And here it is: I think it works. I realize some UI experts won’t agree with me on this. I’ve been told many times over the years that the globe icon is insufficient for indicating language. That the globe represents geography or travel or “select country” — but not “select language.” And while I agree [...]
Mary Meeker, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, recently provided another healthy dose of data and trends, along with a number of predictions. But the media largely overlooked the web and software globalization implications of many of these slides. So allow me to chime in on the slides that jumped out at me. Let’s [...]
I love these new Apple advertisements: And… But one thing I couldn’t help but wonder while watching them: Where are the older folks? That is, where are the people of my demographic? Or my parents? If you look closely you’ll see one or two people who may be 40 or 50 years or older, but [...]
It seems like everyone is running a web survey these days. While I appreciate the importance of asking your website visitors what they think, too many of these surveys are poorly implemented. So here are five tips to consider before launching your web survey… 1. Make it worth my while I used to love to [...]
In this interview with Blake Irving, CEO of GoDaddy, he mentions the company’s focus on expanding global reach: We’re localizing, globalizing and marketizing our code base which means we’re building software for specific languages and markets. Take Spanish, for example. It’s spoken differently in places like Chile, Mexico and Peru, so we’ll make investments in [...]
Speaking of country codes, I’ve been meaning to mention this. Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) now offers users an impressive range of country code domains. Here’s the full list of supported country codes. It appears that Microsoft is using geolocation to enforce that you have to be based in a given region to register its country code. [...]
The .co domain is the country code of Colombia. But a few years back Colombia sold its soul (I mean, licensed its country code). So now .co can be registered pretty much by anyone, similar to generic top-level domains such as .com and .net. Over the past few years the .co domain has become quite [...]
We studied 12 enterprise technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world. Out of those 12 companies, Cisco Systems emerged on top. Cisco emerged on top for three main reasons. First, it [...]
I recently gave a talk via Lionbridge webinar on the globalization of retail websites. I talked at length about Amazon — a company widely considered to be the leader in global ecommerce. And yet after nearly 20 years in business, the company supports only 9 country websites. So what gives? Shouldn’t Amazon have launched 40 [...]
The latest data from IDC show the sharpest decline in PC sales on record. From the release: “Although the reduction in shipments was not a surprise, the magnitude of the contraction is both surprising and worrisome,” said David Daoud, IDC Research Director, Personal Computing. “The industry is going through a critical crossroads, and strategic choices [...]
During my work for the Web Globalization Report Card I encountered a number of US-focused websites relying on language negotiation (also known as language detection) to make their Spanish-language websites impossible to ignore. Shown above is the overlay used on the T-Mobile website. And below is the Ford website overlay: What language negotiation does is [...]
I’m still trying to understand why Google is killing Google Reader and, along with it presumably, Feedburner. I love RSS and rely on it to follow more than a hundred blogs. What about Twitter? Facebook? I’m sorry, but the signal-to-noise ratio just doesn’t cut it for me. They certainly have their roles to play, but [...]
WhatsApp is now supporting 16 languages with the addition of Thai, shown here: I noted earlier how much I admired their global gateway. Simple and effective.
We studied 18 consumer technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world. Out of those 18 companies, Samsung emerged on top. Samsung emerged on top not because it leads in languages or [...]
