Global by Design

I spent a few days in Canada recently and was struck but how many billboards, newspapers, and web sites prominently displayed .ca instead of .com. I started writing down every localized domain I encountered and here’s what I ended up with after the first day: Buick.ca Doritos.ca Eggs.ca Ford.ca iCoke.ca Kia.ca Lexus.ca Lorealparis.ca MTV.ca Pantene.ca [...]

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We included nine hotel and resort brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition. Of the nine hotel/resort companies studied, the InterContinental Hotels Group [...]

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Just what the world needs — two more URL shorteners. 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 [...]

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For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds. 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 [...]

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Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak English. In this article, the German publication Spiegel actually asked people what a number of these English slogans meant and only 25% answered correctly. But [...]

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