Top 10 International Products of 2008 - Page 2
6. Maxthon: China
The browser market has seen many changes in 2008, with the introduction of Google's Chrome in September, Mozilla's Firefox 3 making the Guinness Book of World Records in June, and the slow decline of Internet Explorer as Firefox gains momentum. In Asia however, there's another browser making waves. Maxthon, according to European web metrics company Xiti, is creating problems for its main competitor Firefox. It comes as no surprise then, that Mozilla recently released an edition of Firefox specifically for China.
Maxthon is a browser created in China and reported to be the second most popular browser in China today. While it doesn't show up as a contender in most market share reports, it has had a staggering 174 million downloads at the time of writing this post. Using Internet Explorer's rendering engine, Maxthon has over 1,400 add-ons, proxy switching capability, aggressive ad blocking, split-screen browsing to name a few of its innovative features. We said it two years ago, and we'll say it again: this is one to keep your eye on.
7. Xing: Germany
Xing, the German social network for business professionals and the first Web 2.0 company to go public [December 2006], today has over 6.5 million members, and is now clearly in the race toward globalization alongside LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has over 30 million members, and according to Compete a 179.6% year-to-year change that beats Xing's at 137.6%. It is important however, to note the financials, something we analyzed back in March this year, which may not be completely in LinkedIn's favor. The data of particular interest concerns user engagement; visitors to Xing stay an average of 43.4 minutes on the site, while visitors to LinkedIn stay an average of 7.8 minutes - a whopping difference of 456%. We think Xing has made some good choices this year, especially the recent hire of Stefan Gross-Selbeck, as reported over on ReadWriteWeb's Jobwire.
8. FreshBooks: Canada
FreshBooks, the Canadian online invoicing, time and expense tracking service for individuals and small companies, has been showing steady growth over the past year according to Compete, and claims to have over 500K new users since May 2004.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, and decided it was easy to use, includes a host of useful features, has an active forum, and offers benchmark data by industry to its users. More recently, we looked at FreshBooks Report Cards which provide an insight into how your business fares in relation to other businesses in your profession. Selected as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders in Canada in September this year, we think Freshbooks deserves a mention here too.
9. Mixi: Japan
Mixi, Japan's biggest social network (only available in Japanese) was previously known for its closed platform. No more. In August this year, Mixi announced that it is acting as an OpenID provider - therefore bringing the global OpenID to millions of Japanese users.
While Mixi is not acting as a relaying party yet, allowing users to login with OpenID from other networks, the functionality of Mixi user profiles has now increased dramatically. According to the blog Asiajin, this opening up is pretty radical for Mixi standards.
10. Wuala: Switzerland
Swiss startup Wuala offers an unusual online social storage system: it uses the disk space of other members' computers as part of the cloud. Wuala launched in August 2008 - making it the youngest of our international products.
Wuala differs from our other favorite online storage services in several ways. The advantages of this type of storage include no limits on file size and bandwidth. However the main disadvantage is that regardless of the AES-128 and RSA-2048 encryption, the idea of storing data on machines scattered around the world won't appeal to all. Still, with 28 million files uploaded as of writing and growing by the minute, Wuala is definitely worth watching.
So, do you think we've picked the best 10 International Products of 2008? Please let us know what you think about our choices in the comments. Most importantly, let us know which international products you think are worth tracking.
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