Global by Design

Last week I said I’d love to see more profiles of global-minded business execs and, sure enough, the Journal delivers. Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee. According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s [...]

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In the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, Hotels.com ranked close to last place in the web services category. In this year’s Report Card, Hotels.com ranked only behind Google and Wikipedia — an impressive turnaround. In just two years, Hotels.com added 19 languages, improved global consistency, and, most important, improved local relevance. It’s nice to see [...]

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted findings from the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, but I did want to include a brief note on the retail sector. We define this industry segment to include those retailers (and a few food/beverage chains) that have a physical presence in the countries in which they do business. This excludes [...]

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Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world’s largest auctioneer of heavy equipment and trucks, recently launched a redesigned (and more global) web site. Auction web sites are much like ecommerce web sites — that is, quite complex. You’ve got currencies and time zones and legal issues to navigate. And, in the case of Ritchie Bros, you’ve also got real-time [...]

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Awhile back, Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder. emailed me to ask if I knew of any other religion web site that supported more languages than the site of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I didn’t. As shown in the screen grab below, the Jehovah’s Witnesses site supports nearly 400 languages! In comparison, Wikipedia supports only 272 languages. [...]

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