As life sciences companies broaden their global sights to include new and emerging markets, their global (and mobile) websites have not always kept pace. SDL recently commissioned a report in which I benchmarked a select group of 25 life sciences…
And so it begins. Verisign, the registrar that manages .com domains, has begun its rollout of non-Latin .com equivalents, beginning with Japanese: Now, if you don’t have a Japanese domain name, slapping .コム to the end of your company’s name probably doesn’t make much sense…
For the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied 11 enterprise technology websites: Autodesk Cisco Systems EMC IBM Huawei Intel Oracle SAP Texas Instruments Xerox VMware With support for 23 languages, Intel is not the language leader in this category; Cisco Systems…
As part of the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card I note the use of country codes among the world’s leading brands. It’s an imperfect process because different companies use country codes in different ways. For example, some websites use country codes…
Apple can’t seem to rid itself of using flags on its global gateway. And, yes, I’ve been writing about this for awhile now. Every time Apple launches a redesign I get my hopes up. But this latest design merely offered up newly “flattened”…
Venture capitalist Paul Graham believes so. He notes: 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com…
Qualcomm supports a mobile-friendly website but doesn’t (yet) support a global-friendly website. Particularly if you’re a visitor who does not speak English. The home page, shown here, includes no evidence of a global gateway. It does exist — you have to click…
I sympathize with Internet old timers (such as myself) who look back wistfully at the good ol’ days, when the only decision you had to make when registering a new domain name was choosing between .com or .net. Today, there…
Country codes are still adding registrations but the more developed markets are seeing a decline in growth rate. Shown below is a visual from the registry behind the .FR domain: Of course, AFNIC is keen to point out that the…
I read today about the Nigerian startup Hotels.ng and my first thought was why Hotels.com didn’t already own the Nigerian country code. After all, Hotels.com owns country codes for France and Italy and Japan, among others. But was apparently late to registering…
Greece has received string approval for an IDN, shown below in red: This brings to 35 the number countries with approved IDNs — and an impressive range of scripts, shown here: I’ve just updated the IDN map of the world. If you’d like to…
This is not exactly breaking news, but Armenia now has an IDN: հայ Here it is in my fast-evolving IDN map: This means that 34 countries now have delegated IDNs.
According to Verisign’s domain name industry brief, TLD registrations hit 280 million in the second quarter of 2014. Here’s a list of the leading domains overall: Note that the .TK ccTLD is technically a country code but is marketed as…
Cuba has long had its own country code: .CU. But most companies didn’t view this domain as a priority. Until now. But be aware that this domain isn’t cheap. I’ve seen prices ranging from $800 to $1,100, so only larger…
Five years ago, Bulgaria applied for an IDN but was denied by ICANN on the basis of “string similarity” with the country code of Brazil. Here is the Bulgarian IDN side by side with Brazil’s ccTLD: бг br. String similarity is a…