Forum NetExplorateur, a conference organized at the French Senate has announced its Top 100 most exciting web projects of 2008 last weekend.
The Netexplorateur Forum is an opportunity to meet the global players of the Net Generation whose new uses of digital media are very likely to have a lasting impact on society, business and public and private governance. This makes the Forum a unique event: not a tech fair, a meeting for start-ups and investors nor even a series of specialized workshops on a specific activity or sector of business.
Bringing more Asia web companies, projects and speakers to the global stage is the key thing OpenWeb.Asia wants to achieve. As the official partner of NetExplorateur, we are very happy to announce that 6 projects from China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia suggested by OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup members are on the list. They are:
iKnow! [Japan] is an intelligent social learning platform that enables users to remix the web for the purpose of learning. Powered by personalized, adaptive learning algorithms that accelerate knowledge acquisition, iKnow! is a venue for users to create, share, and learn. iKnow!’s learning engine helps users efficiently encode, store, and retrieve knowledge.
Qifang [China] is a company built on the simple premise that everyone should be able to get an education, no matter their financial means. To accomplish this mission, Qifang empowers students to find people to support their educational aspirations from friends, family, employers and beyond. Connecting communities of student borrowers through our web service to lenders with charitable and financial goals, Qifang believes technology can be harnessed to strengthen existing social relationships and discover or create new ones. Those relationships become the basis for transactions with a foundation of trust, and with trust collaboration and cooperation follow naturally.
SharedCopy [Singapore] is an AJAX based web annotation tool that allows users to mark-up, highlight, draw, annotate, cache, sticky-note and finally share any website. Founded in March 2007, SharedCopy was featured on Techcrunch, Lifehacker, Killer Startups, Startup Squad and Wall Street Journal.
Elevyn [Malaysia] aims to alleviate poverty using fair trade online stores, and to provide an innovative platform to raise money for social causes. The idea is simple ‐ we encourage marginalized communities to improve their livelihoods by providing them access to run online stores that connects them to a socially‐conscious market worldwide. These online stores can be set up and managed by the communities themselves, and Elevyn works closely with NGOs and field partners on training, consultancy and advisory. A portion of every sales made thru the online store will fund specific causes that support the local communities ‐ “Raise $100 to buy books for the school”, for example. Elevyn also intends to empower communities. In existing cases, it is known that some craftmakers only pocket less than 10% of its final sales price in the market. This is a situation that Elevyn can change and we foresee that more than 75% of the item’s sales price can go back to the producers.
Juice [China] is an intelligent discovery engine that integrates seamlessly with your browser. Highlight and move a chunk of text, and Juice directly delivers a set of rich, relevant content to you.
Enswer.me [Korea] is new ways of video search based on video detection technologies.
Congratulation to the winners and we do hope more cool Asia web projects can be recognized by the global industry in 2009. Please keep in touch with us!!