Global by Design

It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world.
As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.
Om Malik recently reported some key stats from [...]

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I bought a LaCie hard drive recently, and I noticed an interesting gap between the global usability of the LaCie Web site and the installation software that shipped with the drive.
I’m sure this is an issue not unique to LaCie. The folks who manage the Web site generally sit in a different part of the [...]

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Techcrunch reports from Facebook’s developer conference today in which company announced that it would open its “crowdsourcing” translation platform to its legion of application developers. Here’s the press release excerpt:
As a result of the worldwide success of Facebook’s translation system, the company has opened up the Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. Beginning [...]

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As John wrote awhile back: All lucky numbers are local.
And this is particularly true in China, where people pay thousands of dollars to obtain license plates with lucky numbers.
So when it comes to naming products or setting prices, you have to be very careful about your choice of numbers. Here are some tips:
6 means “good [...]

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China is on pace to surpass Germany as the world’s most popular country code top-level domain (ccTLD) — in about two or three months.
Germany currently leads with roughly 11.5 million .de registrations, but China recently surpassed the 10 million mark, and is adding 20,000 registrations per day.
Keep in mind, this 10 million statistic includes all [...]

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