My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts. Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands. Like who? Apple, for one. Here we…
In 2005, I interviewed a man named Winter, who was on a quest to visit ever Starbucks location on this planet. Four years later, the quest continues. Unfortunately, as documented by the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is now closing stores…
ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish. This is not the most scalable solution. And I’m…
It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are two very important developments that every companies needs to be…
Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as , which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese character — the DNS is still ASCII-only. In China, the…
According to my search on “web globalization” in Google Timeline: I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000. From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps…
Curious to know how many big companies have embraced blogging? 81 of the Fortune 500 This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many companies on the Inc. 500 list have blogs — and…
File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation. This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial. Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the…