Growth Matters

If you live outside Japan and are familiar with the television series Naruto Shippuden and Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, then you are, no doubt, also familiar with Crunchyroll, an online video service that provides full length episodes and movies of Japanese anime. The site is quickly signing up viewers all over the English speaking world.

Online event planner Amiando allows companies and organizations worldwide to plan events in a professional manner. The company's software has become a leading tool for event organization in Europe and Amiando says its revenues are rising at more than 40% per quarter.

Tweeting is already easy, but an increasingly popular service is making it even easier. TweetSwitch, from London-based Comufy, makes it possible to tweet while instant messaging or emailing. No need to log on to twitter.com.

Is there room in the U.S. telecom market for another Voice-over-IP phone company? Recent European transplant Sipgate thinks so and its low-cost phone service plan offers something many Web competitors don't: a free inbound phone number that anyone can call.

In the 1960s series Batman, people in despair would light up a red beacon and Batman would come to the rescue. Fast forward to the present and the red beacon is still alive...online. If you have a leaky sink, find yourself locked out of your house, or can't fix that jammed copier, you can turn to redbeacon.com, find a service provider, get a price quote and a contractor will come to the rescue.

U.K. entertainment retailer HMV has seen its shares fall 40% in the last year. But with growing market share, recent acquisitions and a plan to cut costs, the company has used the recession to launch a turnaround. Will the growth make HMV's stock a buy?

Popularly known as "the complaint people," the Better Business Bureau is actually a thriving not-for-profit company whose wide range of services are in growing demand. Now it's branching out from its core service of reviewing the ethical standards of businesses, offering a new e-commerce protection service.

Most American shoppers have likely never heard of Otto Group (though you probably have heard of one of its U.S. properties). But if you live in Germany, you certainly have. Otto is a major German e-commerce company with 100 online shops -- and it's growing rapidly.

Boxee, a New York City startup developing free software to bring the Internet and your social network to your television, grew its user base sevenfold in just over a year. But will it find a way to make money?

Our "Growth Matters" series looks at OneRiot, which allows users to scour real-time information from booming sites like Twitter and Facebook. And the company says it can do the job better than Google.