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.  (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.
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 clicks. |
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