There are hundreds of companies small businesses can turn to for tools that facilitate their e-mail marketing campaigns, some of which operate solely on the Web.

One of the largest such providers, Constant Contact, is actually much bigger than most people think.

Launched back in 1998, the company is now publicly traded on NASDAQ and boasts a market cap of nearly half a billion dollars, and the company caters to hundreds of thousands of small businesses and organizations who use its software to spam connect with their customers and members. So if such an e-mail newsletter juggernaut launches a new service that is bound to be a competitor to a host of Internet startups, we take notice.

Asus, Acer, HTC or BenQ: Taiwan is well-known as a significant player in the global electronics industry, but it’s safe to say the Taiwanese web landscape is still a black box for many of us. Taiwan ranks 10th in Asia in terms of Internet population, with around 15 million people currently online. Add to this an online ad market that grew by 14.9% to $208 million in 2009, and you have a fairly attractive Internet market overall.

I’m in Taiwan now and as announced last week, there will be a TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup tomorrow (Monday, October 5) in Taipei at 7.30pm (open door at 7pm). We are holding the meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a Taipei-based innovation strategy firm.

Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.

I’ll be in Taiwan next week and am delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a local innovation strategy firm. The TechCrunch / Chili Consulting Party will take place in Taipei, on October 5 (Monday) and is invitation-only.

Details after the jump.

Meetup, a web service that enables people to organize and manage real life get-togethers, has proven to be a popular tool that people are willing to pay for. TechCrunch has obtained a slide deck that the company used for an August 2009 shareholder update, revealing its current financial situation and past revenue forecasts. The document shows the New York-based company is performing well, having reported its first (mildly) profitable month last July.

Financial results actually fell short of forecasts put forward last year, when Meetup aimed for 50% growth in both meetups and revenues by this Summer. Despite the fact that growth was actually more like 35-40% over 2008 in its main metrics, Meetup (unexpectedly) hit profitability last July on net income of $30,000.

Our first TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup in Tokyo (TechCrunch Japan is one of Japan’s main blogs) yesterday night was a blast. Peter Ha was in town and over 100 people attended the event on very short notice, including representatives from Yahoo Japan, telecommunications giants KDDI and NTT, Opera, MySpace Japan, mobile social network GREE and many more. Japan’s super blogger Danny Choo also joined, spending the whole evening in Stormtrooper gear.

There were a lot of companies with iPhone apps in the room: iPhone manga, iPhone Othello, iPhone Meow Cam, even an iPhone newspaper. Here is a selection of some of the web services and iPhone apps from smaller start-ups that were pitched to me yesterday (in no particular order). Next time we really need to schedule more than two hours for these events.