GoDaddy going global

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 [...]

Microsoft Outlook now supports 32 country codes

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. [...]

When country codes go generic

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 [...]

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Living in a post-PC world

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 [...]

Bienvenido: Ford home page overlay

Bienvenido: Using language negotiation to support bilingual US websites

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 [...]

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Update your RSS feed for Global by Design

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 [...]