Global by Design

The NY Times reports that China has surpassed the US in terms of Internet users. This comes via China’s state-controlled  Internet Network Information Center. Here are the key numbers:
United States
220 million Internet users
70% penetration
China
253 million Internet users
19% penetration
For readers of this blog, this development is hardly news. But it’s significant nonetheless. After all, the US [...]

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Google announced that they now have 30 products available in 30 languages. And many of these products, such as Gmail and Adwords, now support 40 languages.
Here is a graph they published of the rate of growth of their language support. It’s a very impressive visual, but I found it potentially misleading.

What is being displayed is [...]

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Techcrunch reports from Facebook’s developer conference today in which company announced that it would open its “crowdsourcing” translation platform to its legion of application developers. Here’s the press release excerpt:
As a result of the worldwide success of Facebook’s translation system, the company has opened up the Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. Beginning [...]

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I will be presenting a Webinar sponsored by Lionbridge this Wednesday and I hope you can join us.
Here are the details:
Web Globalization Trends to Watch
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
To register, click here.
And if you can’t make the call, it will be recorded for playback.

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Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.
This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.
I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such [...]

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ICANN, the folks who manage Internet domains, recently decided to open up the generic top-level domain (gTLD) space to anyone who can afford it and can navigate ICANN’s complex approval process.
gTLDs are those domains to the right of the dot in the URL, such as .com and .biz. Currently there are 21 gTLDs. But going [...]

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Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany score a last-second goal to keep the tournament alive.
Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of [...]

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Apple today announced the iPhone 3G — a tri-band phone that will operate in most countries around the world. So it’s no surprise that Apple wants to sell the iPhone in as many of these countries as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, Apple supports a consistent design across its many country Web sites. So when it came [...]

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I tried to login to Google Adwords recently and was met with the following “temporarily unavailable” Web page:

The page illustrates one of the many the challenges of managing a Web site that supports so many languages. Even something supposedly as simple as this temporary page is not quite so simple. There are a whopping 17 [...]

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Jane McConnell of NetStrategy/JMC is working on the third annual edition of the Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey and she needs your input.
If you are not familiar with the survey, you can read some key observations from 2007 on JMC’s blog Globally Local: 2007 Highlights. All survey participants receive a free copy of [...]

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