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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France became a member of the million domain club with its one-millionth .fr registration on January 11th.
Here are the top six country codes based on registrations:

Germany: 11,120,000
China: 6,035,000
United Kingdom: 6,010,000
Netherlands: 2,545,000
Italy: 1,426,000
United States: 1,300,000

According to my calculations, France would be ranked either 10th or 11th overall, depending on where Switzerland and Australia stand currently. These [...]

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I recently finished reading Redefining Global Strategies: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat.

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 [...]

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Earlier this year I developed the Map of the World Wide Web, shown here:

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 [...]

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When you work in this industry for awhile, you get pretty familiar with country codes such as .de for Germany or .cn for China. But there are simply too many country codes to memorize them all.
Which is what drove me to develop the Map of the World Wide Web.
This map aligns country codes over their [...]

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A few weeks ago I wrote about AOL’s new portal for India. According to Reuters, or, Thomson, AOL is only just getting started.

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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As early as 2000, people like me have been saying that it would be just a matter of time before corporations added a Chief Globalization Officer to their ranks. It was an easy prediction to make, but the timing was the big question mark.
That time appears to be now.
Late last year, Cisco appointed Wim Elfink [...]

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According to Silicon India Google CE Eric Schmidt says India will become the world’s biggest Internet market in 5 to 10 years. Says the article, “Schmidt’s other futurist view is that Hindi, not Hispanic, could become one of the world’s three Internet languages, in conjunction with English and Chinese.”
Given that Hindi was represented on just [...]

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Adwords is Google’s revenue engine. Advertisers pay to be included on Google’s search engine results page as well as on targeted Web sites that host Google ads, ranging from personal blogs to local and topical news sites. When the user clicks on the Google ad, the advertiser pays. And when that ad is hosted on [...]

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