT.

Three kids working together, living at home, with free food and bandwidth, can change the world.

This is a big change. But it is a below-the-radar change. We cannot see the impact yet. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of young developers will do this in India now. Most will not create a great start-up but will just keep their skills fresh and add to their CV. But one or two will do something totally awesome. The class of 2008/2009 maybe the best ever. Let"s see.

The innovation we are already seeing in the market today has been despite these and all the other hurdles faced by entrepreneurs everywhere.

Zoho: Finally, the Indian Software Product Success Story

For a decade or more, entrepreneurs in India have dreamed of creating a software product powerhouse, moving away from the labor-for-hire services model to create products that are winners on the global stage.

I know firsthand from working with a few of these pioneers that it is not an easy ambition to fulfill.

India finally has a product success story. We have written about Zoho many times on ReadWriteWeb and included it in our list of top 10 enterprise products of 2008.

The bigger story is the impact this success will have on young developers in India. Role models matter. Kids in America want to become ski racers now that they have seen Bode Miller. It is said that Sachin Tendulkar has inspired a few Indians. In software outsourcing, Infosys was the role model. Today, that role model may be Zoho.

That Big Wide-Open SaaS Opportunity

Indian start-ups that dreamed of creating the next SAP or Oracle faced massive hurdles on the sales and marketing front. Sure, they could invest five times more in R&D with the same budget. But the reality was that R&D was a tiny portion of the budget. The big money went into sales and marketing. The R&D budget arbitrage was not enough to move the needle.

This is totally and utterly different today. We have written about the SaaS opportunity many times. This opportunity is totally location-agnostic. But it is also totally price- and cost- sensitive, and R&D is the biggest cost. Success stories such as 37 signals, Automattic, and Zoho did not win by hiring an enterprise sales force or buying advertising. They "let the software do the talking."

This is not just an opportunity for a few big winners. This is an opportunity for thousands of small companies to go after niche markets. The interesting thing about niche markets today is that they are inherently global and can be a lot bigger than people think. These small niche start-ups won"t make headlines and probably won"t get VC financing. But they won"t need VC financing. What is fascinating about SaaS globally is how few start-ups have been VC financed. Most have gotten to profitability on tiny seed rounds or even with revenue financing from clients.

DimDim and the Cheap Decade

DimDim is another Indian company that made it onto ReadWriteWeb"s list of best enterprise products of 2008. It is a classic SaaS story with an Indian twist. DimDim"s proposition is as simple as the whole proposition of offshoring: it just costs less. In this case, it costs less than Webex. That"s a popular story in a recession.

It is the same pitch that Zoho is making. Take a basic software service we all need -- say, CRM -- and offer something that is comparable to the market leader at a fraction of the price.

That doesn"t sound so innovative; more like a classic "fast-follower" strategy, a better, faster, cheaper strategy. That is easy to want, but hard to execute. When you look at a story like Zoho"s, you see a simple strategy but lots of small bits of innovation in the execution that make strategy real. Not glamorous, but effective.

Back in 2003, Forbes wrote an excellent piece called "The Cheap Decade." And as we argued here, the boom we went through from 2004 to 2007 was really just flim-flam, fuelled by incredibly cheap credit and blowing up in our faces. So the cheap decade may be starting for real right now.

Zoho and DimDim are perfectly positioned for the cheap decade. There will be others.

On page 2: the future; and what segments are currently hot in India?

HottestStartUps.In Shows the Future of the Start-Up Launchpad

When I was researching this article, many of my contacts pointed me to a website that runs a competition to find the best start-ups in India. Browsing through it was a fascinating glimpse into an economy of over 1 billion souls in the midst of an incredible transformation.

However, more than any individual start-up, what jumped out at me was that this was a far better launchpad for start-ups than anything we have in the USA. This competition satisfies the three golden rules, FTV:

1. Free for the start-up, so that even one with no funding can play.
2. Transparent; the judging rules are open and the process is independently audited; no suspicion of back-door influence.
3. Virtual; no need to be in a specific place at a specific time in order to fully participate.

Of course this has been made possible by sponsors who have actually donated money to further the cause of innovation; it has not been driven mainly by the for-profit objectives of the event organizer.

What Segments Are Hot with VCs?

VCs miss many great market segments, and entrepreneurs who chase segments that are hot at the moment are usually a day late and a dollar short. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what is getting funded these days in India. Here are the spaces that have already seen a lot of activity:

• Micro-financing. To some, this elicits a big yawn and a "Yet another micro-financing site?" response. But the blow-up of big banks in last few months indicates that a fundamentally new model may be needed. And India, with its huge unbanked population and technically savvy elite, is where innovation is likely to come from.
• Mobile ad networks. I am a skeptic of these. Nobody has found a way to capture attention on a tiny screen without being totally annoying. Maybe somebody will. They probably will, and it will have to have something to do with location. But it is likely to come from Asia, where mobile is more widespread than in the USA. Mkhoj is a Kleiner-funded entrant from India in this space.
• Personal outsourcing. We wrote about this in our article last year as well, and some of the companies, such as iYogi (disclosure: I have an interest in iYogi) and TutorVista, are doing quite well.
• Better, faster, cheaper SaaS clones. Zoho (which is bootstrapped) and DimDim (funded by VC) will inspire investment in many other segments.

Here are some bleeding-edge segments in which investors are taking an interest and in which India may be well positioned:

• Voice recognition. Voice recognition is hard. It is even harder in multiple languages. The official census in India from 1961 recognized 1,652 languages! Voice recognition is still the killer app for the mobile phone, and it is growing at a crazy pace (with over 3 billion mobile users currently). Ubona looks interesting, with some serious IP but also a pragmatic local market-entry strategy. Mscriber looks like it has a good market strategy, too.
• Mobile payments. In India, people live on their mobile phones, and when you are talking about billions of users, the dollars add up, even if in very small increments. Obopay is one company in this space.

Best Exit: Naukri

Naukri, usually described as the Monster.com of India, may not have the innovation to make techies gasp, but VCs salivate at its return. Naukri rode the outsourcing boom perfectly, exiting via an IPO in November 2006 that was oversubscribed 55 times (ah, remember those days on NASDAQ?).

What Have We Missed?

In a nation of over 1 billion people, where technology is the best route to wealth, we are certain to have missed a ton of amazing innovation. Let us know what it is.

(Photo by Thomas Roche.)

Discuss

It"s Presidents Day here in the United States but for most people it"s just a day off work. Cynics, fair-weather political watchers, "Joe Six Packs" (did you want to avoid hearing that phrase again?) - we present to you below some of our favorite online resources for casual political awareness. We"d suggest that these sites will facilitate a basic foundation of day-to-day political awareness.

These are our favorites, we"d love to hear your suggestions as well.

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The Big Picture

It"s not explicitly political but the Boston Globe"s Big Picture website is a must-see collection of big photos of important events from around the world. Collections like Observing Ramadan, Scenes from the Gaza Strip and China"s Lantern Festival are great for grasping what"s going on in other places a little better, almost on an emotional level. Who doesn"t like really big, high quality photos?

OpenCongress

The Sunlight Foundation is dedicated to casting light on the otherwise dark operations of government and one of the ways they do so is by creating really accessible political websites. OpenCongress is their best work, it"s an easy-to-use site to keep track of what"s being debated in Congress. Drop by for a quick glance at what the hot topics of the day are and what different sides of the debate have to say, or dive deep into the system to set up tracking feeds for your favorite politicians, legislation or issue. We reviewed OpenCongress in depth here this summer.

Obama on iTunes and YouTube

You use your computer a lot more than you listen to AM radio, we"d guess, and it"s now easier than ever to keep an eye on the President thanks to the White House"s video podcast feeds and YouTube channel. We thought this was pretty remarkable when it was first announced and we still think so today.

NPR Podcast Creator and Mobile Site

Want to catch an occasional short news piece about your home state or pet issue? Check out the handy new NPR podcast creation tool. We reviewed this in December when it launched and continue to be really impressed. Just enter keywords and you"ll be given a custom RSS feed to subscribe to podcast news stories that contain those words. It"s fast, free, easy and helpful.

Check out the very nice NPR mobile site, too. That"s a great way to call in and get a few minutes of info about what"s going on in the world. Have a little time while walking someplace? We like to take that opportunity to grab a few moments of learning.

Memeorandum Colors

So this one"s a touch sophisticated but we just couldn"t help but mention it. We presume readers here know about Techmeme, the best place to find the hottest conversations about technology on the internet. We hope you also know about the sister site Memeorandum, which aggregates hot political conversations.

That"s a fun site but it"s much more useful if you"ve got the Memeorandum Colors Greasemonkey Script installed. Take five minutes and install it, you"ll be glad you did, it does not require any technical skill at all. The service uses data mining of historical linking patterns to color code the links on Memeorandum by political leanings. It"s really nice to see a cluster of blog posts about a topic and be able to pick out the one conservative perspective, or one liberal one and one conservative one.

Honorable Mentions

A handful of other resources we"d also recommend you check out include:

10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know About the Middle East is simply a blog post by an atheist semantic web fan and IT security guy named Daniel Miessler. It"s a good read, we like to pass it around.

LittleSis is an awesome collaborative research site that describes itself as "an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you." It"s a lot of fun to browse around and could prove useful for political blogging.

Global Voices Online is a long running site that brings together bloggers from around the world. Political holidays should not be marked in isolation, it"s an international world.

BreakingNewsOn is a Twitter account that finds and publishes the most "breaking news" you"re likely to find anywhere. It"s a really neat little project, though with a very strange background story. According to a write up on TechCrunch, founder Michael van Poppel launched the project when he just happened to get his hands on an unpublished videotape of Osama Bin Laden which he subsequently sold to Reuters. So remember kids, if you happen to find any such materials, don"t forget to see if you can parlay it into a news discovery project on Twitter too. Odd, isn"t it?

So those are some of our favorite sites to grab a quick bit of politics. What are yours?

Discuss

Two US journalists from the groundbreaking mixed media company Current TV have been detained by authorities in North Korea, the NYTimes reported this morning. Current was co-founded by Al Gore and has innovated extensively in both its technology and business model.

Laura Ling, a Chinese-American, and Euna Lee, a Korean-American, are in North Korea reporting on refugees fleeing poverty.

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There"s been no mention of the incident there yet, but we expect that updates on the detained journalists will be posted to Current"s Twitter account. We"ll also be watching former CNN reporter and North Korea expert Rebecca MacKinnon"s blog for anything she has to say about this news in context. [Right: Laura Ling"s Facebook pic.]

It"s been a difficult few days for people around the world using new media to challenge authoritarian governments. See also our coverage last night of Omid Reza Misayafi, an Iranian blogger reported to have died in prison.

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Omid Reza Misayafi, one of a number of Iranian bloggers arrested for "insulting" the government and religious authorities in that country, is dead. Misayafi"s death was reported on Global Voices Online via an Iranian human rights site in Farsi and we learned of it from The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.

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An update tonight indicates that the prison conditions may have led the man to take his own life. Directly or indirectly, it appears that Misayafi"s life has been brought to an end for exercising free speech, for criticizing an authoritarian state and for doing it using online social media. Social media users and advocates around the world should take note of this event.

We"ve reported here on a number of bloggers imprisoned in Iran and in Egypt for documenting government abuses or just writing critical words about governments that demand total compliance. In the middle of last year we wrote about Iran"s parliament debating legislation that would add the death penalty to the list of possible punishments for using blogs to challenge government authority.

It is a timeless battle all around the world between freedom, art and self expression on one side and authority, expediency and abuse on the other. The rise of the web has made that battle different, though. Blogs give a voice to the previously voiceless, and the historical and moral importance of efforts to save those new voices from arrest, torture and death cannot be overstated.

We would love to see the Obama administration, which has made extensive use of online social media, publicly and explicitly condemn this death at the Iranian government"s hands. We"d be surprised if that happened.

Social media is powerful and changing the world; we don"t expect that this will be the last person to lose their life over it. Omid Reza Misayafi, brave Iranian blogger, may you rest in peace. May all those imprisoned for blogging in Iran, and around the world, be set free.

For ongoing coverage of this and all-too similar situations around the world, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers and associated organizations linked to on their site.

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One year ago this week, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was traveling throughout India meeting with local technologists and vacationing. Reporters wanted to know, what was he doing there? Speculation that a Facebook India would soon launch was inevitable.

Apparently, earlier today Facebook users in India were greeted with a new message upon logging in: Facebook is now available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. As of 2001, (the latest numbers available) those languages had a combined 770 million speakers. Facebook has just over 200 million users, so this could be a huge opportunity for growth if the company can pull off more than just interface translation.

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Facebook is growing fast all around the world. Last month, for example, we reported that the site"s number of active users in Africa and Asia grew over 70% in 12 weeks. Orkut is by far the dominant social network (and website in general) in India - but that could change in a big way if localization is pulled off effectively.

We expect Facebook will make an announcement about the availability of these six Indian languages sometime very soon - we were told about it by reader Nimish Adani, of Workosaur.com. Adani"s take on the news? "This move isn"t necessarily going to multiply Facebook"s usage as most people here would continue to use Facebook in English," he says. "Usage of regional languages (in the online space and in the professional world in India) isn"t as popular as is the case with countries like Russia, China or those in Europe.

"I"d see this development as a move to woo those from the smaller towns and cities of India who are currently on Orkut. The more urban and suave English-speaking audience have already moved from Orkut to Facebook. MySpace (despite having an office in India) is a complete non-entity in India. Bebo has also come in recently but again its a non-starter."

What do you think?

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