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 data.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Egypt (Was the first country to apply)
• Saudi Arabia
• UAE
• Russia
• China
• Bulgaria
• Israel

Unless a country made more than one application (which I don’t believe is allowed under fast track protocol) I’m still missing three countries. I’m guessing there could be one or more additional Middle East countries. And perhaps Taiwan.

What do you think? What countries/languages am I missing?

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 later post.

What we should see next year are the non-Latin equivalents of country code top-level domains, such as .ru, .cn, .sa. It just so happens that I’ve got a handy map of all ccTLDs here.

Not all ccTLDs will be eligible for a “fast track” ccTLD, just those from countries that have official non-Latin languages.

The two largest countries I would expect to launch IDNs in 2010 are China and Russia.

China has had its IDN ready to go for some time now; the traditional Chinese character version is shown above. The simplified character version is below. The assumption is that both versions will be bundled together.

Below is a screen grab from China’s government web site. Perhaps in 2010 we’ll see “GOV.cn” replaced.

Russia will likely be using this IDN next year:

This IDN is short for “Russian Federation.” Why not just use the equivalent of .RU, you ask? Well, that would give us .ру, which looks entirely too similar to .py (Paraguay).

So there you have it — IDNs for China and Russia, with many more to follow.

IDNs are “internationalized domain names” — which basically means domains that use non-Latin characters. The Internet wasn’t exactly designed to support IDNs, particularly in URLs, but this is about to change in a big way.

China has historically been the most vocal advocate for IDNs, but now Russia is making noise as well. ICANN is in the process of testing IDNs right now and has stated that it wants to have a formal process in place for supporting them by the end of this year.

IDNs are the last major step toward creating a truly user-friendly Internet for people who don’t speak English and don’t use Latin characters — which is quite a few people on this planet. I would not be surprised to see both China and Russia not only embrace IDNs but require foreign companies to register them if they wish to do business in their countries.

Here are the top six country codes based on registrations:

1. Germany: 11,120,000
2. China: 6,035,000
3. United Kingdom: 6,010,000
4. Netherlands: 2,545,000
5. Italy: 1,426,000
6. 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 numbers are changing very quickly, with China on a fast pace to take over the number one spot and Russia and India making good progress as well.For more information on country codes (specifically ccTLDs) check out our new Country Codes of the World map.

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.

This report is a quick read and, best of all, it’s free. You can download it here.

The most interesting takeaway is something I’ve been writing about on this blog — that while Google is by far the leading search engine globally, it still does not lead in a number of key markets, namely China, Russia, Estonia, Czech Republic, and South Korea.

According to this report, Google did not even make the list of top three search engines in South Korea; I’m wondering if Google’s recent redesign of its Korea site is beginning to help it make up ground.

Somewhat related is a new press release from comScore that “found that more than 750 million people age 15 and older – or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.”

Here is the breakdown of these searches by region:

As the ICANN blog notes:

With the transition of Serbia and Montenegro to using .RS and .ME comes the task of migrating users from the .YU domain. As we have talked about before, ICANN uses an international standard for determining country codes for use on the Internet. This standard, known as ISO 3166-1, indicates when new countries codes are created, changed or removed. As Yugoslavia, the predecessor country to Serbia and Montenegro, is now a piece of history – so too is its YU country code.

Awhile back I wrote about the addition of .ME and the potential challenges it poses.

Also (possibly) on the horizon is a domain name for Kosovo. Much resistance must be overcome (namely Russia) before this domain becomes a reality, but I imagine it will within the next two years.

Finally, .KP for North Korea was also recently approved by ICANN as an official country country code.

To keep track of all 245 country code top-level-domains (ccTLDs), check out our new Country Codes of the World map. It even includes .KP.

According to this Reuters article, roughly 10,000 .su domains have been registered, including 1,500 this year. While this number pales in comparison to the Russian domain, .ru, it has to drive the folks at ICANN a bit crazy. ICANN has been trying to fade .su away to nothingness for some time now but the registrars keep signing up new registrations.

Says the article:

“We want to try and save it,” Alexei Platonov, director of the independent Russian Institute of Public Networks, which promotes technology use, said at a news briefing.

“First there is the community and secondly there is also the history of the domain name … It’s original and offers Web site names that other domains don’t have any more,” Platonov said.

Despite the love a number of Russians feel for their .su domain, I don’t believe companies who plan to enter Russia need register it. The .ru domain will suffice, and it is one of the fastest-growing country codes on the Internet right now (next to China). In fact, it just recently surpassed one million registrations.

I will be soon publishing a new poster that includes all 245 country code domains — though it will not include the .su domain. You can read more about it here.

You can also read about the smaller version of this map, which we published earlier this year.

The company says it translates more than a billion words each year into more than 150 languages.

Here are then 10 most-popular languages this year:

1. Canadian French
2. Spanish
3. French
4. German
5. Italian
6. Chinese
7. Japanese
8. Dutch
9. English
10. Russian

“We have observed a strong increase in European language translations – particularly from the Eastern regions as the EU expands,” notes Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer at SDL. “While Canadian French, Spanish, European French and German have held on to the top four spots since 2006, movements further down the list are strong indicators of international business change.”

I’m happy to see SDL sharing this information. It certainly reinforces what I’m seeing on my end. As I wrote two years back, large companies have moved beyond simply translating FIGS languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish) and are now focusing on emerging markets, such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). While FIGS still dominate SDL’s list, the BRIC languages are coming on strong.

SDL also released the following chart detailing the fastest-growing languages overall.

Eastern Europe is certainly getting a lot of attention these days, and not just because the EU requires it across many industries. Deloitte, for example, has over the past 12 months launched Web sites for Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria.

So what languages should we expect to see on the top 10 list next year? According to Chris Boorman:

“Contenders for the future could also include Greece, Nordics and the Baltic states, as there is already a growing demand for translation into these languages,” he concluded. “So we could be in for more surprises in next year’s list.”

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.

According to the article, “Chinese and Russians eat soup more than five times a week, on average, compared with Americans’ once-a-week, Campbell says. In China, 320 billion bowls of soup are consumed each year, compared with 32 billion in Russia and just 14 billion in the U.S.”

Campbell took a crack at China in the 1990s but didn’t do well because it made no effort to localize the product. Campbell is not alone in this regard; see my post on Disney.

For Russia, Campbell has invested in learning all about how the locals make and view soup. For starters, the company has learned that Russians have created unique words specifically to describe soup, such as navaristy. Says the article, navaristy “refers to a thick, heavy soup like the ones Campbell plans to sell in Russia: a beef broth with pieces of meat, onions and potatoes; a chicken broth with chicken, onions and potatoes; and a mushroom soup with large pieces of mushrooms, onions and seasonings.”

Campbell is no stranger to Web localization. It currently offers sites for countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Japan.

I checked to see if Campbell had a Russian Web site in place. Nothing so far that I could find. What’s worse, it appears that www.campbellsoup.ru has been taken by a squatter.

So I’m pleased to announce our Russia Localization Report.

The report is designed to be a quick read for both marketing and Web executives. Here are some of the questions we answer:

• What American and European companies currently offer Russian-language Web sites?
• How to localize a Web page using Cyrillic characters.
• What to know before transliterating your company’s brand names.
• What are some of the major Russian brands?
• How much does translation cost?
• What are the common customs and superstitions in Russia?

To develop this report, I interviewed a number of translators and marketers in Russia. My overall impression is that although Russia poses a huge opportunity for Western and Asian companies, it also features a number of home-grown brands that are not going to sit back and watch their market share erode. You can look at the Web portals to see how strong the Russians are. Russia is the only European market that Google does not rank highly in; Yandex leads in Russia. The Russian beer brand Baltika, is now gaining market share throughout Europe and has its sights set on Heineken for European dominance.

You can read more about the report here. And, as always, I’m curious to know what countries you would like to see addressed next. We’re also looking for country experts who would be interested in contributing to future reports.

What does all this mean for Web globalization executives?

For starters, if Kosovo should become independent, which I think it will, it means we should expect a new country code top level domain (ccTLD). I’m guessing that Kosovo will get the .ks domain.

And this means that companies will have yet another country code to register and ultimately a new country in need of a localized Web site.

As I wrote in March, when Montenegro took the .me domain, it posed some rather unique challenges. As Marissa from HP noted, her company had been using the .me domain for a Middle East Web site. Will Kosovo cause similar domain issues? It all depends on the domain of course, but this is definitely something to keep your eye on.

Need help keeping track of all those country domains?
Check out our new country domain map. It includes 180 country domains in a unique, user-friendly layout. It’s already being used by executives on four continents. Learn more at www.bytelevel.com/map.

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.

Earlier this year, we published the third edition of The Web Globalization Report Card, our annual benchmarking of many of the world’s leading corporate Web sites.

For 2006, we expanded our focus to include a number of government and non-profit Web sites, including Wikipedia. We suspected that Wikipedia would score well given its global reach, but we were quite surprised to find it scoring a 93 out of 100, second only to Google, which scored 97.

How did Wikipedia, with a budget of less than half a million dollars, develop a global Web site that scored better in our tests than a host of billion-dollar multinational corporations?

A global network of volunteers, for starters.

But the more we studied Wikipedia — and interviewed the interim executive director Brad Patrick — the more we realized that there were some valuable lessons here that any company could benefit from.
Leading with Language

The home page of Wikipedia is dominated by language links; the languages that support the largest number of articles are most prominent. Wikipedia uses Unicode as the default Web page encoding so that all languages may be displayed in their native script — essential to improving usability. Given the large number of scripts that Wikipedia supports, your browser may display some language names as a series of questions marks or empty boxes — a sign that your computer does not have the required font.

Language –in form of the two-digit language codes — also forms the foundation for the architecture of the Web site. As shown below, the URLs for the “apple” entry from the English and German Wikipedias vary only by language code:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple

With a design that is utilitarian in nature, the content becomes king. And it is the content that makes Wikipedia so popular

According to Alexa (www.alexa.com), Wikipedia is the sixteenth most popular global Web site. But the site is even more popular in countries such as Germany and Canada. According to Alexa, here is Wikipedia’s popularity ranking within specific countries:

Country –> Rank
Argentina –> 19
Brazil –> 24
Canada –> 8
Egypt –> 64
France –> 11
Germany –> 6
India –> 16
Japan –> 18
Russia –> 39
US –> 9

There is a rough correlation between depth of content and popularity within a given market.
Q&A With Brad Patrick

Brad Patrick is the interim executive director and general counsel for Wikipedia. We recently spoke with Brad to better understand how Wikipedia works and where it is headed.

Q: Do your non-English Wikipedias consist of original content or content that has been translated from other languages?
A: Both. Our sites are hybrids of original and translated content. It depends upon people’ interests. For example, our Polish wiki features a great deal of original content because of a group of dedicated contributors.

Q: So the amount of content within each language is completely dictated by contributors?
A: Yes. You’re going to see different degrees of content by language. We are not going to orchestrate one size fits all. Even the press releases for the Wikipedia Foundation are handled this way. They are translated into languages according to the willingness of contributors to do so.

Q: What percentage of your traffic is directed toward English-language content?
A: Roughly 60%, and falling.

Q: What has been key to the success of Wikipedia?
A: You have to trust your community. We’re not telling this mass of people what to do. You have to listen to them. This is not a top-down effort but a collaborative effort.

Q: How is Wikipedia supported financially?
A: We have a very strong donor base. Periodically, we conduct fundraising drives; we raised $400,000 in four weeks last year. We are not a membership organization and do not have plans to become one. We are interested in developing institutional support.

Web Globalization Lessons from Wikipedia

What can a global Web services manager learn from Wikipedia? We have identified four attributes of Wikipedia that we believe have relevance even to large multinationals.

1. Keep Content Close to the User
If there is one takeaway from Wikipedia, it is in the power of letting go. Or, in corporate-speak, decentralization.

Because Wikipedia was built from the ground up to rely on its content contributors, it relinquished a high degree of control over content from the start. Content stays close to the user because it is written or translated by the very people who consume the content.

While we do not necessarily advocate turning over the content reins to your customers, we do believe that local employees and partners can and should play an active role in content creation and management. They are generally more in touch with current events in the subtleties of their countries and cultures.

As large companies strive to centralize tools and content, they need to do so gently and tactfully, so as not to dampen the enthusiasm of the local content creators, reviewers, and managers.

The people who create Wikipedia content are a passionate bunch. There are similarly passionate people within large corporations — and it is these types of people who can be ideal for taking a lead role at the local level. The key is in identifying them and giving them the room they need to flourish. It’s all about finding the right balance between chaos and control. Wikipedia seems to have found its balance, and companies can do the same thing.

For the complete article, The World According to Wikipedia, consider becoming a Global By Design subscriber.

So what’s the solution?

A few years back we saw RealNames launch a workaround to the DNS in which companies could register their company name and all the Web user needed to do was input the company name. RealNames imploded in 2002 but I believe the technology is still being supported by somebody; I just typed a few brand names into my Safari browser (BMW, Coke, Apple) and was taken immediately to their corporate sites.

Today, I came across a press release from a company that is trying to do basically what RealNames did, only it appears to be a lot less usable. UnifiedRoot is developing a parallel DNS that would allow you to register a domain that completely bypasses the DNS we know and love, as illustrated below:

I don’t see the value of this system. Large companies are going to register every country domain they need for IP reasons alone, so it can’t be a cost issue. I could be missing something here, but so far it doesn’t seem much easier than relying on Google.

What I think UnifiedRoot missed is the huge untapped potential for serving domains in non-Latin scripts, like Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese. The current solutions in this area are little more than hacks, and although the folks at ICANN are working on a long-term solution, they’ve been working on it for half a decade and still have a ways to go. It has to do with the immense complexity of migrating the DNS to Unicode and the numerous potential security issues that would result.

So while I’m glad to see UnifiedRoot taking a shot at building a better DNS, they’re not there yet.

So I think it’s safe to say that there are going to be a number of Starbucks locations opening in Russia in 2006. Starbucks already supplies a few hotels in Moscow but little else thus far. And a recent research report I’ve read said that the coffee culture in Russia is rapidly emerging, along with the country’s economy.

Next stop: Ukraine.

No Russian Web site yet, but I have no doubt that one is in the works. That makes it 19 countries (and counting) for Starbucks.

And, after a brief trip to Osaka, I have to say that Starbucks is doing very well in Japan. The chain is not nearly as ubiquitous in Osaka as it is in Tokyo, but it’s getting there…

UPDATE: I stand corrected. There are more than 30 countries around the world that include at least one Starbucks. Here is the current list (Russia not yet included):

• Australia
• Austria
• Bahrain
• Canada
• Chile
• China
• Cyprus
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Jordan
• Kuwait
• Lebanon
• Malaysia
• Mexico
• New Zealand
• Oman
• Peru
• Philippines
• Puerto Rico
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Spain
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Turkey
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States

Investment bankers use an acronym that is going to have a major impact on the future of the globalization industry: BRIC.

BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the four countries that pose the greatest opportunities for long-term growth among emerging markets. Of course, the key words are “long term” – these markets are anything but sure bets over the short term.

The localization industry has long used the acronym FIGS, which stands for French, Italian, German, Spanish, the most popular four languages chosen when companies enter Europe. CJK, for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, is also frequently used when expanding in Asia.

But I see BRIC gaining currency in the localization industry, because where investment bankers see growth so too do the multinationals who hope to capitalize on that growth. And while FIGS and CJK are geographically oriented, BRIC focuses purely on opportunity. This is great news for translators of Tamil, Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese and the vendors who learn to speak “BRIC.”

(NOTE: This essay is from the April issue of Global By Design — on newsstands everwhere!)

StarOffice costs a great deal less than Microsoft’s Office suite, which makes it particularly appealing in an emerging market like Russia. While Microsoft’s Office suite is available more languages than StarOffice, the gap is narrowing.

While currency devalatuations have been challenging, the economy has since stabilized and sales are growing at 50% annually (although revenues are still a fraction of US revenues). Products such as Pampers, Tide and Pantene have been very successful (though they must be priced aggressively).

Here’s an excerpt that highlights the complexities of marketing in Russia:

…P&G must alter marketing strategies that have worked for decades in the United States.

Alex Nasard of Procter’s Moscow marketing office said the company uses straightforward pitches rather than the entertaining, nuanced ads aired in the United States. Nasard said Russians are more immune to propaganda because of years of communism.

P&G also has left English labels on most products, to maintain the company’s global branding as well as appealing to Russian customers’ desire for anything American.

Here’s the article.