Global by Design

After more than a year at Microsoft, I have decided to return to Byte Level Research.
It was a tough decision to make. I enjoyed working with the many people who are passionate about globalization. And I enjoyed being a part of one of the most global companies on the planet.
But the time was right for [...]

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Let me guess. Year of the Tiger?

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In response to the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft quickly expanded its machine translation engine to include Haitian Creole.
Today I noticed that Google has an alpha version of its Haitian Creole engine as well.
Though it’s sad that it took a natural disaster to spur attention to a particular language, I’m glad to see the language available.
It’s [...]

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I came across an interesting presentation today via Carla Briceno. The survey, sponsored by AOL and conducted by Cheskin, was based on interviewing more than a thousand Hispanic households across the US about how they view and use the Internet.
First some data points. Looking ahead at the 2010 census:

50 Million Hispanics will be living in [...]

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ICANN shed some light on its fast-track application process today, announcing the first four countries to pass the string evaluation of the process.
Here they are:

Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
Egypt (EG): مصر
United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.
I know [...]

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Long before Google launched Google.cn, it launched the Chinese localized version of Google.com.
And this site is alive and well and hosted outside of China’s great firewall.
Just change your browser’s language preference to Chinese and you’ll see it the next time you visit Google.
And had China not continually blocked this site from Chinese citizens years ago, [...]

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I’ve been writing this blog since 2002.
Back when I started out, I wasn’t sure how long I would stick with this “blogging” thing and I didn’t really want to make any investment in software (besides time).
I tried a few different platforms before settling on WordPress.
It was free — certainly a selling point. But it’s wasn’t [...]

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If you want to know the world’s most dangersous ccTLDs, ask an anti-virus software company.
McAfee has released its list of most dangerous country codes. Here are the top five:

Cameroon (.cm)
PR of China (.cn)
Samoa (.ws)
Philippines (.ph)
Former Soviet Union (.su)

Why is Camerooon at the top of the list?
Because .cm is a common typo by users who intended [...]

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I recently got around to upgrading to Snow Leopard.
Along the way, I discovered a rather interesting bug.
It’s not a huge deal, but a bug nonetheless. And one likely to cause a fair amount of confusion.
First of all, if you have never modified your language settings (The “International” button on the System Preferences menu)  then you [...]

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With a few hours to spare, here are the most popular blog posts of 2009, based on number of visitors:

The rise of “international” English — otherwise known as American English
Of Kosovo and .ks
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years
Is this the next language icon?
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Three [...]

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