Something I've been pondering lately is whether there's a viable niche in internationalization as a middleware library & service: it takes a lot of effort to get right, it's tedious stuff (as I discovered when trying to document postal address formats for most of Africa and Europe), and it involves a lot of ___domain knowledge that's completely irrelevant to the actual core business of most SaaS vendors.
Yes, that is why it should be done by domestic startups and teams 'right on the site'. So, YC's model doesn't work here - they fund only US-based startups (because it is quite difficult to fetch a profit from aboard =) but this one must be an international one. (same as that network of Google offices around the globe).
What I mean is whether there's a niche for a single entity whose job it is to be knowledgeable about all the sorts of issues you can run into in trying to internationalize software and services, whether they be local tax issues, best practices for translation layers in a software stack, cost estimations for freighting products.
Like, i.e. an all-in-one service: build your SaaS platform against our framework, and we'll handle all i18n issues on this given list, for this given set of countries and languages, including payment handling and shipping, and take a cut. A successful startup often doesn't have time to deal with its own internationalization before local competitor clones get the jump on it (e.g, Ebay, Groupon). So what I'm envisioning is a company that acts at a higher level than the usual outsource-to-the-translator-agency routine, yet has product-ized its offerings enough that it's not locked into the consultancy business model.
There is definitely a market for this. International payment gateways like CyberSource (www.cybersource.com) are extending their services to include address validation (and correction), fraud detection, etc.
It would be very hard for a startup to compete in this space though - perhaps a better opportunity for a partnership between a payment gateway and a major distributer.
