Mary Meeker, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, recently provided another healthy dose of data and trends, along with a number of predictions. But the media largely overlooked the web and software globalization implications of many of these slides.…
It seems like everyone is running a web survey these days. While I appreciate the importance of asking your website visitors what they think, too many of these surveys are poorly implemented. So here are five tips to consider before…
Speaking of country codes, I’ve been meaning to mention this. Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) now offers users an impressive range of country code domains. Here’s the full list of supported country codes. It appears that Microsoft is using geolocation to enforce…
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. I’m pleased to announce the top-scoring websites from the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the ninth annual edition of the report and it’s always exciting to highlight those…
Ethan Shen, who has become quite an expert on the various machine translation (MT) engines, has launched a nifty web service designed to help you improve your language skills: Gabble On. Basically, the site leverages an MT engine (Google, Bing,…
Saw on Daring Fireball that Microsoft is previewing its new global website (link). Naturally, I wondered “Where the heck did the global gateway go?” It used to be in the header. But no more. The global gateway has been demoted…
The registration period for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), names like .google and .nyc, has been open for a short while and it appears that ICANN has won the lottery. According to Domain Incite, ICANN has received 1,900 registrations so far,…
If you haven’t visited the Noun Project yet, take a moment and drop by. It’s a great initiative to provide open source icons. All you have to do is provide attribution according to the Creative Commons license. I noticed recently…
When it comes to tablets, Apple is far and away the leader. But later this year Microsoft is expected to unveil its Windows 8 tablet and, in doing so, will quickly take the lead. In languages, that is. That’s right.…
Remember the Falklands War? I do and, yes, this does make me feel a little old. For those of you who don’t remember, the war was fought over a group of small islands far off the Patagonian coast of Argentina.…
I’m happy to see Microsoft launch a new global gateway on its home page. Here’s a detailed view: Notice how the country/region options are all nicely presented in the native languages. You might wonder about how the list was sorted, with…
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 250 web sites across 25 industries. The web sites represent nearly half of the Fortune 100 and nearly all of the Interbrand Global…
Two months ago I wrote about an effort to evaluate the quality of the three major free machine translation (MT) engines: Google Translate Bing (Microsoft) Translator Yahoo! Babelfish Ethan Shen has wrapped up the project, soliciting input from more than…
Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews. Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary…
Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. But which…