Selling Muesli (the german word for cereals) doesn’t sound like the most exciting job in the world, right? But actually, it can be. At least when you’re doing it over the internet, in Web 2.0-style. And this is exactly what Hubertus (27), Philipp (28) and Max (26), three friends who studied together in the german city of Passau, are doing.

It all started with a radio ad for muesli they overheard a couple of years ago, explained Max when I called him to hear more about the story of their company. “We immediately thought: We can do better – not only the ad, but also the product.” Muesli, said Max, is one of those products who hasn’t really been changed since its invention by Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner more than hundred years ago.

The three friends immediately realized the potential of web-enhanced muesli. Since muesli is mixed together from different ingredients such as cereals, fruits and nuts, it is a highly customizable product. And what better way to offer customized products than through a website?

In 2007, Mymuesli.de went live and, despite no advertising at all, became an immediate success. The site not only allows you to completely customize your muesli by chosing every ingredient (thus allowing for 566 quadrillion combinations, as the site proudly states) – you can also save your mix, share it with others and even embed it in your blog. Those features, says Max, were and still are crucial to the success of the young company, which by now has 40 employees and delivers to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK.

“The internet is still a place for great innovation”, says Max. It’s also a place where you can buy excellent muesli.

That insight is precisely the idea behind Web2Asia, a Shanghai-based consultancy and expansion partner co-founded by Markus Fuhrmann (pictured). The company, says Markus, helps American and European web companies to establish themselves in China covering everything from market research to server deployment, business development, and operations.

The market has undoubtedly huge potential – after all, China has the biggest internet population in the world.

Nonetheless, only a few of the big web companies from the West have been successful. This is partly because they usually enter the market too late, when local copycats have already taken the lion’s share. But it is also, says Markus, because a lot of the companies don’t pay attention to the small cultural differences. “Ebay didn’t work in China for several reasons, one of them was not realizing that auctions don’t work here. “People want to buy stuff right away”, he says.

Markus is originally from Austria, where he studied biotechnology and co-founded two gaming companies. One produced game series sold more than 1,5 million times on the mobile phone. He fell in love with Shanghai when he was there for part of an IMBA program -and decided to stay. And although he thinks that China has a lot of potential, he also sees some growing problems. “The gap between rich and poor, cities and countryside grows on a daily basis”, he says. Pollution is another big worry. “The streets may be very clean in top tier cities, but the air and water are becoming extremely polluted.”

Markus’s biggest problem, however, is that he can’t find enough skilled people to hire. “It’s extremely difficult to find good managers who have also good collaborative and team skills.” Lack of experience in non-hierarchical environments combined with Chinas enormous economic growth, might be partly to blame for the lack of qualified personal.

But are they? Things might look a little different if you’re a big company. Then, in order to give your employees e-mail addresses, you have to buy servers and licence fees for e-mail software and hire IT and support staff. That, obviously, costs money. But how much exactly? Andrew Fogg wanted to know when he worked for a big British bank. So he did the math, added up all the costs, divided them by the number of e-mails and came up with a figure: 900 British Pounds. Per e-mail address. Per year.

Andrew, who has a BA in philosophy and natural sciences from Cambridge, immediately saw the opportunity and started his own venture, called Kusiri. One of the biggest trends in the internet industry is “cloud computing”: Applications don’t run on desktop computers or company-owned servers, but on the infrastructure that big internet companies such as Google, Amazon or Salesforce have built.

Because these companies can leverage the economics of scale, they are able to provide the same services as in-house solutions much cheaper. The idea of Kusiri, says Andrew, is to “bring these benefits of the consumer web to the enterprise” by building customized solutions on top of the web-based services. With this, he wants to “bridge the gap between the internet and the enterprise” – a gap that is still astonishingly big.