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.

Passport Troubles

The European Union has much stricter customer data restrictions than the U.S. Even Microsoft couldn’t skirt those regulations, as reported in EU Business: The US software giant Microsoft has agreed to make substantial changes to its Passport system of accessing…

Slouching Towards Unicode

Unicode is one of the most significant achievements in computing over the past decade. It’s just a shame that so few people know about it. What the heck is Unicode? Unicode is a universal character encoding. In other words, it’s…

Office Depot en Español

Today, Office Depot launched its Spanish language Web site. It’s just a matter of time before Staples follows suit. I found this interesting tidbit in the press release: According to the United States Small Business Administration, there are an estimated…

An article in the LA Times describes the phenomenal success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ memior (the first of three books): “Vivir Para Contarla” (Living to Tell the Tale). The big news is not that the book is selling wildly in…

Translating Government for the Web

I contributed an op-ed piece to the Boston Globe. They published it yesterday, and I’d love to hear what you think. Here’s an excerpt… Former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, is…

Global Web Services

Web services, should it become a global success story, will require modifications along the way. The Web Services Internationalization Task Force will be instrumental to its success. Here’s an interesting read: Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios About the task force:…

Seasons Greetings

Afrikaans> Een plesierige kersfees Arabic> I’D MIILAD SAID OUA SANA SAIDA Armenian> Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand Azeri> Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun Basque> Zorionak eta Urte Berri On! Bohemian> Vesele Vanoce Brazilian> Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo Breton>…

China’s Biggest Export

It was Air Jordan that helped the NBA go global. Now it seems the NBA is taking a more localized approach to globalization, one player and one country at at time. Consider Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6 center from China, who…