A combination of the below functions to enable ucfirst for multibyte strings in a shared hosting environment (where you can not always count on mbstring to be installed):

<?php
function my_mb_ucfirst($str, $e='utf-8') {
    if (function_exists('mb_strtoupper')) {
        $fc = mb_strtoupper(mb_substr($str, 0, 1, $e), $e); 
        return $fc.mb_substr($str, 1, mb_strlen($str, $e), $e);
    }
    else { 
        $str = utf8_decode($str);
        $str[0] = strtr($str[0],
            "abcdefghýijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".
            "\x9C\x9A\xE0\xE1\xE2\xE3".
            "\xE4\xE5\xE6\xE7\xE8\xE9".
            "\xEA\xEB\xEC\xED\xEE\xEF".
            "\xF0\xF1\xF2\xF3\xF4\xF5".
            "\xF6\xF8\xF9\xFA\xFB\xFC".
            "\xFE\xFF",
            "ABCDEFGHÝIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ".
            "\x8C\x8A\xC0\xC1\xC2\xC3\xC4".
            "\xC5\xC6\xC7\xC8\xC9\xCA\xCB".
            "\xCC\xCD\xCE\xCF\xD0\xD1\xD2".
            "\xD3\xD4\xD5\xD6\xD8\xD9\xDA".
            "\xDB\xDC\xDE\x9F");
        return utf8_encode($str);
    }
}
?>