Rebecca Villaneda of HispanicBusiness.com points out some interesting numbers in an article tonight: the official Spanish Twitter account @Twitter_Es now has half a million more followers than the official global Twitter account in English, @Twitter. That's pretty remarkable; according to Twittercounter.com, @Twitter_Es just took the lead earlier this Summer. Twitter en español amassed its bigger pile of followers in less than half the time, too.

The @Twitter_es account was created just under two years ago; @Twitter was registered four and a half years ago. In addition to being more popular, @Twitter_es has also posted more photos using the new photo feature announced today. @Twitter follows more other accounts, is on more Lists and has a higher score on Klout though.

Last month Twitter began supporting the unique hashtags posted by Japanese users. A group of 200,000 volunteer language translators help turn the Twitter interface into local languages around the world; this month Indonesian and Dutch.

To Tweet is truly an international thing these days.

The e-G8 Summit precedes this years G8 Summit in Deauville on May 26 and 27. The purpose of the e-G8 is to inform the G8 leaders by gathering the world's top Internet and digital leaders in advance of the bigger event. Given the closed-door nature of the event and its relationship to the G8 Summit it's somewhat unsurprising that rumors about the nature of the meeting have been flying.

The e-G8 has the potential to be an important event and it is attracting a who's who in technology and government. The attendee list boasts heads of state as well as prominent media and technology figures like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; are all expected to attend.

French outlet La Tribune is suggesting that many attendees are being asked to pay up for their chance to speak out. It says the event which promises to deeply influence government leaders from the worlds most powerful nations is, in fact, a very private affair” in which getting a seat at the table is easy if you can spare several hundred thousand dollars.”

I'm unaware of any such requirement. Indeed, a representative of the organizer, Publicis Groupe, responded to that post in the comments. In short, this assertion, as with many others swirling about the Internet, smell a little bit paranoid.

The thread of cynicism and borderline paranoia running through coverage of the event is likely created, in part, by the unusual policies of Sarkozy and France. These include extreme copyright laws, proposed taxes on Internet use, and opposition to net neutrality. The exclusivity of the event undoubtedly fuels skepticism.

While the elitism of the event is a bit of a turn off for me too, it doesn't make sense that you would get this many great minds in the same room simply to make money. And if you look at the agenda, while short on details, it most definitely doesn't reek of marketing and PR hype for a bunch of vendors.

With all the politicking, skepticism and controversy that typically surrounds the G8 Summit already in full tilt and seemingly directed at the e-G8 currently, it strikes me that the event is at risk of being written off as political theatre. However, I intend to pour myself into the event and hope to find a way to direct the conversation toward topics I care about.

The materials I've received thus far encourage me to believe the goals are altruistic. It is my hope that this is in fact the case.

Nova Spivack published the e-G8 agenda and fact sheet we received with our invitations. He also writes:

I am skeptical that it will be possible to reach any sort of agreement on such complex and controversial issues in a short timeframe, however, perhaps it will be possible for the delegates to come up with recommendations for Internet-related issues that require urgent attention from the G8 leaders, at least.

I too am unsure how attendees will have a meaningful impact given the short time, diversity of personalities and complexity of issues.

Earlier in my career I was involved in a lot of community and non profit work. Indeed, just last November I attended the White House Summit on Education.

Based on my experience I know this: technologists take for granted how difficult it is for people that haven't been steeped in technology to grok topics like net neutrality, patent and copyright reform, privacy and open standards. Many non-technologists assume our fervor for such concepts to be idealistic when, in fact, it is our ardent support of free markets and business that spur our passions for such concepts.

Bridging the knowledge gap between policy maker and technologist is undoubtedly the most significant challenge facing the e-G8. However, if we can make progress on just one or two key issues, it paves the way for a host of other improvements, many of which will help further all of our more selfish interests while also bettering society as a whole.

I have two goals for the e-G8. I want to influence the discourse so that we cover topics I am passionate about such as net neutrality, free speech, open standards, patent and copyright reform, narrowing the digital divide and privacy. Secondly, I intend to do my best to report my experiences to the public.

I want to open it up to you, the readers. What can I do on-site to answer questions for you? What can I do that will help us push the agenda of technologists and entrepreneurs?

Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, was sentenced in 2006 to four years of jail for insulting religion and the leadership of Egypt on his blog. He was critical of, among other things, Egypt's treatment of women and of its Coptic Christian minority. Supporters report that during those four years, Amer was tortured, beaten, attacked by other prisoners, disowned by his family and had his books, letters and personal effects taken away. His case is of international interest not just because of his humanity, but because of the political conflict between authoritarian states and a new world of freely self-published bloggers who would challenge them with new Web technology.

Amer's supporters say he is declining interviews while recovering from his detention.

Part of a Larger Trend

Though Kareem Amer was the longest-imprisoned blogger known, detained for most of the history of this young phenomenon called Social Media, he was not alone.

A report by international media watchdog organization Reporters Sans Frontières last year found that there were 151 people in prison around the world because of the contents of their blogs in 2009, a nearly three-fold increase over 2008.

Iranian cultural satire blogger Omid Reza Misayafi is believed to be the only blogger killed in prison to date. He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 months in prison for "insulting Islamic Republic Leaders" but died under mysterious and allegedly abusive circumstances after just six months of detention.

With brave bloggers in mind who are free, imprisoned and deceased around the world, we leave you with the moving short video Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, about just one of many places where disruptive social media and authoritarian tradition clash, and where the stakes are at their highest.

SCVNGR is also switching away from its own proprietary location database. Thanks to its close relationship with Google (SCVNGR is, in part, funded by Google Ventures), the service is the first site to leverage the new Google Places API.]]> As the company's founder and "Chief Ninja" Seth Priebatsch told us yesterday, switching to the Google Places API allowed SCVNGR to quickly scale globally, as it can now rely on Google's extensive location database to power its service. SCVNGR users will now also be able to create challenges and treks - the central gaming elements on the service - at all of these locations. As we noted when Google first announced it, the Places API "could do for check-ins what Google Maps did for maps." As Priebatsch told us, the fact that Google gave his company access to this comprehensive global database with millions of locations made switching to it a no-brainer.

While SCVNGR plans to launch localized versions of its apps in the future, the interface is currently only available in English. Users can create challenges using their own languages, however.

The service, which launched just 20 weeks ago, currently has about half a million users, though it's not clear how many of these are active users. Priebatsch also told us that the company has managed to double the number of enterprise clients since its official launch to over 1000. SCVNGR clearly has a lot of momentum going for it right now and it will be interesting to see how the service develops now that it is going global.

Enterprise Marketing Management and Automation Tools

Aprimo Marketing Studio, SAS On Demand and Unica On Demand are some of the market leaders in Web-based marketing management and automation for enterprises. Unica was recently acquired by IBM, possibly to integrate it with some of its e-commerce properties like Sterling Commerce and WebSphere. Logistics software company CDC also offers a Web-based marketing automation tool.

SMB Marketing Tools

SMBs needing a streamlined solution for both logistics and marketing automation should take a look at Netsuite. Other Web-based marketing automation tools for SMBs include Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. If the marketing automation tools built into the solutions above don't cut it for you, Pardot is a marketing automation application that can integrate with CRM solutions like Salesforce.com and Netsuite.

If you just need a Web-based tool with limited automation features for dealing with e-mail marketing campaigns, take a look at both AWeber and Mail Chimp. AWeber also supports some limited social media engagement in the form of sending Facebook and Twitter announcements.

Social Media Marketing Management

For those going beyond e-mail, several tools have emerged for managing social media marketing campaigns. KickApps offers a social media management tool that includes a full content management system, so that you can tightly integrate your entire wWb strategy - from your own site to Facebook - through one tool. It also integrates with other CMSs and WebSphere.

Jive Software offers a market-leading social media engagement solution, and WildFire is quite popular as well.

Website Localization

If you want to have your site available in multiple languages, automatic translation tools aren't going to cut it. You're going to need to hire professional translators and website localizers.

However, if you really need to have a site translated but can't pay for it, and you're fluent enough in another language that you could translate someone else's website, you can check out Free Localization. It's a translation exchange site - you volunteer some time translating a site, someone else translates your site.

For more information on Web localization:

Ten Tips for Website Localization

About.com's localization site

Photo by jaylopez

May 28th saw the iPad on sale in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

"The press here is already dead, so all of them are praying for the iPad to resurrect them, but after a few weeks, they are starting to realize things aren't that simple. The US iPad release sounded like a big PR party in all the french press, but today's official launch in France looks more like a hangover."

About a month ago, Apple had sold half a million devices and said inventory would not tolerate opening to foreign markets as soon as they had planned. Inventory is still an issue, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"Analysts estimate that Apple will sell about 1.7 million iPads in the April-to-June quarter and five million for the year world-wide."

Analysts also anticipate that about a third of Apple's sales will be U.S.-based and the rest shared with the remaining global market.

With over a million iPads sold, it has been described as "the fastest consumer product growth to the $1 billion revenue mark in history."

In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don't know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person's profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person's name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.

This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months.

Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages

Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says "Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb."

Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling.

Based on the strong U.S. demand for Apple's new iPads, the company has decided it would delay the product's international release for a month.

Apple "will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10."

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Our Spain channel is edited by Ignacio García Ramos. Ignacio and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Spain's Web market. Like the mothership ReadWriteWeb, the Spain channel will focus on Web trends and products.

Ignacio gave us the following background about Spain:

"We happen to be a country with very few English speakers (by European standards), so we feel that bringing home a valuable piece of Sillicon Valley and making it accessible to our entrepreneurs, startups and hobbyists is a way of contributing to pushing this country forward in technology. We would like to gather a community of decision takers and influential professionals around ReadWriteWeb Spain and make things happen.

Our economy has largely been based on construction and the economic turmoil has hit us hard. There is talk of "changing bricks for computers". We want to be at the cutting edge of this movement and we found no better vehicle than ReadWriteWeb.

We also share a lot of ReadWriteWeb's interests, like the semantic and the real-time web; and values such as analytical, uncompromisable journalism. It's great to stay current on those issues, thanks to your updates [at ReadWriteWeb.com] and best practices, but we'll also broadcast news and trends from this side of the Atlantic."

You can also follow ReadWriteWeb Spain on Twitter @rwwes - and all of our country sites at the Twitter list rww/international.

The opening post, translated in English here, was written by Jaime Garcia Cantero and is an in-depth look at Internet trends in Spain. Jaime Garcia Cantero is an associate of IDC Spain and assistant professor of IDG Communications of the EOI. He is considered to be one of Spain's most influential analysts.

Our Brazil channel is edited by Diego Gomes. Diego and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Brazil's emerging Web market.

ReadWriteWeb has a natural affinity for the international Web - after all, the company was founded by a New Zealander (yours truly)! For more context about our global strategy, read Bernard Lunn's post Do You Speak Global Innovation?.

RWW Brazil Sponsor Opportunities

ReadWriteWeb Brazil already has two key sponsors, who we'd like to thank here:

• UOL HOST, the top .com domain registrar in Brazil and a provider of quality web hosting, e-commerce, e-mail marketing and data center services.
• PagSeguro, the leading Brazilian online payments and money transfer service. It allows users to send and receive payments via e-mail or using credit cards, bank account transfers or bank payment slip.

If you're a Brazilian Internet company or an international company seeking to reach an influential readership in Brazil, please contact the RWW Brazil editor to find out about their sponsor and partner opportunities.

Brazil's Web Market

We last wrote about the Brazil web market back in September 2006, at a time when Brazilians were 70% of the user base of Google's social network Orkut. We noted at the time that Brazilian Web users had a special affinity for community, which was reflected in the web apps that were popular in Brazil at that time.

For an up-to-date review of Brazil's web market, check out this presentation by comScore:

According to Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, roughly 70% of the company's users are now outside of the U.S., so cooperating with an international investment firm seemed to make sense in order to bring a global perspective to Facebook's operations. DST will not get a seat on Facebook's board, however.

Update from press conference:

While the press conference did not feature any really exciting revelations, Zuckerberg stressed that Facebook is doing well financially. The company does not have any immediate plans for the cash it will receive from DST. Zuckerberg was also asked about a possible IPO, but according to Facebook's CEO, an IPO is not on the "immediate horizon."

Being asked about Microsoft's investment in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation, Zuckerberg mostly sidestepped the issue, but stressed that this investment was part of a larger partnership at the top of the bubble and that he thinks that $10 billion valuation is "fair" and that he "feels good" about it.

Zuckerberg expects that Facebook's revenue will continue to grow about 70% year over year and that the company will be cash-flow positive in 2010.

While the companies did not directly confirm a relationship between the common stock deal and cashing out options from Facebook's employees, Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook would have more to announce about this in the future and it was quite clear that Facebook and DST talked about this.

Given the nature of the call, there was not a lot of focus on specific features, but Zuckerberg did confirm that Facebook is testing out a video chat feature. Our friends at All Facebook spotted references to this in Facebook's code two weeks ago.

Original post follows:

Digital Sky Technologies is a major player in Eastern Europe, and with Mail.ru, Forticom, and vKontakte among its assets, the company claims to account for over 70 percent of all all page views on the Russian-speaking Internet. Interestingly, DST (mostly through its investment in Forticom) also owns interests in a number of social networks like one.lt and Odnoklassniki.ru.

This deal also fits in well with other rumors about Facebook trying to raise capital to allow its employees to cash out some of their options. Just two weeks ago, our colleagues at VentureBeat reported that Facebook's current investors "found it a stretch to supply the full amount of capital" that would be needed to provide Facebook with enough money to allow it to buy out roughly 15 million common shares at around $10 each.

International Growth

While we knew that Facebook had built up an impressive international following, this is the first time that we have heard Zuckerberg mention that 70% of the service's users now come from outside of the U.S. If this is indeed true, then this is quite a remarkable achievement for a company that used to struggle to grow outside of the U.S. market. We can only assume that the rapid growth of Facebook in the U.K. and Canada has helped the service to achieve these numbers.

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.

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?

One of the things that hinders private-sector engagement in sub-Saharan Africa is that banks offer very little in the way of credit systems. This means there is no PayPal, no oDesk, and no eLance. So even if you're the smartest, most talented developer in the East African community, your options for making money are limited to groups you can physically interact with to receive payment. Meanwhile, most of the money coming into the region from developmental programs goes to government groups and often doesn't end up in the hands of the people it's intended to help. This creates a vacuum for entrepreneurs who have no sources of private funding, no source of government funding, and few ways to engage the outside world.

After the clinic was held, I caught up with Charlie and Leila to ask them about their experiences and views on the East African development scene.

Charlie Cheever, Facebook

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background at Facebook?

Charlie: Right now, I oversee platform engineering at Facebook, which encompasses our developer platform and Facebook Connect and some parts of the facebook.com website. I studied computer science in college, then worked at Amazon.com for a few years before joining Facebook.

You've mentioned that although Facebook covered all the costs of the actual Developers Garage, it wouldn't sponsor your travel expenses. What inspired you to use your own money and resources to get here?

Charlie: Facebook's been really supportive of our developer community. I wanted to make this trip to see Africa, and it worked out that you and Leila were able to set up a Dev Garage here.

Did your perception of Africa change after arriving here?

Charlie: Somewhat. The things that surprised me most were how knowledgable people were about American politics. One of our guides out in the national forest quoted McCain's concession speech -- and he didn't seem unusual or anything. The cities here are more modern than you see in most movies or documentaries, but the villages can be pretty poor, and there's not much infrastructure here outside of Kampala.

What were some of the challenges of running a session about developing for the web here? How did you overcome them?

Charlie: Most of the challenges here stem from the spotty connectivity. If you're doing regular old web programming, you can just run things locally, and the connectivity isn't too much of an issue. But when you're making a Facebook app, there's no way to get around the need for connectivity to Facebook. A related challenge is hosting. You want your server to be close to your end users and also to Facebook's servers, and that's tough to do in Africa.

What I ended up doing was making a Facebook app that the garage participants could type code into that would run on the hosting service I use. For the more advanced developers who wanted to make full apps, we used AppJet, which is a really cool free hosting service that uses server-side JavaScript. Things worked out pretty well, I thought.

One of the questions that came up a lot from the developers was about Facebook Connect: it's still pretty early, but how is Facebook Connect changing things at Facebook?

Charlie: I think the biggest reason that so many people are excited about Connect is that now you can really start to see how Facebook and things like it are going to be a part of everything we do. Soon, I think we'll have things like airlines adopting Connect and showing you people you know who are on the same flight as you and where they're sitting. Today, we expect every business and service today to have a website; in a few years, we'll expect everyone to integrate with Facebook and other web services.

Do you see Facebook playing a big role in changing the state of developing countries, either as an economic platform or as a way for people to communicate?

Charlie: As a way to communicate, definitely. What's really cool is how small the gap is between the developing world and the US on this. Even outside of the event we put on, I saw a bunch of people using Facebook in Africa -- and Facebook hasn't even reached everyone in America yet and has only been around for 4 years. If you compare that to other game-chaning communication mechanisms, like landline phones, which have been wired up in America for decades but never really happened in most of the developing world, or even cell phones, for which the developing world has good connectivity but most people use pretty old school phones, it's really cool to see how things are so similar in America and Uganda. The biggest reason for this is that the new wave of communication platforms, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, etc., are software-based, and it's actually easier and cheaper to distribute the same software to everyone in the world, whereas with things requiring physical infrastructure, that isn't true. Facebook is still evolving as an economic platform, and I don't think the full power has been even close to realized yet. When we figure that out more, we'll start to get a better idea of how it might change the economic landscape in the developing world. Right now, its hard to say how that will play out.

There's a group in Egypt using Facebook to mobilize against the oppressive government. A similar group is using Facebook to support activism in Somalia. Is it exciting to see Facebook at the center of real change movements?

Charlie: It is really amazing. I think people have always organized like this, but one great thing about Facebook is that people like you and I can see how people in Egypt and Somalia are organizing as it's happening, and I think with the proliferation of the web and tools like Facebook, these things can happen faster and more efficiently.

The other day I asked you why Facebook hasn't implemented clean URLs, something most other social networks have. I was actually surprised at how much the response made sense. Can you repeat that for ReadWriteWeb readers?

Charlie: The main reason is that we want the Facebook product to be intuitive for everyone in the world, not just for technical people. In real life, most people keep track of their friends by their real names, not usernames like angeldog007, so we've tried to focus the product around using real names as much as possible. I think it makes it easier to find people on the site and also to find one's way around the site. For a few things, like applications [http://apps.facebook.com/appname], we do have pretty URLs, so we do use them when we think it makes sense.

What would be your advice to other developers in the Valley who want to get involved in the African technology scene.

Charlie: The usual stuff: scour the web for anything you can find, read blogs, follow people on Twitter who you find, friend them on Facebook. Once you connect with people in the scene, getting involved is easy. The African tech scene has a few quirks, but overall it's pretty similar to tech communities everywhere else in the world.

What is your advice to "third-world" computer science students who want to work for Facebook?

Charlie: The most important thing I think you can do is find a way to get yourself a great Internet connection and then spend a lot of time building things and teaching yourself stuff -- beyond just doing schoolwork. After that, I'd work on finding a way to physically get to Silicon Valley. Even in today's high-tech connected world, there's really no substitute for proximity.

On page 2, we hear from Leila Chirayath from Samasource

Leila Chirayath, Samasource

Why did you start Samasource?

Leila: I think the biggest tragedy associated with poverty is wasted talent. As a volunteer teacher in Ghana in my late teens, I was struck by how bright my students were and how few opportunities they had to use their skills productively. We have this perception in the US that the world is a reasonably functioning meritocracy -- in fact, it's much more like a lottery.

I became a management consultant after graduating from college, and my first client was a large outsourcing company in Mumbai. I'd walk the halls after work and discovered that many of the staff lived in slum communities around the city and were supporting entire families with their incomes. For young Indians, these jobs offered an entry into global business and a shot at putting their talents to use.

I began thinking about a system that would encourage greater local ownership -- by workers, rather than large multinational companies -- and extend the benefits of outsourcing to skilled workers in the bottom billion.

Can you explain some of the challenges you face in the US in advocating for small businesses in developing countries?

Leila: Where do I begin? Our biggest challenge is convincing people that there is a surplus of skilled talent in very poor regions, particularly Africa. The general response is, "Don't people there need to focus on the basics -- agriculture, health, education -- rather than on trying to build service companies?" Years of development studies have given us the answer to that question: the only sustainable path out of poverty for many poor countries is increased international trade, particularly in industries that rely on human capital.

People tend to irrationally aggregate the countries in Africa, which leads many to believe that doing business anywhere on the continent entails driving through refugee camps or bribing corrupt officials. Potential clients are shocked when we show them videos of our partner firms in Nairobi in modern office buildings, filled with educated young people in suits. We spend a good deal of time repairing Africa's public image and convincing clients that doing business with small, locally owned service companies in places like Uganda is a win-win: they can lower their costs while contributing to sustainable economic development.

What kind of support does Samasource have already, and what kind of support would help you sustain your model?

Leila: Samasource was a second-place winner in the global Business in Development Challenge in December 2007 [a $22,000 award] and the Stanford Social Enterprise Challenge in April 2008 [a $12,000 award], which funded our feasibility study and the launch of our pilot earlier this year. We have received countless hours of volunteer support to build our initial website and sales team.

The nice thing about our model is that we're sustainable: Samasource makes a commission on work we broker for the providers in our global network. We're trying to raise about $350,000 to build out the organization, and after that we plan to run our organization largely on earned income.

Is the world financial crisis affecting any of the small firms you work with?

Leila: We have eight small firms in our network: in Kenya, rural India, and Nepal. The biggest hit our firms took was during the Kenyan elections crisis earlier this year. Many US companies left Kenya immediately, though there were few actual service interruptions.

The global financial crisis may make it harder for our firms in developing countries to raise capital for expansion, but it will likely have a positive impact on sales. Outsourcing tends to grow when client companies are pressed for cash.

What did you think about the Kampala Dev Garage? You've done these in Ghana and Kenya. How did Uganda compare?

Leila: We were lucky to have Charlie attend in person. In Nairobi, we were only able to patch in Silicon Valley coaches via online chatrooms. With the spotty Internet connection we had there, it was very challenging to coordinate 80 people in chat rooms at once. I think having someone attend from Facebook was also really exciting for students. Silicon Valley engineers rarely spend much time in sub-Saharan Africa. Charlie also had a chance to learn what the local technology scene was like and will transfer that knowledge to his peers in the Valley.

This interview is a follow-up to an audio interview I conducted with Charlie and Leila on Appfricast. I also conducted an interview with three attendees (one Peace Corps volunteer, one local student, and one successful East African entrepreneur) to see if they thought the workshop was relevant and how it would directly impact their lives. You can listen to that podcast here.

Appfricast is a weekly podcast about the African technology scene. Appfrica Labs is an incubation program for software entrepreneurs in East Africa modeled on Paul Graham's YCombinator. Photos by TMS Ruge, Leila Chirayath, and various attendees. You can find the Kampala Facebook Developers groups here. More photos from the day here.

Disclosure: it was mentioned at the top of this post, but to reiterate that the author Jonathan Gosier's company Appfrica Labs was one of the 3 organizers of the event described here. Jonathan Gosier is a web developer and social entrepreneur living and working in Kampala, Uganda.

This is the second in our series of top products of 2008, the first can be found here:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

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.

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

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.