Global by Design

Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around to doing it. But that’s a topic for a later post.
For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing [...]

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Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).
But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.
As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting [...]

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My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts.
Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.
Like who?
Apple, for one.
Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing [...]

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In 2005, I interviewed a man named Winter, who was on a quest to visit ever Starbucks location on this planet.
Four years later, the quest continues.
Unfortunately, as documented by the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is now closing stores faster than Winter can visit them.
In 2005, Winter had visited 4,500 Starbucks stores. Today, his count stands [...]

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ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish.
http://twitter.com/icann_en
http://twitter.com/icann_es
This is not the most scalable solution. And I’m not trying to pick on Twitter; the issue effects any multinational company or organization.
For instance, let’s say ICANN [...]

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