Global by Design

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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The falling dollar is forcing a lot of small business owners to focus their marketing efforts outside of the US.The New York Times weighs in with a good article on small business owners thinking globally.Here’s an excerpt:
The ebb and flow of global markets was part of the reason Handlery Hotels in California decided to pursue [...]

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If you’ve read this blog recently, you are aware of John’s reports on Facebook’s efforts to translate its Website into German and other European languages. I am a keen observer of the “kraut-sourcing” efforts. However, in Germany Facebook faces an entrenched competitor: “StudiVZ”.
StudiVZ is a social networking platform, very similar to Facebook. In contrast [...]

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Starwood Hotels has announced that it has launched Chinese-language Web sites for all of its hotel brands — from Westin to Sheraton to St. Regis.
The hotel chain had previously offered varying levels of Chinese support across its hotel brands but has definitely made a big step forward. The room-booking engine is in Chinese as are [...]

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I’ve had Google Analytics installed on this site for some time now, which makes it a great resource for tracking the most popular posts of the year.
So here are the top 10 posts of 2007 based on traffic:

The Best Global Web Sites of 2007
Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing This quote from the Starbucks [...]

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