CNNMoney.com
Companies Economy International Corrections Pre-market Trading After-hours Trading Winners/Losers/Actives Bonds Currencies Commodities World Markets Money Magazine Real Estate Taxes Jobs Ask the Expert Money 101 Autos Mutual Funds The Help Desk Loan Center Best Places to Live Ask the Expert Ultimate Guide to Retirement Retirement Calculators Best Funds Ask the Mole Best Places to Retire Big Tech Blog Techland Blog Sectors and Stocks Fortune 500 Techs Tech Talk 100 Best Places to Launch Ultimate Resource Guide Small Biz Makeovers FSB 100 Ask & Answer Fortune 500 Technology Investing Management C-Suite Rankings Main Create Portfolio Edit Portfolio Create Alerts Edit Alerts
Where to find the world's hottest startups
From Aussie blog mining to Finnish friend finding, we've located the planet's most innovative new sites.
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large

(Business 2.0) -- The editors have identified the Best business ideas in the world, which will appear here in a series throughout the next month. Check back daily for updates.

The term "Web 2.0" is used so widely these days, you'd think it was taking over the globe. And you'd be right.

idea_web_20.gif
Photo GallerylaunchSee more photos

The catchall phrase - used to describe websites that thrive on what their users make of them is no longer limited to the United States.

As Web 2.0 success stories like Flickr and Del.icio.us prove, this kind of technology is dirt-cheap to implement and borrows data freely available from other websites. A guy in his bedroom in Chile can come up with a novel way to navigate global classified ads - and, in fact, one has.

A lot of these global entrepreneurs are simply copying the biggest ideas in America's Web 2.0 canon. For every Digg.com, the popular U.S. site that lets readers nominate and vote on the most important news stories, there's a Yigg.de (the German version of the same).

But they can also surprise you by taking a familiar idea to the next level. South Africa's Muti, for example, not only employs the Digg model but also shows its users where the stories are coming from on a map of the world.

Speaking of cartography, take a look at our photo gallery to get a global view of our picks for the most influential or innovative Web 2.0 sites developed abroad.

We've divided them into six categories: social networks (like MySpace), social media (user-generated content like Flickr), webware (applications that work within your browser), aggregators (collections of content from all over, My Yahoo (Charts) style), mashups (such as sites that add features to Google (Charts) Maps), and Internet TV (like YouTube). Many fit into more than one category.

And all, except Bokee and Toodou, are available in English, which goes to show how easily an online business anywhere in the world can go after the U.S. market.

So join us as we go around the world in 23 clicksTop of page

YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.

Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
Manage alerts | What is this?
© 2009 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2009 BigCharts.com Inc. All rights reserved. Please see our Terms of Use.
MarketWatch, the MarketWatch logo, and BigCharts are registered trademarks of MarketWatch, Inc.
Intraday data provided by Interactive Data Real-Time Services and subject to the Terms of Use.
Intraday data is at least 20-minutes delayed. All times are ET.
Historical, current end-of-day data, and splits data provided by Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data.
Fundamental data provided by Morningstar, Inc..
SEC Filings data provided by Edgar Online Inc..
Earnings data provided by FactSet CallStreet, LLC.