You're a developer in Columbia, Brazil, South Africa or Turkey.  You know a little PHP.  How do you quickly become a world class entrepreneur?  How do you reach audiences of millions?  You have access to a computer, but you have you have no capital.  What would you do?

At Joyent, we have partnered with Mentez to help app developers in emerging markets . Â Mentez starts with competitions to generate successful applications. Â It's American Idol done in Columbia or Mexico and focused on good code instead of terrible singing. Â Mentez helps with everything from technical support to help monetizing the businesses.

How do you monetize an application in Brazil?  Mentez has already succeeded by taking successful applications to corporate sponsors.  For example, they have taken one game application that gained reasonable traction and sold a sponsorship of the app to Budweiser.  As part of the Mentez agreement, the developer received 50% of all revenue generated. The revenue was much higher than the low value CPMs the developer could have received by going through a standard Facebook ad network.

Bottom line, the way that apps get developed is changing, and it is benefiting people in Emerging Markets.

• Joyent gives them free infrastructure
• Mentez gives them training and business development assistance
• Facebook gives these developers access to a massive and powerful marketing and distribution tool