Global by Design

Last week I said I’d love to see more profiles of global-minded business execs and, sure enough, the Journal delivers. Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee. According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s [...]

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The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart. This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages. It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic.

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In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category. In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround. In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance. It’s nice to see [...]

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted findings from the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, but I did want to include a brief note on the retail sector. We define this industry segment to include those retailers (and a few food/beverage chains) that have a physical presence in the countries in which they do business. This excludes [...]

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I’m happy to be not only attending but speaking at Localization World and Unicode Conference in October. Here are the details on my sessions: Localization World Seattle, WA October 6: International Search Summit October 7: The Next Ten Years of Web Globalization October 7: Making Your Website Truly Global — and No, We’re Not Talking About Language Unicode [...]

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