The world is big
Silicon Valley is no longer the center of innovation.
This means a lot of innovative, strong startups are getting founded outside the US. And, maybe, just maybe, they're coming over to eat your lunch.
Criteo is the best ad retargeting company in the world
Criteo, based in Paris, does ad retargeting: their network learns about your online habits and targets ads based on that. It sounds like exactly like the kind of business where Silicon Valley companies dominate, and yet Criteo is the industry leader.
MXit is a huge mobile social network in South Africa
Mamba Nation is the future of Facebook games
Mamba Nation Founder Nicolas Gaume
Image: Rodrigo Sepulveda
Mamba Nation is the future of social games: built on top of Facebook, the game includes an immersive 3D universe and tries to build actual connections between players instead of just using social features to spread the game virally.
Flipkart is the Amazon of India
And the country's first billion-dollar startup
And the country's first billion-dollar startup
Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal
Image: TechnoFirst
Flipkart is an online bookstore in India, that is expanding into other areas of e-commerce, in a hugely fast-growing market. Just like Amazon. And just like Amazon, the sky seems to be the limit. Flipkart was recently valued at $1 billion, a first for an Indian startup.
SMS GupShup wants to take over the world with easy mobile messaging
SMS GupShup is a group messaging service that's hugely popular in India, and that alone would make it noteworthy. But the company has even bigger ambitions: it believes mobile messaging is the future of social networking, and it wants to be that future.
Redbus.in lets people book bus tickets online in India, which is huge
Bus tickets? Really? It sounds less niche/weird when you know that buses are Indians' preferred mode of mass transit. No matter which way you slice it, making bus travel easy for over a billion people is a huge market, and Redbus.in is grabbing it.
Justdial is the Indian Google, and it's coming to the US
Image: Justdial
Justdial is taking India by storm with a very simple idea: call them and ask them for any business listing, and they will text you or email the result within a minute. The company is on a tear and described as "addictive."
In an amazing twist, Justdial came to the US last year, setting up an 1-800 number and building call centers in the US to power the service. An Indian tech company coming to the US to build call centers is worth noting
MyHeritage is the world's biggest genealogy startup
Online genealogy is big business--Ancestry.com is publicly traded and worth $1.5 billion. And Israel-based MyHeritage is a strong contender in the space, despite being turned down by investors for the first years it was around. And now MyHeritage wants to take over the world.
Animation Lab wants to be the Israeli Pixar
Image: Animation Lab
Based in Jerusalem, Animation Lab has an ambitious plan to make animated feature films and be as successful as Pixar. It's currently working on its first film, The Wild Bunch.
Crivo lets middle class people in Brazil borrow
by making credit checks easy
Image: Crivo
Credit checks are hard in Brazil, which makes banks very conservative. Crivo has a huge database that extrapolates your creditworthiness from all kinds of data, making credit checks very easy and unlocking credit for Brazil's middle classes. The company is currently looking for Silicon Valley capital to expand internationally, writes TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy.
OLX is the Craigslist of emerging markets
Started in New York by French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda, OLX is the Craigslist of emerging markets, especially Latin America and Russia. It recently got a big investment from international media conglomerate Naspers.
InMobi just might be the biggest mobile ad network
Image: YouTube
Remember AdMob? Mobile ads is a pretty hot market, and yet very few people talk about InMobi, which got started in India and is reportedly doing over $100 million in revenue. Why? Because it serves ads mostly everywhere except in the US, although it is making inroads here as well. Mobile ads in emerging markets are dirt-cheap, but people love their phones and all those pennies quickly add up to a juggernaut
Pesapal is the PayPal of Kenya
In Africa, most cashless payments happen with mobile phones, not credit cards. That means if you're an online merchant, PayPal isn't going to be enough--you're going to need something that's specific to the market. Pesapal does that, and by all accounts does it very well.
Ushahidi is an amazing live reporting tool
Image: Ushahidi
Ushahidi started out during riots and Kenya, when people could text or email reports of violence, and those reports would be posted on a Google Map. Since then Ushahidi, which describes itself as a non-profit software company, makes tools that allows people to crowdsource information about events that are going on, in real time. It's been used after the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and in other places to understand what's going on in real time.
Paper.li is reinventing the newspaper for the Twitter age
Paper.li Founder/CEO Edouard Lambelet
Image: Paper.li
Switzerland-based Paper.li lets anyone build an online newspaper from their social media feeds, or from topics. It's a simple but ambitious idea: anyone can become a media or newspaper editor. And the company is growing fast, recently raising a round and adding former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau to its board.
SohoOS wants all business tools to be free
SohoOS is an ambitious Israeli startup that wants to make it as easy as possible to run a small business. To that end, it's taking all the online tools that small businesses typically pay for--think CRM, accounting, invoicing--and giving them away for free. And it's building a big social network where entrepreneurs can interact and trade tips.
OpenERP is disrupting one of the biggest enterprise software markets
Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, is the software that runs most large businesses and allows them to operate. It sounds boring (and it is) but it's the meat and potatoes of huge companies like Oracle and SAP.
Belgium-based OpenERP wants to disrupt them by offering an open source, i.e. free, ERP solution and make money by charging added services. By all accounts it's doing pretty well.
CommerceGuys is making ecommerce open source
Image: Commerce Guys
Paris-based Commerce Guys is building software to run e-commerce sites and using a disruptive approach: their software is open source and based on the highly popular open source content management system Drupal. Taking highly popular and scalable open source software, adapting it to e-commerce, and selling services on top, seems like a winning combination. Plus, they have a pretty sweet logo.
BlaBlaCar is a popular European carpooling startup
Image: Screenshot
BlaBlaCar lets you carpool to work online efficiently. It's cheaper and it's green. And it's very popular. The company got started in France as Covoiturage.fr and it recently expanded in the UK, and just might take over the world soon.
CK Telecom makes the cheapest mobile phones out there
Image: CK Telecom
CK Telecom is the biggest company on its list, but it's also one of the most interesting. It's a Chinese OEM that makes cheap mobile phones. What's interesting about that? Well, it's climbing up the value chain and starting to make its own products and undercutting the likes of Nokia, which dominates the emerging markets, and RIM, which is banking on emerging markets for growth. Companies like CK Telecom are an even bigger threat than Apple to these companies.
Via B.I
Luxury News / Golden Choice by Lux Creative International
