2008年12月11日星期四
Top 10 International Products of 2008
Written by Lidija Davis / December 5, 2008 4:01 PM / 21 Comments
We live in a technologically rich and increasingly Web-savvy world. In this post, we celebrate the World Wide Web by selecting our top 10 international products of 2008. What do we mean by 'international'? We looked for products that were developed outside the U.S., which showed innovation and support for global Web standards. We also tried to choose from a cross-section of countries, although obviously we couldn't cover all the major countries. That said, we hope you enjoy our selections!
Of course with so many innovative products to choose from all around the globe, some exceptional non-U.S. products didn't make the cut. So please let us know your own favorites in the comments.
This is the second in our series of top products of 2008, the first can be found here:
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 MayReadWriteWeb 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 amajority stake in Afrigator, giving the startup some breathing room to work on their new projectAdgator, 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 toZoho 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 viaGoogle 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 imagesautomatically 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 ofFirefox specifically for China.
Maxthon is a browser created in China and reported to be the second most popular browser in China today. While it doesn't show up as a contender in most market share reports, it has had a staggering 174 million downloads at the time of writing this post. Using Internet Explorer's rendering engine, Maxthon has over 1,400 add-ons, proxy switching capability, aggressive ad blocking, split-screen browsing to name a few of its innovative features. We said it two years ago, and we'll say it again: this is one to keep your eye on.
7. Xing: Germany
Xing, the German social network for business professionals and the first Web 2.0 company to go public [December 2006], today has over 6.5 million members, and is now clearly in the race toward globalization alongside LinkedIn. LinkedIn has over 30 million members, and according to Compete a 179.6% year-to-year change that beats Xing's at 137.6%. It is important however, to note the financials, something we analyzed back in March this year, which may not be completely in LinkedIn's favor. The data of particular interest concerns user engagement; visitors to Xing stay an average of 43.4 minutes on the site, while visitors to LinkedIn stay an average of 7.8 minutes - a whopping difference of 456%. We think Xing has made some good choices this year, especially the recent hire of Stefan Gross-Selbeck, as reported over on ReadWriteWeb's Jobwire.
8. FreshBooks: Canada
FreshBooks, the Canadian online invoicing, time and expense tracking service for individuals and small companies, has been showing steady growth over the past year according to Compete, and claims to have over 500K new users since May 2004.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, and decided it was easy to use, includes a host of useful features, has an active forum, and offers benchmark data by industry to its users. More recently, we looked at FreshBooks Report Cards which provide an insight into how your business fares in relation to other businesses in your profession. Selected as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders in Canada in September this year, we think Freshbooks deserves a mention here too.
9. Mixi: Japan
Mixi, Japan's biggest social network (only available in Japanese) was previously known for its closed platform. No more. In August this year, Mixi announced that it is acting as an OpenID provider - therefore bringing the global OpenID to millions of Japanese users.
While Mixi is not acting as a relaying party yet, allowing users to login with OpenID from other networks, the functionality of Mixi user profiles has now increased dramatically. According to the blog Asiajin, this opening up is pretty radical for Mixi standards.
10. Wuala: Switzerland
Swiss startup Wuala offers an unusual online social storage system: it uses the disk space of other members' computers as part of the cloud. Wuala launched in August 2008 - making it the youngest of our international products.
Wuala differs from our other favorite online storage services in several ways. The advantages of this type of storage include no limits on file size and bandwidth. However the main disadvantage is that regardless of the AES-128 and RSA-2048 encryption, the idea of storing data on machines scattered around the world won't appeal to all. Still, with 28 million files uploaded as of writing and growing by the minute, Wuala is definitely worth watching.
So, do you think we've picked the best 10 International Products of 2008? Please let us know what you think about our choices in the comments. Most importantly, let us know which international products you think are worth tracking.
Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
作者：Rick Turoczy
It's a well-known fact that our readers are on the cutting - if not bleeding - edge of technology. But sometimes, it's important to take a step back and realize that the apps to which we've grown so incredibly accustomed are just barely beginning to register with the general public.
With the Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008, we've tried to select the apps that have burst onto the radar of the everyday user this year - or if not quite, then perhaps they will next year.
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This was a year - after years of build up - in which two major events had worldwide impact on the Web. These events focused the world's attention, had more consumers creating more online content, and had more people online searching for information than ever before: the Beijing Olympics and the US Presidential elections. Many of these apps have those events to thank for their exposure and adoption.
This is the third in a series of top products of 2008:
Note: We attempted to order this list from most obvious to least obvious.
1. Twitter
Twitter is the de facto leader of the microblogging scene, a realm usually rife with witty repartee between leading social media consultants and Web 2.0 developers. But when household names like Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Al Gore, Shaquille O'Neal, Britney Spears, and politicians across the US started using it, this year, it was clear that our selection as the Best Web LittleCo for 2007 had grown up - and entered the public consciousness.
Twitter was a constant fixture on ReadWriteWeb this year from its use as a source of news to its growing use as a customer service channel. But it wasn't without its hiccups. Midway through the year, Twitter - and its more and more frequent showings of the Fail Whale - was rapidly becoming persona non grata. In June 2008, Amazon's Jeff Bezos poured more cash into the service. And with the US elections, Twitter proved its mettle, becoming a critical forum for debate on the issues at hand.
2. Firefox
November 2008 marked the fourth birthday for Firefox, arguably one of the most successful open source projects and clearly the most popular Web browser that users have to actually install. In 2008, more and more of the consumer population gravitated to the browser that strives to deliver the Web the right way.
Firefox has continued to grow in popularity throughout 2008, but it was the download day for Firefox 3 that began to truly turn heads. Site crushing traffic to download a Web browser? Believe it. So much traffic, in fact, that it set a world record. That, and a number of other factors, had Firefox reaching a 20% market share in October of this year.
3. IntenseDebate
IntenseDebate - dubbed by RWW as the "the sophisticated blog comment system with the silly name" - provides a commenting add-in for blogs and Web sites that allows users to better manage their profiles and comments across multiple conversations. It also supports OpenID.
In 2008, distributed commenting was still a very young space with no clear leader. But when IntenseDebate appeared as the comment system on US President-elect Barack Obama's change.gov, it stepped into the public eye. Now, thousands of people are using the commenting system. This makes Automattic - the company that manages the development of WordPress - look pretty insightful foracquiring IntenseDebate this year.
4. Hulu
If Hulu - a joint video content sharing venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. - is any indication, traditional mainstream media companies are beginning to get this whole "online thing."
And with good reason. In 2008, Hulu shed its ugly duckling imageand came into its own and was projected to earn a staggering $90 million in its first year. How? Again, the true turning point was the US elections. Consumers turned to Hulu as much for the political content, as for the satire - like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. Now, consumers are hooked and that affinity for the service is showing no sign of slowing.
5. Ning
Ning is a service designed to help anyone build a social network about anything that interests them. And in 2008, consumers flocked to the site to do exactly that - to the tune of a new social network created every 30 seconds.
As of October 2008, Ning was host to half of a million networks. And it will only continue to grow in the consumer space. Why? Much like Twitter, Ning has begun to attract celebrities who find the service a viable way of interacting with fans. Plus, with its integration of OpenSocial, Ning gains access to tech savvy consumers on a variety of social networks who already understand the dynamic.
6. Last.fm
Any app that incorporates consumer media and makes it easier to use is a winner. And that's whyLast.fm, the socially driven music recommendation service, is a shoo-in for top consumer apps of 2008.
We at RWW spend a great deal of time focused on Last.fm - from the most popular songs to mashups created using its data tovisualizing Last.fm friends networks - because we spend so much time on Last.fm. One thing is for sure with its redesigned site, the growing presence on mobile platforms, innovative programs, andinteresting features, Last.fm is sure to continue gaining more and more fans.
7. Meebo
Meebo, always a favorite here at RWW, provides a centralized instant message platform that's accessible from any Web browser. While they've always been popular with the overly connected crowd, 2008 marks the year where Meebo has a growing opportunity to become a consumer favorite, as well.
In March 2008, we saw Meebo as having the opportunity to bringWeb IM to the mainstream. Throughout the year, they continued to improve - including adding a revenue stream. And by October, Meebo had begun to roll out a partner program that will place its functionality on niche consumer sites throughout the Web. Even if consumers don't recognize Meebo yet, they will soon.
8. Mogulus
If YouTube taught people about online video and Ustream taught folks how to stream video, thenMogulus will be the service that teaches consumers how to broadcast online. And in a burgeoning HD market, where users are coming to expect crisp video and audio quality even online, Mogulus stands to become the streaming service of choice for serious videophiles.
In June 2008, we reported that Mogulus - which launched in May 2007 - was already reporting 4.5 million uniques. By September, that number had grown nearly 30% to 5.8 million. Clearly, the numbers are on the upswing.
9. Qik
Qik, the service that allows users to stream video to the Web from a mobile handset, may not be as prevalent on the consumer radar as some of these other apps. But it's safe to say it will be. While services like Mogulus have focused on the quality of the video stream, services like Qik have focused on the converse: the ability to stream content with devices that consumers are already carrying around. And that will be their key to success - the ability to deliver more content while hauling less gear.
At the beginning of the year, we wondered if Qik might be one of thebreakout apps at SXSW 2008 given the number of tech types participating in its early testing. By the middle of 2008, Qik had opened its beta to more participants. And since that point, they've focused on making the service available on both mass market phones and some smart phones. No doubt, the ability to shoot video with that phone in your pocket will be as compelling to consumers as taking photos - if not moreso.
10. Cooliris
Cooliris may be the least obvious - and least recognized - of our consumer app selections, but it has that certain something that makes us sure its going to be popular with the less technically savvy. For those of you who haven't had the chance to try it, Cooliris is a browser extension that provides a 3D environment for thumbing through visual sites - like photo and video sites. What's more, it makes it fun. And that's why consumers will continue to be attracted to it.
We covered Cooliris - then called PicLens - in February 2008, finding it "a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable." By June 2008, they had added Amazon items and YouTube videos. Even the iPhone got the Cooliris treatment with the Cooliris iPhone app. Most recently, Cooliris has unveiled features that allow users to personalize selections - and that allows Cooliris to sell more advertising. Visual browsing is still coming into its own, but Cooliris is leading the charge in a way that consumers will embrace.
Now, it's your turn. What's your opinion on these selections? Are we off? Did we miss something? Are you seeing consumer adoption elsewhere?