Stardoll is UK's top kids site - Nielsen Survey

The rich functionality and continued focus on fashion has paid off handsomely for Stardoll. Mattias and his team have continuously evolved the simple idea of dressing up dolls in a virtual environment in a sophisticated and intelligent way.
This is a community which is really engaged and interacts.
And Stardoll is now truly a global brand.
With 20m members worldwide and still growing strongly its not surprising that a new Neilsen survey of kids sites puts Stardoll at No1 for under 12's
Ahead of Club Penguin, Nickelodeon, Lego, Cartoon Network and the like, for proportion of audience under 12 Stardoll's challenge was always going to be monetisation.
Stardoll has approached this intelligently too. Revenues come from the sale of virtual clothes, gifts, scenery as well as from sponsorship and advertising - all in an integrated and non-invasive way.

The Local Globe in action

When Saul coined the name LocalGlobe he showed profound understanding of the web.
We are seeing some really exciting examples of how this all works in practice.

Stardoll [for those unfamiliar, watch eNews on the Stardoll phenomenon], is now available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Hungarian. A look at the Alexa rankings for Stardoll shows how the effort of localising is paying off.
Another great example is TAG's latest announced investment, Netlog.
Netlog is the least known of the social networking giants see LocalGlobe's brief piece on it recently and the press announcement of the Index led round.
Countries where Netlog sites have been established include UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Romania and there is a real local flavour to each. You'd expect a user generated site to be so but Netlog have really facilitated this process.

Netlog Facts: 18.1 Million Members
2 Billion Monthly Pageviews
25 Million Unique Monthly Visitors

It will be interesting to see how Imagini evolves since it uses few words and images tend to be fairly universal in their interpretation. Certainly the 2m VisualDNA profiles which Imagini have collected will throw up some interesting national differences.

Little Moo has not started localising but the comment from one of their customers, Dennis Howlett says a lot:
"Along with a certain scepticism that I might not receive the product given I live in the back of beyond.
Imagine my surprise when my Moo cards turned up - exactly on time.
Although Moo is a tiny company, it has reached 143 countries. A perfect example of the Global Microbrand."

In the big Euro/Valley debate the one advantage Europe and London in particular has is its awareness and readiness to internationalise and localise.
Of course localising is not simply a question of translation it often implies local customer service and cultural nuances.
As broadband penetration grows globally, we are truly seeing the WORLDWIDE WEB emerge.
Let me know of other Euro companies really doing a great job at localising...