Social Aggregation Case Study: KPMG@Davos
In my last post I noted how Cisco has created the social aggregation page: Social@Cisco. This page is simply a global template that allows Cisco to plug in different local …
Companies
One person’s workday is another person’s holiday
I was fresh out of college and living in Australia when I first experienced Boxing Day. I was clueless. I thought the Aussies were unusually eager fans of, well, boxing. …
Global gateway notes: Guidewire, Google, Locaria
One of the many things I love about global gateways is that I never stop discovering new ones. Here are notes on a few gateways I’ve stumbled across over the past …
(Insert company name here) stumbles in China
From the article Groupon stumbles in China in The Wall Street Journal: Foreign Internet companies have long struggled in China, which has more Internet users than any other country. Yahoo Inc., one …
Yandex headed to Turkey, and beyond
Now that Yandex is a public company there is much speculation about which markets the search engine known as Russia’s Google plans to expand into next. You don’t have to …
Web design with the world in mind
I was interviewed recently by Paul Sawers of The Next Web. He wrote a great article about the challenges and opportunities of web internationalization. I recommend sending this link to …
Delta’s global gateway: When complexity kills
I’m always amazed when I come across global gateways that I find complicated in my native language. Like Delta Airline‘s global gateway. What you see here is not one but …
Emirates: Best global airline web site of 2011
Sometimes a web redesign is a big step forward; sometimes it is a step in reverse. In the case of American Airlines (when viewed from a web globalization perspective) a …
Dear Airbnb: Please take down your mutant flag
Airbnb is one of the hot new travel web service startups. It basically lets you rent out your spare bedroom or look for a spare bedroom when you travel. That’s …
Microsoft launches a new global gateway
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. …
Language negotiation in a mobile world: Improving the global user experience
Language negotiation is the process of detecting the language setting of a web browser and responding with the matching language, if available. Companies such as Google and Facebook have used …
Can Google Translate improve your love life?
According to this Google Demo, featuring Nice Peter, it can (to a point)… [yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfTNJtOL4hM&tracker=False’] Of course, I would have ended this video differently — with a mistranslation or two. …
Walking through jelly
Just because a global company mandates one “global” language doesn’t mean that everything will run smoothly. English is typically the global language selected, which is nice for those who were …
Global by Design turns 1,000
In 2002, I launched this blog. It was the first blog devoted to web globalization. In fact, I don’t believe there were any blogs devoted to translation either at that …
Twitter launches translation crowdsourcing, again
Twitter went live with its newly updated translation center today. This is the second iteration of the platform; it first launched in October 2009, but was closed less than a …