As global expansion goes, Amazon has, over the years, moved slowest. But when it does commit to a market, it tends to stick around and increase its investment and service offerings. Like India and Australia, two of its more recent…
As in 150 million. According to Verisign, there are now more than 150 million registrations of .com (of which I account for about a dozen): .Com remains the most popular top-level domain. However, the total number of country codes now…
Hard to believe, but the country code for France turned 34 last week. There are now roughly 3.6 million registrations in use. Where has the time gone? Yet I must remind myself that the Internet is still quite young —…
I recently spent an hour with Kathrin Bussman as part of her wonderful podcast The Worldly Marketer. I talked about the most recent Web Globalization Report Card as well as a host of web globalization best practices. You can listen…
This month I had planned to be traveling to Southern Land (Australia). At least I can visit virtually. Like via this unique map of the world based on the origin of country names, such as Land of the Fierce (France).…
In keeping with past years, I’m pleased to announce the top 25 websites from the 2020 Web Globalization Report Card. When compared with last year’s top 25 list, there are a number of new entrants to the list: Airbnb: As…
I began the Report Card back in 2003 because, at the time, there was nothing out there that focused specifically on the globalization and localization of websites. And, to be honest, most websites were not all that “global” yet; 10…
For those of you keeping track, this is the 16th edition of this report. Thanks to everyone who has supported it all these years! More soon…
Earlier this month, I wrote about Amazon and India. Now let’s look at Walmart and India, via Flipkart, the leading online marketplace in India. Walmart acquired 77 percent of the company last year. According to TechCrunch, Flipkart is (finally) adding…
A little more than 15 years ago, I began benchmarking websites for a new report I had in mind, tentatively titled the Web Globalization Report Card. The number one website in the first Report Card was a startup company by the…
Verisign has owned rights to the .com domain for many years, and profited enormously. So it’s no surprise that the company has been eager to see continued profits from language/script-specific equivalents of .com. So it has recently pushed ahead with…
If you are flying the Taiwan flag on your website, consider yourself warned. By China. As I’ve written many times over the past year, China is paying close attention to how multinationals refer to Taiwan on their websites, not just…
When I read about Swaziland’s recent name change, by decree, my first thought was: What about the country code? As in .sz? As far as I can tell, it’s way too soon to know if the president has thought this…
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more than 50 across more than 30 countries and regions. I’ve…
Apple has redesigned its website many times over the past decade but one thing has remained largely unchanged — its global gateway strategy. Here’s a screen shot of the global gateway menu from back in 2010: And here it is…