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If you want something more capable than Hootsuite to handle your social media marketing, then you might want to take a closer look at what Pardot's Marketing Automation service provides. The marketing automation platform has gotten some new social media features that complement its existing tools for handling CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting.

It's a little discussed but widely-known fact that Twitter is bigger outside the United States than it is inside its home country: it's huge in Brazil, Japan and the Philippines, for example. It turns out Twitter's pretty hot in the Spanish speaking world, too.

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 story behind Stuxnet, the malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear processing station, has been known in general since last fall when a team of researchers at Symantec released this document, which we covered at the time in our article here. But seeing is believing. I had a chance to attend a special briefing at Symantec's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. where Patrick Gardner, a director in their security group, actually showed us what was involved. It was a real thrill.

Recently I was honored with an invitation from President Sarkozy of France to attend the e-G8 Summit.

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.

In any growing business, one way to increase your market potential is by expanding to other countries; specifically, to those where you see little or no competition or which are crying out for the solutions your business is offering.

Here are a few issues that companies should understand before expanding internationally.

The man believed to have been imprisoned longer than anyone else in the world for the contents of a blog, Egyptian Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, has been released after four years and 10 days of detention, his supporters have announced on their blog.

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.

SCVNGR is a location-based service with apps for the iPhone and Android that wants to add a "game layer on top of the world." Starting today, the company is getting closer to this goal, as it is going international and expanding to about 80 new countries. Until today, SCVNGR was only available in the U.S.

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.

While the logistics of moving goods and information around the globe is rapidly changing, marketing to international audiences, for the most part, is little different from marketing domestically. Abe Burmeister, co-founder of apparel company Outlier Tailored says, "We don't really make any distinction between local and international. It's all the World Wide Web and we sell all over the world. " Starting with a comprehensive marketing plan and solid tools is the first step, but globally minded business people will want to add a few extra tools to their toolboxes. Here are a few resources to get you started.

Most of the talk surrounding immigration reform in the U.S. these days is coming from my home state of Arizona where controversial laws like Senate Bill 1070 have the nation divided. For entrepreneurs, there are other laws - mainly those surrounding work visas and green card acquisition - that are in dire need of reform if the nation is going to rebound on the back of innovation. Thursday night, the tech community was again reminded of this need when Robert Scoble posted a blog and video interview with a pair of foreign-born entrepreneurs who shared their varying but equally troubling stories of immigration.

On Friday, Apple debuted their iPad tablet in nine countries. Apple already pushed back international sales a month with the explanation that the demand in the U.S. was too great to go international at that time.

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