Top 10 International Products of 2008
We live in a technologically rich and increasingly Web-savvy world. In this post, we celebrate the World Wide Web by selecting our top 10 international products of 2008. What do we mean by 'international'? We looked for products that were developed outside the U.S., which showed innovation and support for global Web standards. We also tried to choose from a cross-section of countries, although obviously we couldn't cover all the major countries. That said, we hope you enjoy our selections!
Of course with so many innovative products to choose from all around the globe, some exceptional non-U.S. products didn't make the cut. So please let us know your own favorites in the comments.
This is the second in our series of top products of 2008, the first can be found here:
Note: the products listed below are in no particular order
1. Remember The Milk: Australia
Remember The Milk, the Australian startup that gave us our favorite task management tools, began when Omar Kilani, Emily Boyd and one stuffed monkey got together in 2004 with a simple idea. The idea grew and in 2005 they launched Remember The Milk.
RTM has seen enormous growth over the past couple of years. By October 2006, 100K people had signed up for the service, 200K by May 2007, 500K by March 2008, but it is only within the past year that RTM has had a significant impact on Web users globally. RTM now boasts over one million users, was named one of CNET's Webware 100 Award winners in April, and in May ReadWriteWeb readers chose RTM as one of their favorite Web apps. More recently RTM created a gadget for Gmail and an application for the iPhone, pushing its reach further still.
2. Afrigator: South Africa
Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory for content from the African blogging community, similar in many ways to Technorati. Anyone in Africa with an RSS feed can use Afrigator to index their content and market it to the world.
Launched in April 2007 (alpha), Afrigator has seen a steady 25% month-on-month growth rate, launching beta in November of the same year. In September 2008 MIH Print Africa acquired a majority stake in Afrigator, giving the startup some breathing room to work on their new project Adgator, Africa's first ad network. Currently tracking 4159 blogs across the continent, Afrigator is a great place to find content from the "Afrosphere."
3. Zoho: India
Zoho is an Indian startup that offers a number of office tools, project management software and CRM solutions. It has made serious advances with its office productivity suite during 2008, reaching a milestone of 1 million users in August this year.
At the beginning of 2008, Zoho updated Writer to include support for the DocX file format along with several other features. In April, support for Visual Basic compatible macros was added to Zoho Sheet; macro record and playback rolled out four months later. October saw Zoho Mail emerge from private beta to being publicly available, offering at the same time offline support via Google Gears.
4. Netvibes: France
Members have created more than 50 million start pages spread across 200 countries on Netvibes since its launch in 2006. Available in 76 languages, Netvibes was named one of Times Best Web Sites 2007; but this hasn't dampened the team's enthusiasm to make Netvibes bigger and better, as evidenced by the launch of Netvibes Ginger in April 2008.
Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to share your new content from Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, etc. with friends; it also lets you follow the digital life of your friends. In November, Netvibes added a feature that allows content to be shared via integration with Facebook Connect and Twitter.
5. Dopplr: Finland / U.K.
Dopplr is a startup that lets you share travel plans with your friends, and "highlights coincidence," giving you a heads up of which friends will be in cities you plan to visit. While the company has only been around since 2007, it has big name backers, and according to Compete has shown significant growth.
Last month Dopplr launched its new city pages, which include creative commons images automatically imported from the 'interesting' tag on Flickr - to provide a visualization of visitor activity for cities within the Dopplr database. If you're not using it yet, you soon will be; we think Dopplr shows plenty of promise.
Comments
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I don't know whether you have seen CurdBee(http://curdbee.com). It's an online billing app which is totally free from Sri Lanka. It is still very young but very polished and usable. I guess these kind of services will give tough competition to US based services in the coming years.
I have been using Wuala almost since the very beginning and I personally love the tool. It's not only about the way you store files, it's also that it's a full scale replacement for Windows Explorer and your local hard drive (so long as your internet connection is fast enough).
Being German, I also love XING because of its success story. The internet doesn't work different in any way than any other business when it comes to cash. As a rule of thumb you could say that you have to earn money before you can spend it. XING does just that.
RememberTheMilk also rocks especially since the Gmail Widget was released a few weeks ago. We use it in our company and it helped a lot to reduce forgotten return calls.
I'm also happy Zoho is out there because they are kind of a counterweight to 37signals and Google Docs/Spreadsheets, etc. I hope competition stays alive in the CRM / online office field because competition fosters innovation.
Generally, I agree with your choices. They are not only good products but in general also good businesses. That's something so many people around the internet seem to forget sometimes.
Having become a major visual-based site search engine for women-centric sites in Russia, Quintura reaches a multi-million online female audience
http://blog.quintura.com/2008/11/07/quintura-launches-first-ad-campaign-in-its-search-cloud-widgets/
RyanB: Thanks for the link. Will look into it. Looks easy to use and professional. Currently using Zoho CRM - Excellent product. I didn't realise Zoho had so many different applications.
This is a great top ten list and without doubt some of them have helped inspire our online accounting solution, http://www.inniaccounts.co.uk
So many of these developments are about making our lives easier and hats off to all those involved!
zoho is really useful not much interaction with others
Hi Lidija,
Stii from Afrigator here and thank you so much! This means the world to us and what a BRILLIANT Xmas gift this is!
Thank you!
You should extend to 20 next year with more countries covered
the 10 web products should really win the international honour.
This is a great top ten list
I hope you do write more about design as relates to marketing, I need to learn how to put together a powerful infographic now.
thanks for the list.
I felt good to see some product from India getting into the list. (Zoho)
Would have liked to have OpenX adserver (http://www.openx.org) to be part of this list.
Wuala is a great product, I've seen it used in company after their main server crashed badly, and of course, it's a must have for any geek with a 24/7 connected computer... Glad it made it in this panel :)
I agree with Stii, Lidija, this is a wonderful gift for the holidays! Thanks so much for including FreshBooks in this solid list and for your constant support.
Rayanne Langdon -- Marketing Coordinator, FreshBooks.com
We're really flattered that you included Wuala in your list. Thanks a lot!
@Andi @Fabrice Thanks for your support!
Oona - Wuala Team
Another great collection of useful emerging technologies - cheers RWW!
I'm biased but Songsterr, a Russian online guitar tab player startup, received good reviews by Techcrunch, Mashable and Lifehacker earlier this year. I think it probably deserves being mentioned in comments as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm co-founder of Songsterr)
useful post thanks
Why did you think Zoho is from India? Because the CEO is an Indian? From their website looks very much like a California company - headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. They do have an office in India though.
Due to the release of the GMail Task function you might want to revise your list and remove Remember the Milk. They have just run into the same trouble many feature-startups for Facebook, etc. previously ran into: They've been replaced by the platform developer.
Although RTM still beats the GMail Task Manager when using Google Apps for your Domain, I'm convinced that Google will soon integrate its task manager into the AppsFYD environment while also adding sync functions, thus making RTM obsolete.
How in the world is Zoho an Indian company?! By its own admission, it seems to be a US corporation - http://www.zoho.com/company.html.
Just having a development center in India does not make it an Indian company...if that was the criterion, then Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo would also be Indian companies!
Because: Adobe took its first breath in the US and later spread out to India instead of other way around. AdventNet, the company behind Zoho, started out from India. The set up a shop in the US later.
Well done, Stii.
In my opinion, www.doodle.net deserves bring mentioned here for their innovative, user-friendly service that is totally free of charge. By the way, I have nothing to do with them, just liking the site.
I'm really surprised last.fm didn't make the list! Had you forgotten it's out of London, or is it too established to count maybe?
thanks for this blog
This is a great top ten list
I hope you do write more about design as relates to marketing, I need to learn how to put together a powerful infographic now