It doesn’t happen too often that a European web startup (or any foreign startup, for that matter) makes it in Japan, but Jimdo is one of the very few examples of those that did. After reading an article on the website building service from Germany on TechCrunch Japan a few years back, a team at Tokyo-based telecommunications giant KDDI (over 30 million mobile subscribers, US$40 billion revenue) decided to bring Jimdo over in 2009.

KDDI unit KDDI Web Communications localized Jimdo into Japanese in early 2009 and has been doing pretty well since (even though details are scarce). And it looks like starting today, things will run even smoother, as the Germans and their Japanese partner just announced a major milestone, namely a cooperation with Google Japan and other local businesses.

Under the deal, KDDI and Google have started operating a service called Minna No Business Online (Everybody’s Business Online) [JP] today. As the name suggests, the service is supposed to make it possible for small and mid-sized businesses to launch their own websites “in 15 minutes”.

This is the first screen you see after pushing the “Get Started” button:

Minna No Business offers a total of 100 designs for companies from over 14 different industries, lets users choose between the most common top-level domains (.com, .jp, .biz, etc.) for their sites, and is free for one year (with monthly charges of 1,470 yen/ US$19 thereafter).

Jimdo is powering the tool itself, while KDDI and Google are handling marketing, distribution and ads (namely by offering AdWords to website owners). The project partners are looking at a big market (on paper, at least): according to Google Japan, just 24% of Japan’s 4.7 million SMEs currently have an online presence. The plan is to sign up 150,000 customers in the first year.

More information (in English) on the Jimdo-KDDI-Google alliance can be found here.

Jimdo, a service that lets anyone create a good-looking website without too much effort, is on a roll. The tool has now been used to build over 4 million websites, and 200,000 more Jimdo-powered sites get published every month.

Last year, the German startup behind the service rolled out a feature that let anyone create an online store, quickly and easily. Fast forward 15 months and 40,000 online stores have been built using the service, generating more than 7.5 million euros in sales.

Today, the company is debuting a mobile-friendly view for optimized display on iPhone, Android handsets and other smartphones, which works for all Jimdo websites. In addition, all 40,000 online stores will have a mobile store with mobile checkout. Click a Google Map in the mobile view, and the native Google Maps app will open on your phone.

Jimdo has more in store: next week, the company will announce Dropbox integration, enhancing the website building application with a digital file center in the cloud.

The startup currently boasts offices in Hamburg, San Francisco, Shanghai, and through cooperation with KDDI Webcommunications, also in Tokyo. There are about 70 people working for Jimdo today, and co-founder Christian Springub just relocated to the United States to more efficiently attack the North American market.

Furthermore, Jimdo is a profitable business today, although they declined to share absolute revenue numbers. Either way, their momentum is noteworthy, especially when you consider how much capital was raised by rivals Wix ($58.5 million) and Yola ($25 million).

Jimdo, in contrast, was built on only 500,000 euros (roughly $715,000). When United Internet invested in the company, more capital was available, but the management team actually moved to buy back the shares back in 2009.

This is because the German startup behind Jimdo has added a ‘Store’ feature to their website building service, enabling users to add a full-fledged ecommerce element to their sites.

Jimdo users who want to set up an online business can use Store to start organizing and publishing a catalog of products, which can be presented in various ways: multiple pictures with detailed-view zoom functionality, videos, text, PDFs and more. Products can have multiple variations (e.g. shirt colors, sizes, etc.) and can be featured as ‘bestsellers’ or within a given specific product category.

A shopping cart feature is built right into the new product extension, complete with PayPal integration and the ability to include a custom check-out process (i.e. by invoice). The startup has also considered the challenges of conducting online business on a global level, making it possible for sellers to switch between U.S. Sales Tax and VAT (Europe) and customize shipping costs accordingly.

Here’s a reference site, fully powered by Jimdo (more can be found here). For pricing and current promotions, check this page.

In other, rather unexpected news, Jimdo investor United Internet has withdrawn from the company’s board. In May 2009, the international ISP had acquired 30% of the startup and also inked a license deal with the young company that allowed it to have its hosting provider subsidiary 1&1 enable their customers to build Jimdo sites as a white-labeled service.

Jimdo co-founder Matthias Henze had this to say about the whole ordeal:

“United Internet has left the board of shareholders. As you know, they mainly invested because of the partnership we had with 1&1. Since 1&1 had different views concerning the roadmap we changed the agreement with 1&1 which now has a license to develop the white-labeled version on its own. I’m really sorry, but due to signed NDAs I can’t share any more details on the deal.”

It’s a bit of a strange development, but Jimdo doesn’t seem to be all too worried about the ties getting cut – the company also tells me they’ve reached profitability with team of 30 full-time employees. We’ll see how they fare now that they’re on their own again.

Today United Internet’s hosting provider subsidiary, 1&1, is debuting a new business service to its customers dubbed ’1&1 MyBusiness Site’, which boasts Jimdo as its underlying engine.

1&1 later today will start offering this new package to its corporate customers, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to create their own website in just a few minutes without the need for extensive website design experience, starting at $9,99 per month. Specific designs are available for more than 100 different business types (restaurants, real estate, etc.), and users get a 5-day free trial to test the service before they sign up for a paid subscription. Users can check the success of their website via the inclusive 1&1 WebStatistics tool, and the 1&1 MyBusiness Site package also includes modules for SEO, implementation of RSS feeds, photo albums, YouTube videos and Flash animations.

This is a big deal for Jimdo, a small German startup that so far raised only a ‘fairly small amount in angel funding‘ from the infamous Samwer brothers. Looking at their traffic estimates on Google Trends, it was already doing nicely in terms of usage compared to competitors like Weebly and the well-funded Synthasite (now rebranded to Yola). The latest user numbers it released were back in February 2009, when the company said it had over 500,000 registered users building websites with its web-based application.

However, I think licensing deals with Internet Service Providers and server hosting companies are a much better way to make money from something like basic website editing tools than going after one user at a time. Jimdo clearly understands this and is making it happen, too.

Earlier this year, Jimdo also announced it had reached an exclusive agreement with KDDI Web Communications, a subsidiary of Japan’s second largest telecommunication corporation KDDI, to launch the Japanese version of the application.

SynthaSite is one of the players in the DIY website / blog builder field, and they’ve just gotten a huge vote of confidence from their investors: the company has announced a $20 million Series B round from Luxembourg-based Reinet Fund and plans to use the money to grow both organically and through selected acquisitions (they made a first small one past December when they bought Clickpass).

This is actually the same investor as the $5 million Series A round it raised in November 2007, but then then-called Columbus Venture Capital was recently restructured into Reinet, which is now a listed entity on the Luxembourg & Johannesburg Stock Exchange with over $2 billion in market cap.

No word on the startup’s valuation, although co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham (also an occasional blogger) tells me it was definitely not a down-round and that they’re in it for the long run. He also added that the company is growing nicely, boasting 1 million registered users and graphs clearly showing an upwards traffic trend (Quantcast). Compete shows a similar curve.

SynthaSite makes building simple websites a breeze, but in that it doesn’t differ much from the dozens of similar services out there (e.g. the just launched DevHub, WebJam, Sampa, Jimdo, Weebly, webme and many many more) apart from the fact that they integrated a bunch of third-party services into the application (e.g. WidgetBox for widget distribution, Picnik for photo editing, etc.). SynthaSite is also up against services from established companies, like Microsoft Office Live and Google Sites. It remains to be seen if the now heavily-funded startup will be able to keep growing at the current rate in this economic climate and with an increasingly competitive playing field.

As for the business model: SynthaSite generates revenue from domain names sales only (as an affiliate to Network Solutions) as the service is entirely ad-free. Premium services (like advanced features, unique templates, etc.) are coming later this year, says Lingham.

Strategy-wise, SynthaSite is looking for partnerships with ISPs and large computer manufacturers and internet companies, who could offer a co-branded solution to their users without paying SynthaSite for the service but rather getting a chunk of the revenues back from the company.

It’s a good strategy, but many have tried – and are trying – to do the same, so again, the jury is still out if SynthaSite will be able to justify the faith their investor obviously puts in them in the years to come.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

Several services have popped up to fill this need by offering simple site creation tools. They’re like Geocities v 2.0. Jimdo is another easy to use AJAX site editor out of Hamburg Germany that launched earlier this year. You can use Jimdo to easily and quickly create a personal website including photos, text, a guestbook, rss feeds, and YouTube videos. They are close competitors with Weebly (one of my favorite), another AJAX editor we have covered before.

One issue I have with these sites is that design can still be fairly constrained. Today Jimdo has tackled that problem by letting you easily grab a design from any site in a couple steps.

1. copy and paste the HTML source from the target site into Jimdo.
2. click on “xhtml” – the system will automatically cut out the relevant code (content, sidebar, navigation, footer) – and validate it.
3. copy your CSS into Jimdo.
4. upload the pictures that you need for your layout under the label “Files”.

Jimdo basically places their widgets into key parts of the template using special tags their site understands. The result is that the template displays your Jimdo navigation bar and content. You can see an example of the TechCrunch site here. I still had to fool around with the HTML code to make it work, though, placing the special tags manually where the content needed to go.

A team of three friends originally started selling simple site creation tools for the enterprise as CMS solutions, but decided to add a consumer version this year. They currently have over 25,000 users and sites in three different languages (German, English, and Chinese). Their basic accounts start with 500 MB of storage, with pro accounts going for $6 a month with the ability to host them on your own domain name.

There are some other site design tools out there as well, aimed at different crowds. RealEditor makes an editor specifically for MySpace. Synthasite is a good AJAX based editor with detailed control of the page layout. Sampa, while having a weaker layout editor, is aimed at families looking to create a group website. Webjam is a community of sites created with their editor.

Update (Arrington): Just to be clear, we are not granting permission to copy our site template.