Global by Design

So who’s applied for IDNs so far?
According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days.
ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010.
So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to piece together the [...]

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So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means.
First of all, we’re not about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon. Certainly not next year. There are several reason for this which I will cover in a [...]

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Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language [...]

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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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