Web Globalization Report Card Update: More Geolocation. More Languages

After three weeks of analyzing Web sites for the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, a number of interesting trends are coming together, and I thought I’d share a couple of them with you…

Geolocation is gaining momentum

PricewaterhouseCoopers is now using geolocation to improve global content delivery. So too is Audi. And we have yet to detect a company that has stopped using it. We’ve advocated geolocation for many years, but not before having a solid visual global gateway in place, which many companies do not yet have.

We still love the Caterpillar gateway:

Companies keep adding languages

It’s looking as if we’ll see an average increase in number of languages supported across all web sites studied so far. And this will be significant because a number of companies have actually reduced the number of languages they support, also a notable trend.

Hotels.com has more than doubled the number of languages it supports, to more than 30. Apple also boosted its global reach over the past 18 months, a sign of its global ambitions.

And now back to the web sites. Still more to analyze…stay tuned.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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