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.

But that's not all. If you play well enough, show some creativity, and exude passion, you may find yourself seated in the famed Carnegie Hall, performing live with other YouTube musicians.

The contest is open to all musicians over age 14, regardless of instrument or skill. But it's not going to be easy. It's going to take some practice.

To begin, download the sheet music and start learning your part. The music? You get to pick your favorite classical piece to showcase your talent. And you'll also have the opportunity to perform a new piece - "The Internet Symphony" - by Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Grammy and Oscar winning composer of the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But you won't be practicing alone. YouTube will help you learn the music, rehearse, and upload your performance for the virtual symphony video. Along the way you'll gain insight from Tan Dun and the London Symphony Orchestra, and get tips from pianist Lang Lang. Rest assured, all of your hard work and practice will pay off, culminating in a unique YouTube concert composed of users from around the globe.

If you perform well enough, there may be more in store for you. Musicians who exhibit that certain je ne se quois will get the opportunity to perform at the renowned Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Submissions are open until January 28, 2009. The live performance in Carnegie Hall will be held in April 2009.

Now, would be a good time to start practicing.

'Unintentional'

After assessing the damage he had done, Heilmann, according to a post on his own site, has now decided not to press any further charges against the non-profit organization behind the German Wikipedia project, though he might still press charges against the authors of the controversial statements in his Wikipedia entry. In this statement, Heilmann argues that he never intended for the whole site to be shut down because of this, but that he wasn't able to stop the German bureaucracy from taking its course during the weekend because of a legal error in his request to have the ban overturned.

Streisand Effect

Of course, the whole affair spectacularly backfired on Heilmann and turned out to be a boon for the German Wikipedia, which collected donations worth over 32,000 Euros during the weekend. The controversial article about Heilman was read over half a million times since last Friday.

RWW France will be covering the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 next week and they have tickets to give away if you're one of our European readers.

Romain gave us some background on why RWW France was created and what they plan to do with the site, along with profiles of the team:

"ReadWriteWeb France was started with the purpose of providing French people another way to read about the web and learn from it. We intend to make the French version not just a translation of the ReadWriteWeb website, but to add to it the French point of view and market knowledge of web experts who have joined the French team - as well as original content to highlight and analyze what's currently happening in Europe, starting with the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin coverage next week.

The French team includes Fabrice Epelboin, entrepreneur and partner at Aladia (branding & strategic consulting shop) and social web consultant at Kantik.com; Damien Douani, Concept & Business Development Manager at Orange / Innovation department - explocentre; Jeremie Moritz, Business Manager Southern Europe - Metaboli (online content distribution); and Charles Liebert, Digital & Interactiv Marketing Manager at Orange Vallée as an occasional author."

Welcome Romain and team, thanks for translating us into French and we look forward to reading your original content (via Google Translate probably).

p.s. Kudos to eagle-eyed Techcrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon, who spotted RWW France as soon as it began posting.

In this post we look at the state of the fast-growing mobile industry in Africa. This is the second post in our series on Africa's Web (Part 1 is here).

The tough conditions developers face in the continent provide some challenges but overcoming them offers something greater. According to Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman:

"The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."

Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.

Mobile Penetration Statistics from Africa

• At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%
• Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country.
• Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
• Increased competition as more operators come online in each country (11 in Nigeria, 4 in Kenya and SA, 3 in Egypt and Morocco)
• Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region.
• The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers.
• In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

via PICNIC2008

African Innovations in Mobile

A broad look at some of the tech being produced for the mobile industry by the continent...

Micro-payments and Mobile Banking

In Africa, until recently, there's been no easy way for consumers to purchase things other than with cash. Most financial institutions on the continent don't offer credit credit cards, and those that do have trouble finding other institutions that will accept them. This has lead to an incredible amount of innovation in the areas of micro-payments and mobile banking. MPESA by Safaricom (micro-payments) and Wizzit (mobile banking) are examples.

Mobile News Reporting

Because of the lack of basic infrastructure, getting information from one place to another quickly is often extremely difficult. A number of organizations have tackled this problem using Mobile devices. mPedigree offers a way to authenticate pharmaceutical drugs and prescriptions using SMS. Winafrique tackles issues with communication and power by offering wind powered cellular towers. QuestionBox.org collects data from and distributes it to rural areas using a SMS/web/voice platform. Ushahidi allows people to report and geolocate incidents of violence and incident using SMS.

Mobile Application Developers

Kenya's Mobile Planet made news in August when Google announced that they'd be investing in the mobile application start-up. Mobile Planet specializes in the development of wireless voice & data applications for mobile devices in Kenya, with a special focus on SMS-based products and services. Meanwhile, independent developers like Moris Mbetsa have repurposed mobile technology for all sorts of solutions like this anti-theft and tracking system for vehicles.

See also: Social Media in Africa, Part 1

The point of this series is to highlight African contributions to social media and, in turn, reveal how social media is changing Africa.

Things aren't perfect; the continent still suffers from disproportionate amounts of poverty, the vast majority of people remain without reliable electricity and the spread of AIDS claimed about 1.6 million African lives in 2006. Historically, that's all the world has known about Africa - but the facts are changing and other aspects of the continent deserve attention. For one, Africans are embracing the web and all things associated.

The Web Community in Africa

Technology unconferences and Barcamps have sprung up all over the continent, everywhere from Kenya to Nairobi to Madagascar to Uganda and Senegal. Although terrestrial broadband infrastructure is still a problem, VSat has provided internet connectivity in areas that don't even have electricity. There were a number of protests from the continent when Twitter shut down it's international services.

It's no wonder, then, that a number of companies, investors and entrepreneurs have taken a second look at the continent. Google especially seems to have taken an interest in supporting the burgeoning tech renaissance in Africa. They recently agreed to facilitate Barcamp Africa at their world headquarters at GooglePlex in Mountain View, CA, U.S.A. Beyond that, they've launched a blog to document their operations in sub-Saharan Africa and a complimentary forum.

African Social Media Leaders

The three biggest success stories of independent social media projects taking off in Africa are Afrigator (a South African aggregator of African blogs and news), Zoopy (a YouTube/Flickr like service also out of South Africa) and Ushahidi (an SMS crisis reporting and mapping engine from Kenya). All three have drawn international attention which resulted in a major investment for Zoopy and Afrigator's acquisition (ReadWriteWeb's coverage). Meanwhile Ushahidi has successfully raised several rounds of funding after winning the Net² Mashup Compeition prize of $25,000.

Afrigator

Afrigator defines itself as "a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the web." They made a big splash in the social media space when Marshall Kirkpatrick reviewed their site here on ReadWriteWeb last year. Afrigator adopted the XFN microformat standard very early on allowing their users to use their blog rolls to import friends. Afrigator makes heavy use of a proprietary filter based on an algorithm that uses page rank, incoming links and the site's overall traffic to determine what's "hot". Afrigator was created by Justin Hartman, Stii Pretorius, Mike Stopforth and Mark Forrester.

Zoopy.com

Zoopy is a South African social media tool created by Jason Elk that allows users to upload videos, podcasts, and pictures and share them on the web. Although, it can be used by anyone, it targets the niche local market of South Africa. Zoopy also uses XFN to import friends from the aforementioned Afrigator. Zoopy recently attended the Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in New York where they showcased their platform.

Ushahidi

Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was built in the aftermath of the Kenyan 2008 elections. When violence erupted, Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, Daudi Were, Segeni Ng'ethe and Juliana Chebet used their collective talents to create Ushahidi, a web app that maps SMS reports of violence by location. Ushahidi relies heavily upon GoogleMaps, which it uses for mapping reports of incidents. It's built on the Zend framework for PHP and uses a number of different protocols for SMS, GPRS and mapping data.

African Social Application Round-Up

Although these three standout applications are the most well-known home grown social media projects from Africans, there are an increasing number of social media websites coming from the continent. Here's a round-up of several. If something gets overlooked, please add it as a comment along with a description.

I've deliberately only included applications that I know were created by people from Africa. In Part Three I'll list social applications created by foreigners and nonprofit groups.

• Muti.co.za (a Digg-like South African news site)
• Sokwanele.com (an SMS/mapping application similar to Ushahidi)
• Amatomou (a South African news and social media aggregator)
• BlogSpirit (a Ugandan blog aggregator based on the open source Gregarious)
• Mzalendo (portal for tracking the actions of Kenya's Parliament)

Top image: whiteafrican

It's a new era for YouTube. No longer is the number one video of all time a plucky American dancing to 50 years of this country's greatest hits. The new leader is a video made and viewed primarily from outside the U.S., explicitly tied to a current commercial campaign and suspected to be part of the now widespread cheating on the site.

The International You

Hot Hot Sex deserves some analysis beyond the suspicions it faces. For one thing, YouTube now gets a majority of its viewer ship from outside the U.S. so it only makes sense that the #1 video of all time isn't from the U.S. There are now three of the 20 all time most viewed videos on YouTube with non-English titles. Non-native English speakers and other languages are an essential part of US culture and English titled videos are of course viewed substantially outside of the US - but the growing internationalization of the site can't help but increase the prominence of non-English videos. The victory of Hot Hot Sex is a strong signal of the global reach of YouTube.

This YouTube Clip Brought to You By...

Additionally, the new leader is a video based on a song that was popularized by an iPod Touch commercial. The YouTube folk story has been that it's the poster-child for the rise of user generated video, it's America's Funniest Home Videos broken free of the TV, it's the more authentic American Idol. It's laughing babies and piano playing cats.

Except it's not, at least at the fat end, opposite the long tail. The big majority of the most viewed videos of all time on YouTube are commercial productions. There's a laughing baby, there's an oddly unfunny puppet show and somebody playing the guitar. Other than that it's all big star music videos. It's like low-quality MTV from the days when they showed music videos. It's not user generated content at all. It would be interesting to see how the total views of User Generated content in the long-tail compare to the fat head of big act music videos, but that information would not be easy to acquire. For now, all hail the new king - Hot Hot Sex, a fan remixed commercial hit popularized by an iPod commercial. It may not be a traditional music video, but it's certainly more complicated than a laughing baby.

Pants on Fire

Allusions to sex are a big factor in much of YouTube's daily viewership (and who's not a fan of sex?) but it's widely understood that there's something even funkier going on with numbers for many videos. From home-baked page refreshing scripts to high-end soulless cheating/marketing campaigns - there's all kinds of ways to artificially inflate the number of views for your video, and thus its prominence on the popularity-based parts of the YouTube site. (See the subhuman Dan Ackerman Greenberg's post on TechCrunch, for example.)

Upcoming.org co-founder and now investigative blogger Andy Baio brought this whole story to the world's attention with some number crunching he posted today. To put it simply, Hot Hot Sex has a views-to-comments/ratings ratio wildly disproportionate with the majority of other videos on the YouTube leaderboard and there's no clear source off-site for the huge upswing in traffic the video is getting in the past few months. Its numbers look more like the numbers of some other questionable mega-hits than they do the numbers of videos like Evolution of Dance, the music videos or the laughing baby cats playing piano.

The video's creator, Italian music blogger Clarus Bartel, runs a related and active music blog, but judging from the comments and inbound links - and there are essentially none of either - it's not Bartel's blog that's driving the YouTube views. A forthcoming YouTube analytics tool suite may offer us some more perspective.

It's fishy, it's international and its commercial. It's also not a bad little video. That's the new YouTube story, at least as far as the most visible parts of the site are concerned. There's certainly still a lot of great, original, noncommercial content out in the long tail - see a search for "wheel throwing" for some great pottery videos, for example. Be that as it may, let all the subjects in the kingdom of YouTube know, there's been a change of leadership, at least as far as content is concerned.

Throw in YouTube Live, which is coming later his year, and the future of online video's biggest site is going to look very different from its storied past.