Google now has goo.gl.

And Facebook has FB.me.

But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country code”

That is, the ccTLD is not being used to signify location, but for something totally unrelated.

I’ve compiled a growing list of Countryless Country Codes.

As always, if you have any sites for me to add, post a comment below.

And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:

Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with subtitles in as many languages as possible. Still, many of the world’s languages aren’t yet represented in the project, and we want to fill those gaps. Today, we’re putting out a call to translators worldwide to help us translate the languages that the project hasn’t yet covered.

We’re looking for translators who speak these languages, in particular:

• Akan
• Assamese
• Filipino
• Galician
• Gujarati
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Panjabi
• Sinhala
• Tagalog
• Tibetan
• Tswana
• Yoruba
• Zulu

In some cases, translations in the languages above have already been completed, but remain unpublished because they still need to be reviewed. (Some of the languages only have one translator.)

These languages aren’t exactly what the translation industry would call Tier 1. That is, there simply isn’t as deep pool of translators to draw from. Which is why any crowdsourcing strategy must take into account the size of the potential crowd.

So how is TED doing so far with its crowdsourcing project?

This menu should give you an idea of what languages are covered and to what extent. Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese are doing best by far.

For roughly six months of work, TED appears to be doing quite well.

But hey, those slogans are cool to look at, right?

Here are two German examples:

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2006, when I predicted that companies would eventually do away with global slogans. It seems to me that the next generation of global brands won’t have them and won’t need them. I pointed out at the time that Google didn’t have a global slogan, but apparently I overlooked YouTube. Even Google has fallen for a lure of the global slogan.

Nike tried to translate “Just Do It” but gave up and just used the slogan globally. So perhaps the “global slogan” is here to stay.

But my advice to companies just getting started — avoid them if you can. The risks generally outweigh the rewards.

Until there is a “global consumer” there is no such thing as a “global slogan.”

So Bit.ly has launched an even shorter URL: J.mp.

You can’t get any shorter than this, at least not until we see single-digital TLDs.

I can’t help but wonder if this new URL is a sign that Bit.ly is planning to shift away from its Libyan-dependent domain to one that may be a tad bit more politically stable.

And you could argue that .MP does the trick. It is the domain of the Northern Mariana Islands. It’s also a part of the US (in some legal fashion that I don’t fully understand), which has to make the lawyers at Bit.ly breathe more easily.

So my prediction is that Bit.ly will be replaced by J.mp. And though Bit.ly might play up the shorter angle for the reason why, I think it’s the legal angle that matters more.

PS: I added J.mp to a growing list of these branded country code domains.

According to the Seattle PI:

Starbucks recently opened stores in the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Poland. And it has plans for a big push in China.

Starbucks began its expansion outside of North America in 1996 when it opened two stores in Japan. By 2000, teamed up with its Canadian operation, it had opened 127 stores internationally. Its appetite for worldwide growth grew bigger in 2005 when it set its sights on 1,500 stores internationally, including expansions into Brazil, India, Russia and China.

Perhaps it’s coincidence that when Starbucks redesigned its Web site recently the “International” link was promoted to the top of the page, as shown here:

For Starbucks, this is big.

The previous two web designs, stretching all the way back to 2003, relegated the “Worldwide” link to the bottom of the left column.

Not an ideal location.

That said, now that Starbucks has promoted its international interface, there is still room for improvement.

For starters, the accented characters used in Österreich and España didn’t appear correctly on both my Mac and PC browsers. It looks like an Adobe Flash glitch, but a pretty big one I’d say.

Second, I’d like to see the “International” link accompanied with a globe or map icon. Would a non-native English speaker know to click on the International link? I’m not sure. A globe icon speaks many languages.

I’m glad to see Starbucks put an emphasis on International. It may seem like a trivial change in the great scheme of things, but I know how various departments and divisions within companies battle over the precious real estate of a global home page. Here’s hoping the International link retains its high-profile position.

I think it will. After all, international is where the growth is.

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 Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

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 company from the folks who develop the installation software. So the end result is two different user experiences — and inconsistent experiences at that.

First-time visitors to LaCie.com will encounter this splash global gateway:

I’m not a huge fan of the pull-down menu, but there are also text links positioned underneath the menu for those who’d rather not bother scrolling. Overall, it’s a nice way to welcome people to your Web site — by ensuring that they’ve found their localized content as early as possible in the process.

After purchasing my hard drive, I inserted the CD that shipped with it and this is the first screen I saw;

“ENU” was the folder I needed to open.

But I had to think about it. “English_US” would have been clearer. And what about the other options? Is CHS for Switzerland? Is NLD for the Netherlands? I would assume so, but I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having to think about this. And you really shouldn’t make your customers think about these details.

A simple splash screen — based on the Web design — would have been a much more user-friendly way to present these options.

I want to emphasize that this is a disconnect not unique to LaCie. It has to do with different groups within same company all tackling the same general problem — with different results.

My prediction is that the people who manage global Web sites are going to see their scope widen in the years ahead as they assist other customer-facing parts of the company develop consistent global interfaces. It’s all about consistency these days — easier said than done — but those who do it well truly stand apart.

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 today, any Facebook developer can make their application available in any of the 20 languages that are currently available on Facebook, with 69 more coming soon.

Developers can now access the Translation Application to either translate their applications themselves, or open up translation of their application to Facebook users around the world, who will work together to define it in their native languages.

Developers are naturally very excited about this development because they can tap into the same group of enthusiastic volunteers who are currently translating Facebook’s interface into different languages. Or, developers can pay translators or agencies to do the translation.

Facebook knows that part of the value of its platform are the third-party applications. As I mentioned a few days ago, I was concerned that so many of Apple’s iPhone apps are currently in English only. And it’s safe to say that Apple is nowhere close to launching anything similar to what Facebook is now doing.

As Facebook goes global with its platform, it wants all of its 400,000 developers (more than half of which live outside of the US) to come along as well. Opening up the translation platform is a win-win for everyone.

And we could see Facebook’s translation platform become a force onto itself.

It will be interesting to see what role translation agencies and freelance translators will play. I see a nice opportunity, because some of these app developers will want to pay a premium to have professional translators involved.

PS: Techcrunch also shares some data on Facebook’s global traffic growth — a sign that this translation program is perfectly timed.

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 fortune.”
8 means “abundance of wealth” or “make lots of money.”

The number 8 is a very lucky number, and the reason why China chose August 8th, 2008 to kick off Olympics Games. Vehicle license plates and cellphone numbers containing 6 or 8 are coveted and often auctioned to the highest bidder. A recent example: A C88888 vehicle license was auctioned in Guangdong where it sold for RMB800,000 (around USD113,000). The new owner hopes this license number helps bring good fortune — though presumably the owner was already fortunate enough to have the money to spend on the license plate.

9 means “forever.”

If a boy wants to buy a rose for his girlfriend, he will typically buy 9 roses. If he wants to splurge, he’ll buy 19 roses — and if he’s affluent, he’ll buy 99 roses. September 9th is Senior People Day in China, to ensure that th elderly live a healthy and long life.

4 is pronounced the same as “dead.”
13 means crazy, abnormal.

If a Chinese person says “you are 13″, it means “you are insane!” Some buildings, like in the US, avoid having a 13th floor. Instead, they use floor 12B. And although the pronunciation of 4 sounds like “dead,” there is a positive way to portray the number: In a musical scale, 4 is equialent to “fa,” which is pronounced closely to “make money” in Chinese. My old phone number contains “5854″ and my Chinese friends say it is a great number because it means “I make money and then I make money again.” I am happy to hear their comments.

51 in Chinese is pronounces like “I (5) wanna (1).”

You’ll find a lot of businesses and Websites using 51 in their names. 51job is the largest online human resources company. So you can tell a lot about a company simply by the numbers it uses in its domain name. Since 1 sounds like “wanna,” the number 18 is also popular as “wanna make money” and many people will choose the 18th of the month as a new business opening date or a wedding date.

Even numbers > odd numbers

Chinese people like to use even numbers rather than odd numbers because even number are related to the concept of “pairs” which usually means “perfect” in Chinese culture.

With regards to business, if a company produces different versions of products, expect them to produce 6, 8, or 12, 36 different versions. And you can always find prices like 88.00, 128.00; 156.00 in China’s shopping malls.

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 permutations of .cn, such as gov.cn and edu.cn. The .cn domain registered by companies inside and outside of China, such as Intel.cn and Google.cn, accounts for 6 million of the 10 million registrations.

It’s no surprise that China would surpass Germany. What is surprising is China’s rate of growth, as visualized here:

The ebb and flow of global markets was part of the reason Handlery Hotels in California decided to pursue foreign travelers 30 years ago. The Web site for the hotel company, a family-owned business, is translated into seven languages, and Jon Handlery, senior vice president, makes regular marketing visits to travel agents overseas. The philosophy, according to Mr. Handlery, goes something like this: �One year the pound might be strong so we increase marketing in the U.K. Another year it could be Japan. Things could shift globally year to year and we adjust accordingly.

I’m working on the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card right now. The report mostly focuses mostly on large US companies. The early data I’m seeing is that 2007 was another busy year for adding languages. For instance, Hotels.com added four languages, bringing it to 16 total, and Microsoft now supports 40 languages on its Web site (not including Microsoft Live, which we haven’t reviewed yet). What’s going to be interesting to see are what languages companies are supporting. While small businesses may just be getting their feet wet with FIGS (French, Italian, German Spanish) and Japanese and Chinese, many large companies are now venturing into Russian, Vietnamese, and Arabic.Also worth a quick read, Laurel Delaney features a Q&A with the author of a new report on global entrepreneurs. Here’s the link.

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 to Facebook, the positioning and the target group is extremely focused (for example, during signup you have to explicitly provide your high school or university). There are other affiliated networks like “SchülerVZ” specifically targeting younger people and pupils (until they are “old enough” to join StudiVZ).

In the past StudiVZ has tried to expand into other countries, too, and translated the Website into French, Spanish, Italian and Polish. But despite its efforts and except for Poland, the results were poor: the number of users were well below expectations. This led to a reorganisation of the staff, e.g. reduced teams which operate independently in each country. And now StudiVZ announced that it will “hibernate” its international expansion and instead it will focus its efforts in a renewed and improved software architecture.

For me this a clear move to counter Facebook’s advance in Europe, and especially Germany. Let’s see how the opponents stack up:

• Facebook has an estimated user base of 60 million users worldwide and app. 600.000 in Germany. StudiVZ has app. 4,8 million users and SchülerVZ app. 2,7 millions. Numbers are currently increasing sharply. Facebook 0 : StudiVZ 1
• StudiVZ is extremely focused in marketing its platform to students and teenagers. Therefore the numbers above show a deep market penetration in this growing group. Facebook 0 : StudiVZ 2
• Facebook has a lot of venture capital backing, while StudiVZ has the backing of only the German publishing group Holzbrinck. Facebook 1 : StudiVZ 2
• StudiVZ is trailing Facebook in technology and needs to modernize its software architecture. Right now StudiVZ is a “closed shop” and does not yet allow independent developers in its ecological niche. And the renewed technology might take some time to completely roll out. Facebook 2 : StudiVZ 2
• StudiVZ has translated its Website into several languages and can exploit this language base in the future. Facebook has a very large and expanding global user base. Shortly they will have the same language capabilities. Facebook 3 : StudiVZ 3.

Right now I cannot see a clear winner here in Germany, but I see some small advantages for Facebook. But winning over the users from StudiVZ will be difficult and will consume time and money. Maybe a takeover would do the trick.

Moreover, the global reach of users is crucial for potential partners, e.g. for content providers or technological partners. I am referring here to the rumours of a Nokia+Facebook deal. I reckon the combination of mobile Web and global social networking will be one of the most interesting developments in the near future.

But don’t forget Orkut and Android, Google’s social platform and mobile technology… Ah, what interesting times we live in!

Links

• Interview with the CEO of StudiVZ (in German)
• StudiVZ

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 customer support tools.

China is Starwood’s fastest-growing market and only getting bigger. The company manages 40 hotels in China with an additional 40 under development. According to their press release, “In 2006, the market size for hotel bookings in China reached US$121 million and around 40% of this revenue was contributed by five-star hotels. By 2010, the market size for hotel online booking will hit US$347 million.”

Starwood was ranked the best global hotel Web site in our 2007 Web Globalization Report Card and thanks to efforts such as this appears poised to do well in the 2008 report.

So here are the top 10 posts of 2007 based on traffic:

1. The Best Global Web Sites of 2007
2. Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing This quote from the Starbucks CEO speaks volumes about the company’s success around the world.
3. Which Country; Which Language? A guest article by John Greenwood of InterPro Translation Services continues to be very popular.
4. The Best Global Web Sites (and why) This entry is a nice summary of some of the best practices exhibited by the top sites in the 2007 Report Card.
5. Register.Me Montenegro is getting its own country code (.me) and one can imagine the entertaining possibilities this domain presents for creative URLs.
6. Staples: Asi de Facil Hardly a week goes by that I don’t press my “That was easy” button, translated in Spanish. They sell a lot of these here in San Diego. I’m still waiting for the Chinese version.
7. If The World Were 100 People This is a personal favorite.
8. Scaling a Great Wall: Top 5 Tips for Learning Chinese This is another guest article, by Saul Gitlin of Kang & Lee, and a very hot topic these days.
9. Just Don’t Do It: The Art of Slogan Translation
10. The Localization of iPhone

So there you have it — the top 10 entries out of the 99 entries posted in 2007. Yes, I know I’m not the most active blogger as bloggers go. But I only blog when the urge strikes and sometimes it just does not strike. Which is probably a good thing.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

And on that note I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

So now it’s time to take a deep breath and take a shot at predicting the future of Web globalization. The following predictions are based on current trends as well as gut feelings.

Predictions for the Year Ahead

1. The Weak Dollar Drives US Companies to Greatly Boost Web Globalization Spending
Okay, this was an easy call to make. The weak US dollar is helping companies weather a poor local economy by selling their goods abroad. And this year I’ve noticed a number of companies boosting their Web globalization budgets to expand into new markets or improve their current localized Web sites. All signs point to 2008 being a very busy year for translators and Web localization teams.

It’s also worth highlighting a few companies that invested in Web globalization while the dollar was still strong. It’s no sheer coincidence that some of the companies weathering the US downturn thanks to strong overseas sales are also some of the companies at the top of the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Google
• HP
• Cisco
• Xerox
• Caterpillar

While a great global Web site does not in itself ensure success, it is a major competitive differentiator as companies expand abroad. And those companies that embraced Web globalization early on are now reaping the rewards.

2. Internationalized Domains Names Become a �Surprise� Hit
I have long been a strong proponent of local-language domain names. Next year, ICANN will launch approved IDNs that the local markets will embrace. The media will report the surprising success these domains see in their respective countries. China in particular will report more than two million registrations in one month (probably in 2009).

The demand for local-language domains is there. Yes, there are plenty of details yet to be worked through at ICANN and there will no doubt be technical and political obstacles along the way — which will also be widely reported by the media. But next year will mark that point in time when the Internet begins to provide a true local-language end-to-end Internet experience for users around the world.

3. China Requires Companies to Register Chinese-Language Domains
China has been the most vocal proponent of IDNs. The government effectively argues that the Internet cannot be user friendly for its citizens until they can enter domain names in the native Chinese script. Now that IDNs are becoming a reality, I expect China to begin requiring companies that wish to do business in China to register IDNs.

China would probably initially require those companies that are licensed to host sites within China to register IDNs, but it may also go after companies that host outside of China as well. There is also a financial incentive for this requirement, as these registrations will benefit state-owned domain registries. Following in China’s steps, Russia will also require the registration of Cyrillic domains, and other countries may also follow.

From a usability perspective, we expect most companies to register IDNs for China and Russia (and elsewhere) regardless of any such regulations. But the regulations will be a wake-up call to those companies that have overlooked IDNs.

4. The .asia Domain Will Not Equal the Success of .eu
In one year, the .eu domain surpassed 2.5 million registrations. It would stand to reason that the forthcoming .asia domain, which represents a far larger population, would be even more popular.

I’m not so sure. I believe that .asia will be fortunate if it reaches 1 million registrations in its first year, and it may not exceed half a million. The reason for this is two-fold:

• No geographic boundary. While .eu refers to a group of clearly defined countries, what countries does .asia refer to exactly? I’m not sure, and neither is anyone I’ve asked.
• IDNs are better. China, Korea, Vietnam and others are going to embrace domains in their native language rather than the .asia domain.

The sunrise period for .asia began in November, and the DotAsia registry reports 15,000 applications, the majority of which have come from US corporations. This is hardly an overwhelming response and a sign that 2008 will be an underwhelming year for registrations.

5. Splash Global Gateways Become Ubiquitous
Early this year, during the course of research for the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card, I found that approximately 30% of the 200 Web sites reviewed made use of a splash (or landing page) global gateway, such as the one shown here:

That figure was a 20% increase from the year before and a sign of a trend that we do not see slowing. By the end of 2008, nearly half of all large multinationals will make use of splash global gateways.

6. Geolocation Gains Fans (and Enemies)
Geolocation is a “behind the scenes” way of guessing a Web user’s location by analyzing his or her IP address. It can be quite effective, and Google has used it for years. Amazon and Expedia also use it selectively, and more companies will follow suit next year.

However, I think we will also begin to see news reports of geolocation being used to keep people out of Web sites. For example, Amazon may offer a special discount on a book in one country and not the other, and it does not want users in the non-discounted country to know better. Using geolocation, users could be barred from seeing these discounts or products altogether, without being the wiser.

Geolocation could be used to create geographically gated communities on the Internet, something that goes against the spirit of the Internet but is also difficult to stop.

7. Multilingual Corporate Blogs Go Mainstream
While lawyers in companies around the globe fret over the legal implications of supporting employee blogs, more and more companies are taking the plunge, from Dell to Sun to Google. From a budgetary perspective, blogs offer the ideal way to bypass the cost-per-word limitation of translation while offering plenty of local content. Naturally, companies need good writers locally who can contribute relevant content, but these writers do exist, and forward-looking companies will put them to good use.

8. Wal-Mart Launches a Spanish Site for the US
While retailers like Lowe’s and Staples have launched Spanish-language Web sites for the US market, Wal-Mart has remained on the sidelines. This will change in 2008.

I witnessed a sign that Wal-Mart is headed in this direction during the week of Thanksgiving.

Wal-Mart ran a Web-based promotion that was bilingual, as shown here:

If you were to click through on any of these product links, you would be taken to English-language text. But I think this will change, probably by next Thanksgiving.

Looking Beyond 2008

9. Baidu and Yandex Enter the US to Challenge Google
If one the best forms of defense is a strong offense, I expect Chinese search engine leader Baidu and Russian search engine leader Yandex to attack Google on its home turf.

Yandex, shown here, continues to lead in Russia despite Google’s best efforts. And the success of both Yandex and Baidu hint that the search engine wars globally have only just begun.

10a. Google Becomes Your Company’s Internal Translator
Google Apps is a Web-based platform that businesses small and large rely on to support email and collaboration. At some point in the future, Google will provide business members with integrated access to Google Translate.

Google Translate will allow executives to have foreign-language emails translated in real-time into their native language. Web browsing can also be translated in real time for executives who want to learn more about foreign competition. All of this will be powered by Google’s in-house statistical machine translation (SMT) engine and it will be tailored to the company’s industry terminology.

The quality of this translation will by no means be perfect. But as Google’s engine gets to understand your business and as its global memory database grows, the quality of translations will improve. Google will allow companies to upload their own translation memories to further improve Google’s SMT engine.

10b. Google Becomes Your Company’s External Translator
Eventually, companies will become so comfortable with Google’s translation abilities that it will allow Google to be the company’s “front end” for specific types of Web content.

For example, a company may offer a public blog in English and will allow Google’s SMT engine to translate it for the world. Since this is content that the company may not have ever paid to have manually translated, it’s a nice proposition for both the company and consumers.

Naturally, there are a lot of “ifs” involved. Companies must upload their translation memories to provide the level of quality required, and the public must be satisfied with less-than-perfect translation quality.

But the ramifications of Google acting as a “multilingual interface” is significant. It could very well mean that we’ll see companies actually decrease their pure translation spending in the years ahead. But that does not mean they won’t be spending money on Web globalization. Their spending will probably increase, but it will be focused on content creators, editors, user advocates, and community managers.

What does this mean to vendors? It means that the time is now to begin thinking about how your company will thrive in a world where translation is not your core source of revenue.

This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat.

While The World is Flat may leave an executive thinking We have to be in Brazil and Russia and China and India yesterday! Pankaj emphasizes a more measured, sober approach to expanding globally. He also makes a good case for looking beyond the BRIC countries.

Pankaj argues that there are very few truly global companies. Most companies are going through a phase of semiglobalization in which “levels of cross-border integration are generally increasing and, in many instances, setting new records, but fall far short of complete integration and will continue to do so for decades.”

Pankaj says that companies should ask themselves if they should even go global to begin with. At a minimum, he recommends that companies apply his “CAGE distance framework.” CAGE refers to the four types of distance that companies must overcome to succeed in a new market: Cultural, Administrative, Geographic, and Economic.

This is a dense book and it feels academic at times. But don’t let that stop you from reading it. It is an important book and could help many executives avoid a lot of headaches as they invest millions and millions in, say, Brazil or Russia or India or China.

Here is a blurb from a New York Times review:

Very few companies are globally global, Mr. Ghemawat observes. Even Toyota became No. 1 in autos by linking operations within the Americas, within Europe and within Asia, rather than across them. Definitions of region can vary — not just continents but trans-Atlantic, Greater China, trans-Indian Ocean, Eurasia — and Mr. Ghemawat examines a variety of regional hub strategies. But the latter, too, is no strategic panacea: regional platforms can grow into regional fiefdoms.

“Nobody has figured out the optimal way to organize a complex global economy,” he concludes. That is because no single optimal strategy exists. Companies are left to pursue what Mr. Ghemawat labels A.A.A:  — adaptation, aggregation, and arbitrage — or, in straightforward English, multiple variants of individual tailoring.

Here are the top five markets based on online spending:

• UK: $20 billion
• Germany: $12 billion
• France: $6.5 billion
• Italy: $2.1 billion
• Netherlands: $1.9 billion

Leisure travel, clothing, and consumer electronics will account for more than half of the money spent online.

These numbers are significant and further illustrate the importance of Web localization.

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Tagalog

Since languages span borders, the total number of country domains now supported by iGoogle number more than 70.

According to the Google Blog, “with this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language.”

Based on my research, your Web site needs to support 10 languages to reach more than 80% of the world’s Internet users. To get to 99%, you definitely have to exceed 30 to 35 languages (depending on the mix), which very few companies have done. In the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card, out of the 200 Web sites reviewed, only 28 sites exceeded 30 languages and only 3 sites exceeded 40 languages.

The languages that Google has recently added reflects a larger Web globalization trend. Large multinationals that already support the core Western European and Asian languages are now turning their attention to Eastern and Northern Europe and the Middle East.

While a Slovakian Web site may be off the radar for most global marketing executives, it may not be off their radar for very long.

A flat world is a great thing when you can get a brand new high-def TV for less than $700 because it was made in China.

But it’s not such a great thing when you wake up one morning to find antifreeze in your toothpaste or lead paint on your children’s toys.

I think we’re now entering a period of globalization hangover that I call “flatlash.”

A new Pew report based on interviews with 45,000 people regarding globalization appears to support this view.

The report summarizes as follows:

People support the tenets of economic globalization but fear the disruptions and downsides of participating in the global economy. In rich countries as well as poor ones, most people endorse free trade, multinational corporations and free markets. However, the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey of more than 45,000 people finds they are concerned about inequality, threats to their culture, threats to the environment and threats posed by immigration. Together, these results reveal an evolving world view on globalization that is nuanced, ambivalent, and sometimes inherently contradictory.

There are signs that enthusiasm for economic globalization is waning in the West – Americans and Western Europeans are less supportive of international trade and multinational companies than they were five years ago. In contrast, there is near universal approval of global trade among the publics of rising Asian economic powers China and India.

I’m also reading a book now called Redefining Global Strategy that basically says that the world is not flat and that the companies that succeed are those that understand how best to navigate the many differences of countries and cultures around the world. I recommend the book and will post a review shortly.

My hope is that as this globalization hangover wears off we enter a period of “smart globalization.”

That is, we negotiate trade agreements that take into account human rights, environmental rights, and common sense. When 100,000 Costa Ricans are protesting a proposed free trade agreement with the US, something is not right. Just as Americans are now scared of toys made in China, Costa Rican farmers are justifiably terrified of the effect that US factory farms will have on their livelihoods. Even though more and more Americans don’t even like their own factory farms, our trade agreements are effectively forcing farmers in other countries to emulate our business models as we undercut their prices. The irony, of course, is that the US is moving back towards local and organic farming just as farmers in other countries are being forced to give up local and organic farming. (UPDATE: Costa Rican voters narrowly approved the trade agreement.)

So I think this period of “flatlash” was not only inevitable but also positive, and will lead to smarter globalization in the years ahead.

This map was designed to fit on a cubicle wall and include the major country code top level domains (ccTLDs) that a global Webmaster may encounter.

And although the map includes a whopping 180 ccTLDs, that is not all of them. To include all of them, I would have to develop a much-larger map, which is what I ended up doing.

And here it is, our newest and biggest map, shown below:

This map effectively includes all ccTLDs — 245 in all. Yes, there are more country codes than there are countries. That’s because you don’t have to be a country to have your own country code. The uninhabited Bouvet Island has a code: .bv. Even Antarctica has its own code: .aq.

This map also sizes the country codes based on the population of a given country or territory, which is why China and India feature so prominently. And this map also includes some key statistics regarding country populations and the most popular country codes based on registrations.

To learn more, go to www.bytelevel.com/map/ccTLD.html.

This week, AOL launches AOL España.

Said AOL President and COO Ron Grant in a recent interview:

“We are going to be expanding internationally. We’re going to have a relentless focus on building.” AOL plans localized portals in 30 territories by the end of 2009. Grant: “We are behind internationally. We sold off access so we�re starting from a very small base; I think we’re in seven countries now. We start off about 100 million uniques (through AIM, Winamop, Mapquest and ICQ).” As for Platform A, “we are going to take this monetization global.”

More to come…

As The Wall Street Journal reports (sub required), beer pong is now sweeping the nation.

Here’s the setup:

Now what does this story have to do with Web globalization?  Apparently, an entire industry of beer pong accessory makers have sprung up with global aspirations. Consider this excerpt:

In 2004, brothers Ben and Jesse Spiegel took a leave from the University of Denver, pooled more than $50,000 in savings and borrowed money, and started BJ’s Beer Pong. Following a business plan he wrote after taking a business course, Jesse spent seven months traveling around China looking for a factory to produce their portable beer-proof, sun-resistant tables with built-in rubber mats.

They say they have sold about 8,000 tables for prices ranging from $110 to $250 and have registered domain names in Australia, England and Ireland with hopes of international expansion. “By reading a lot of business and success books, we knew we could work hard and will it to happen,” Jesse says.

That’s right, the owners of BJ’s Beer Pong have registered domain names in other markets in anticipation of going global. Regardless of what you think of their business venture, you have to give these guys credit for looking beyond borders from day one.

The shirt has proven so popular that we’re now offering customized versions of the shirt.

Let’s say you want to get your global Web or marketing or customer service teams to “think global,” we can develop a shirt that includes your company’s logo along with the slogan. We can also develop customized coffee mugs and other goodies.
If you’re interested, please contact me.

And if you want our “off the rack” version of the shirt, we offer them for sale here.

Now one might argue that AOL is too late to the game. Yahoo and Google and many locals are already entrenched in Italy. But I would argue that all it takes is one new killer app to pull a few million people to your portal. So it’s important to first have that portal in place.

As a Yahoo user, I’ve often wondered what it would take for me to dump it in favor of a new portal, such as AOL. Right now, AOL looks a lot like Yahoo, so I’m not sure there is any compelling reason to switch, other than the fact that I really detest Yahoo’s use of stock photos, as shown below:

So I’m glad to see AOL going after Yahoo, not just here but abroad. What country will be next for AOL? Stay tuned to this blog for updates…

So what I’ve done is excerpted the top 100 Web sites from the report. Why didn’t I just include all 200? Frankly, I don’t want to call that much attention to those companies that rounded out the bottom of the list. It’s better to learn from the best global Web sites anyway.

You can download this mini-report here.

I hope you find it useful.

UPDATE: The 2008 Web Globalization Report Card is now available.

One of the things I first noticed (and love) about the Web browser is the .com button on the keypad, shown here.

Of course, this little shortcut isn’t so handy if I want to visit a .org or .edu Web site.

It’s also not much use for visiting country-specific Web sites, such as www.yahoo.fr.

Which is why the localization of this interface is going to be an interesting thing to watch evolve.

It is just a matter of time before we see the iPhone launched around the world. So does that mean the .com key will be replaced by .de or .fr keys? I imagine so.

This will give companies yet another good reason to register country code domains. While a Web user in France may first go to acme.com and then navigate to acme.fr when visiting a Web site. Using the iPhone, it’s likely that person will simply go to acme.fr, an example of a new interface changing user behavior.

The other interesting thing I’ve noticed on the iPhone so far is that it doesn’t appear to be using a “conventional” Unicode font. That is, I’m finding that the interface displays Chinese and other Asian scripts just fine — as well as Cyrillic — but it can’t display Arabic or Hebrew scripts. What this says to me is that Apple doesn’t have the Middle East on its near-term global expansion plans. My guess is that it’s using the scaled-down font to conserve drive space. Documentation is hard to come by so far so I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows more about this.

I’ve been to Europe once so far and the iPhone held up quite nicely; AT&T didn’t hit me up for too much in roaming fees. It is interesting — though not surprising — that you can’t de-activate cellular roaming and just rely on Wi-Fi. I did have a faulty power adapter but got that replaced at the Apple store with no resistance.

But back to the Web browser. I know this has been said many times before, but this is the first phone that makes browsing the Web about as easy as it is on a computer. And I suspect that over time this will have an impact not only on how companies develop Web sites in the US, but how they localize these sites for markets around the world.

The company is focusing on those markets where it currently does not lead. It looks like the new Web designs for Taiwan and Hong Kong will follow Korea’s lead — with more content, more animation, more everything.

Google cites the need to take advantage of the higher broadband speeds, which is certainly one good reason. But there is also the simple fact that austere Web designs have not (to this point) gone over very well with most Asian countries.

Does this mean that Google is sacrificing its identity to succeed in Asia? Perhaps. If, five years from now, tastes in Asia veer toward the austere, Google could find itself out-Googled by someone else.

It’s easy to be austere when you’re a one-trick pony, as was the case for Google six years ago. But it’s hard to be austere when you have so many different applications to offer. Even the new Apple iPhone, which is widely praise for its simplicity, features 16 icons on its home page (with more to come).

Perhaps feature-creep is just a fact of life for maturing Web sites. It wasn’t that long ago that Amazon featured only books on its home page and Yahoo! was little more than a one-column layout.

Here’s an excerpt:

DON’T: Obsess about learning the language. Foreign marketers entering Japan often try to learn the language before and during their short stints to establish partnerships or to secure distribution. Learning a few phrases can help, but you’ll rarely have time to become proficient in the language. The early stages of an expansion is a time to focus other aspects of your project.

But international revenues have grown at a faster pace — and this is despite eBay’s comical missteps in China.

So here we have it:

I’m a little surprised that none of the media I’ve read so far have picked up on this financial benchmark. It is significant.

Now where does eBay go from here? For starters, I have to believe that eBay is planning to enter Russia and the sooner the better. But even more important, I would like to see eBay seeding a number of emerging markets with localized Web sites — such as Ukraine and Turkey. These markets may take five years to begin really paying off — but then the UK and Germany were not overnight successes either.

India is already an important market for eBay — but infrastructure and Internet access are developing more slowly than in China.

And then there is Japan — the market that eBay ceded to Yahoo! years ago. eBay now offers Kijiji for Japan, which is something of a start in terms of readdressing this market. But the big question remains: Can eBay be a leader in Asia without leading in Japan?

Which brings me back to China. Not much was said in eBay’s Q2 call about China. eBay is far from alone in learning the hard way in this market. I read that eBay China is going to refocus on the small business market — which is really where the money is in the auction business right now, and where eBay’s competition has been focused from the beginning. I do see an opportunity for eBay to help small businesses facilitate international trade within Asia as well as outside of Asia.

For now, it’s simply important to recognize that, revenue-wise, eBay is now more of an international company than a US company. This is an exciting achievement.

More than two-thirds of them would live in Asia and Africa.

Next would be Europe, with 12 residents, and Latin America, with 8.

Only five people would live in North America.

Looking at global growth trends, it’s safe to say that Asia and Africa are likely to gain a few residents in the years ahead, while Europe is in danger of losing residents.

How many people have Internet access
Of these 100 people, only 16 currently have Internet access.

Here’s where they live:
> 6 live in Asia> 5 live in Europe
> 3 live in North America
> 1 lives in Latin America
> 1 lives in “Rest of World”

What languages do they speak?

Of the 16 people with Internet access, here’s how they are represented by their native languages:
> 5 speak English
> 2 speak Chinese
> 1 speaks Japanese
> 1 speaks Spanish
> 7 speak “Rest of World” languages

I’ve developed a one-page handout that includes this information. You can download it here.

• According to this Reuters article, Starbucks plans to increase the number of international stores by 20% annually in the years ahead while keeping the number of US stores relatively flat. Starbucks is pushing into China, Brazil, and Argentina.
• Shares of eBay are up today after the company announced that it remains on pace to return to China’s online auction market this summer, thanks to its partnership with Tom Online.
• Best Buy is accelerating its rate of expansion in China — planning to open 8 to 10 stores over the next 18 months, up from the 2 to 3 stores it originally had planned.
• And then there is YouTube, which has received an enormous amount of press coverage over its launch this week of nine localized Web sites in seven languages.

And here’s a relevant excerpt from a recent LA Times article on Web 2.0 companies racing to go global:

“If we’d had it our way, we’d have done this a long time ago,” Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, says of his operation’s new international plans — hardly what you’d expect to hear from a service that was launched barely two years ago. Chen blames a lack of resources for YouTube’s failure to go global earlier. That changed with Google’s acquisition last year.

“Many start-ups in the U.S. start with [only] a U.S. presence simply because it is such a large market,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google. “The moment we acquired YouTube, I told [founders] Chad and Steve, ‘Get yourselves on a plane.’ “

And it appears things are going quite nicely. Says Jeff Bezos in a recent Wall Street Journal article: China “is by far the fastest-growing part of Amazon anywhere in the world,” Mr. Bezos said. “This business is remarkable, and it’s growing so rapidly that it deserves even increased levels of investment.”

Joyo.com will now be known as Joyo Amazon, as Amazon seeks to develop its brand name in the market.

Here’s how Joyo looked in 2006:

And here’s how the site looks today:

I appreciate Amazon’s slow and steady approach to China. It could have simply wiped off the Joyo.com name and inserted Amazon.com. It could have even gone with “Amazon Joyo” instead of “Joyo Amazon.” But the slow and steady (and humble) approach seems to be the way to go.

Also from the Journal: Mr. Bezos said China reminded him of the U.S. Internet market when he founded Amazon 12 years ago. “When will it be a double-digit percentage of our sales? I don’t know. But I know that will happen,” he said.

In an effort to win over the locals in Korea, Google has just launched a new design that not only features twice as much text, but also features animation:

Try it out yourself.

According to Search Engine Land, “The new, animated Google Korea home page is intended to help Google better compete in the country where it seeks to gain market share. ‘It was important where our classic minimalism wasn’t working that we adapt,’ Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google, told Danny Sullivan in a briefing earlier today.”

Google isn’t alone in this regard. I often hear from global Webmasters and marketing execs in global companies based in the US and Europe who often do battle with their Web designers and managers in Asia who insist on using lots of Flash-generated animation and dense amounts of text. But what may seem busy and downright silly to a Westerner is anything but to consumers in many parts of Asia.

Does that mean that Western companies have to give up their Web designs when localizing for Korea? Well, they certainly need to be flexible. I recommend a global design template in which the “global” elements take up very little real estate. This will allow for plenty of local customization.

Google Korea is a case study to watch closely. Even with its animated home page, the design is still spare when compared to the likes of Naver and Empas.

AOL plans to expand into 14 markets over the next two years. And this is in addition to the portals it recently launched for India, Netherlands, and Austria.

AOL is also opening an office in China, though is wisely treading carefully in a country that has proven to be a financial black hole for other Western media companies.

I’m glad to see AOL going all out on global expansion. It’s easy to sit back and assume that Google and Yahoo! portals dominate the world. But when you start to look at individual markets you realize that even Google is not the leading search engine everywhere — like in China or Russia.

Will we see an AOL Poland two years from now? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Of course, the key to success ultimately has less to do with going global than going local. That is, how can a new portal succeed against entrenched portals within a given country? Who must AOL partner with? Should it try a radically different design or should it follow the leaders? Should it target a specific demographic? What application can you offer that the other portals don’t already offer? One new “killer app” could change everything for AOL in an instant — and that app could come from anywhere.

AOL has just gone live with its India Web portal as the company seeks to grab a growing slice of this rapidly growing market.

Says Ron Grant, AOL president and COO, “This is a very important — I would say critical — market for us. India has the highest priority in our international business.”

AOL already has a customer service center in India and roughly 2,000 employees.

MSN, Yahoo! and Google already offer localized sites for India, and local players such as Rediff and Sify are well established.

But I wouldn’t say that AOL is late to the party.

Depending on how you measure Internet penetration (particularly cyber cafes), India has between 20 and 50 million Internet users. This is a lot of people, but in a country of 1.1 billion, it’s really not that many at all.

This party is just getting started.