December 8, 2008 at 22:07Top 10 Internet projects of 2008 according to ReadWriteWeb
- Transfer
ReadWriteWeb selected 10 projects made outside the US that create innovative services and support global Web standards. The compilers of the chart admit that many interesting projects were not mentioned, but this happened because the authors were not familiar with them. And they urge you to talk about interesting projects in the comments on their article on The New York Times. I urge you in your comments to talk about Russian projects that can compete in the global market, at the moment there are no Russian companies on the chart.
1. Remember The Milk: Australia www.rememberthemilk.com
Remember The Milk is an Australian startup that has developed an internet task manager designed to manage its time and work. It all started in 2004, with Omar Kilani, Emily Boyd and a teddy monkey united by one simple idea. The development of this idea led to the creation and launch in 2005 of Remember The Milk.
RTM has experienced a huge influx of users in recent years: by October 2006, 100 thousand people were using the service, 200 thousand was reached in May 2007, 500 thousand in March 2008. During 2008, RTM had a significant impact on Internet users. RTM now has over a million users. RTM was also named one of CNET's Webware 100 Award winners in April, in May ReadWriteWeb readers chose RTM as one of the best among Internet applications. Recently, RTM created a gadget for Gmail and an application for the iPhone.
2. Afrigator: South Africa www.afrigator.com
Afrigator is a social media aggregator from an African community blog similar to Technorati. Every blogger in Africa can use Afrigator to promote his blog.
Launched in 2007 (alpha), Afrigator had a steady increase of 25% every month, and beta was launched in November of that year. In September 2008, MIH Print Africa became the main owner of the company, giving the startup a respite and the opportunity to work on a new project: Adgator, the first African advertising network. Currently tracked by 4,159 blogs from across the continent, Afrigator is the best place to find content from the Afrosphere.
3. Zoho: India www.zoho.com
Zoho is a startup from India offering office applications, project management software and CRM solutions. During 2008, they seriously improved the quality and functionality of office applications, reaching 1 million users in August this year.
In early 2008, Zoho updated Writer to include support for the DocX format and added a few more features. In April, Visual Basic macros support was implemented in Zoho Sheet, macro recording and playback appeared a month later. In October, Zoho Mail pulled out of closed beta testing, making it available to everyone by offering offline access through Google Gears.
4. Netvibes: France www.netvibes.com
Users from 200 countries have created more than 50 million startup pages on Netvibes since its launch in 2006. Available in 76 languages, Netvibes has been named one of the best sites in 2007 by the Times. But this did not make the creators enjoy fame and honor, they made Netvibes bigger and better, and in April 2008 Netvibes Ginger was launched.
Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to share your new content with Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs with friends, it also allows you to follow the updates of your friends. In November, Netvibes added support for Facebook Connect and Twitter.
5. Dopplr: Finland / England www.dopplr.com
Dopplr is a startup that allows you to share travel plans and find friends who are going to visit the same city as you, or just live there. Since its inception, the company almost immediately acquired large investors and, according to Compete reports, has shown significant growth.
Last month, Dopplr launched new city pages with photos imported from Flickr that Dopplr users took while traveling to visualize user activity in cities. If you are not using Dopplr, you will start soon, we think that Dopplr is a promising project.
6. Maxthon: China www.maxthon.com
The browser market has changed a lot in 2008, Google's Chrome appeared in September, Mozilla's Firefox 3 got an entry in the Guinness book in June, Internet Explorer is losing ground, and Firefox is taking its place. In Asia, another browser creates waves. Maxthon, based on the statistics of the European company Xiti, creates problems for its main rival Firefox. This was not a revelation, and Mozilla recently released a special version of Firefox for China.
Maxthon, a browser made in China, now it occupies the 2nd position among the most popular browsers of this country. At the moment, it does not claim to be the most common browser, only 174 million downloads at the moment. Using the Internet Explorer engine, Maxthon has more than 1400 plugins, proxy switching ability, aggressive ad blocker, split-screen browsing function; these are just a few of the browser features. We said this two years ago, and let's say it again, this project deserves attention.
7. Xing: Germany www.xing.com
Xing, the German social network for professionals, and the first Web 2.0 company to go public (December 2006), today has more than 6.5 million users, is now engaged in globalization, along with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has over 30 million users, based on Compete research, its annual growth is 179.6%, more than that of Xing with its 137.6%. However, it's important to note that monetization is not LinkedIn's strong point. A Xing visitor stays on the site for an average of 43.4 minutes, while LinkedIn has 7.8 minutes, the difference is 456%. We believe that Xing made some good decisions this year, especially the recent arrival at Stefan Gross-Selbeck.
8. FreshBooks: Canada www.freshbooks.com
FreshBooks, a Canadian startup, a service for accounting accounting, both personal and for small companies, has shown steady growth over the past year; more than 500 thousand users are registered on the service.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, our verdict: it is easier to use, it has a number of useful built-in functions, there is an active forum and the possibility of comparative analysis. We recently rated FreshBooks Report Cards a feature that allows you to compare your business with similar ones in your area. The service was chosen as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders of Canada in September this year and we believe that Freshbooks deserves mention in this rating too.
9. Mixi: Japan www.mixi.jp
Mixi, Japan's largest social network (available only in Japanese), was previously known for its closed platform. But since August of this year, Mixi began supporting OpenID, that is, it became an OpenID provider for millions of Japanese users.
Giving the opportunity to enter Mixi with OpenID from other networks, Mixi dramatically increased its functionality, according to the Asiajin blog this “discovery” is quite radical for Mixi standards.
10. Wuala: Switzerland www.wua.la A
Swiss startup offers an unusual social file storage system: it uses the disk space of network participants as part of a shared hard drive (cloud). Wuala was launched in August 2008, it is the youngest startup on our list.
Wuala is different from other file hosting services. The advantage in the absence of a file size limit and the width of your connection, the big drawback in AES-128 and RSA-2048 encryption, the idea of placing files on computers scattered around the world, may not appeal to everyone. But with 28 million files uploaded at the moment, Wuala certainly deserves your attention.
Original:
www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2008/12/05/05readwriteweb-top_10_international_products_2008.html
1. Remember The Milk: Australia www.rememberthemilk.com
Remember The Milk is an Australian startup that has developed an internet task manager designed to manage its time and work. It all started in 2004, with Omar Kilani, Emily Boyd and a teddy monkey united by one simple idea. The development of this idea led to the creation and launch in 2005 of Remember The Milk.
RTM has experienced a huge influx of users in recent years: by October 2006, 100 thousand people were using the service, 200 thousand was reached in May 2007, 500 thousand in March 2008. During 2008, RTM had a significant impact on Internet users. RTM now has over a million users. RTM was also named one of CNET's Webware 100 Award winners in April, in May ReadWriteWeb readers chose RTM as one of the best among Internet applications. Recently, RTM created a gadget for Gmail and an application for the iPhone.
2. Afrigator: South Africa www.afrigator.com
Afrigator is a social media aggregator from an African community blog similar to Technorati. Every blogger in Africa can use Afrigator to promote his blog.
Launched in 2007 (alpha), Afrigator had a steady increase of 25% every month, and beta was launched in November of that year. In September 2008, MIH Print Africa became the main owner of the company, giving the startup a respite and the opportunity to work on a new project: Adgator, the first African advertising network. Currently tracked by 4,159 blogs from across the continent, Afrigator is the best place to find content from the Afrosphere.
3. Zoho: India www.zoho.com
Zoho is a startup from India offering office applications, project management software and CRM solutions. During 2008, they seriously improved the quality and functionality of office applications, reaching 1 million users in August this year.
In early 2008, Zoho updated Writer to include support for the DocX format and added a few more features. In April, Visual Basic macros support was implemented in Zoho Sheet, macro recording and playback appeared a month later. In October, Zoho Mail pulled out of closed beta testing, making it available to everyone by offering offline access through Google Gears.
4. Netvibes: France www.netvibes.com
Users from 200 countries have created more than 50 million startup pages on Netvibes since its launch in 2006. Available in 76 languages, Netvibes has been named one of the best sites in 2007 by the Times. But this did not make the creators enjoy fame and honor, they made Netvibes bigger and better, and in April 2008 Netvibes Ginger was launched.
Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to share your new content with Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs with friends, it also allows you to follow the updates of your friends. In November, Netvibes added support for Facebook Connect and Twitter.
5. Dopplr: Finland / England www.dopplr.com
Dopplr is a startup that allows you to share travel plans and find friends who are going to visit the same city as you, or just live there. Since its inception, the company almost immediately acquired large investors and, according to Compete reports, has shown significant growth.
Last month, Dopplr launched new city pages with photos imported from Flickr that Dopplr users took while traveling to visualize user activity in cities. If you are not using Dopplr, you will start soon, we think that Dopplr is a promising project.
6. Maxthon: China www.maxthon.com
The browser market has changed a lot in 2008, Google's Chrome appeared in September, Mozilla's Firefox 3 got an entry in the Guinness book in June, Internet Explorer is losing ground, and Firefox is taking its place. In Asia, another browser creates waves. Maxthon, based on the statistics of the European company Xiti, creates problems for its main rival Firefox. This was not a revelation, and Mozilla recently released a special version of Firefox for China.
Maxthon, a browser made in China, now it occupies the 2nd position among the most popular browsers of this country. At the moment, it does not claim to be the most common browser, only 174 million downloads at the moment. Using the Internet Explorer engine, Maxthon has more than 1400 plugins, proxy switching ability, aggressive ad blocker, split-screen browsing function; these are just a few of the browser features. We said this two years ago, and let's say it again, this project deserves attention.
7. Xing: Germany www.xing.com
Xing, the German social network for professionals, and the first Web 2.0 company to go public (December 2006), today has more than 6.5 million users, is now engaged in globalization, along with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has over 30 million users, based on Compete research, its annual growth is 179.6%, more than that of Xing with its 137.6%. However, it's important to note that monetization is not LinkedIn's strong point. A Xing visitor stays on the site for an average of 43.4 minutes, while LinkedIn has 7.8 minutes, the difference is 456%. We believe that Xing made some good decisions this year, especially the recent arrival at Stefan Gross-Selbeck.
8. FreshBooks: Canada www.freshbooks.com
FreshBooks, a Canadian startup, a service for accounting accounting, both personal and for small companies, has shown steady growth over the past year; more than 500 thousand users are registered on the service.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, our verdict: it is easier to use, it has a number of useful built-in functions, there is an active forum and the possibility of comparative analysis. We recently rated FreshBooks Report Cards a feature that allows you to compare your business with similar ones in your area. The service was chosen as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders of Canada in September this year and we believe that Freshbooks deserves mention in this rating too.
9. Mixi: Japan www.mixi.jp
Mixi, Japan's largest social network (available only in Japanese), was previously known for its closed platform. But since August of this year, Mixi began supporting OpenID, that is, it became an OpenID provider for millions of Japanese users.
Giving the opportunity to enter Mixi with OpenID from other networks, Mixi dramatically increased its functionality, according to the Asiajin blog this “discovery” is quite radical for Mixi standards.
10. Wuala: Switzerland www.wua.la A
Swiss startup offers an unusual social file storage system: it uses the disk space of network participants as part of a shared hard drive (cloud). Wuala was launched in August 2008, it is the youngest startup on our list.
Wuala is different from other file hosting services. The advantage in the absence of a file size limit and the width of your connection, the big drawback in AES-128 and RSA-2048 encryption, the idea of placing files on computers scattered around the world, may not appeal to everyone. But with 28 million files uploaded at the moment, Wuala certainly deserves your attention.
Original:
www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2008/12/05/05readwriteweb-top_10_international_products_2008.html