Web localization in the Year of the Sheep
I enjoying watching how Western companies localize their websites and products to capitalize on Chinese New Year — the Year of the Sheep (or Goat). Like this gift card from Starbucks …
China
Domain name registrations surpass 280 million
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 …
The biggest ecommerce day in November? It’s not Black Friday.
In China, November 11th is known as Singles Day and it has quickly become the world’s biggest day for ecommerce. Tmall, the massive ecommerce website owned by Alibaba is already …
Buick: A Chinese success story
I still look at the Buick brand as something for the post-60 demographic (though I must confess that demographic doesn’t feel quite so old anymore). It’s an image Buick has been working to change for …
Adobe and Google release open source CJK font family
This is the result of a massive investment of resources and expertise — and I’m excited they’ve made it open source. From Adobe: Source Han Sans, available in seven weights, …
Go global with .INTERNATIONAL? I don’t think so.
GoDaddy is marketing the new top-level domain INTERNATIONAL. This is one TLD that I can’t imagine recommending to anyone. For starters, you don’t need this domain to go global. Every TLD …
dotConfusing — What you need to know about the next wave of top-level domains
My latest post for client Pitney Bowes on making sense of the hype concerning the new generic TLDs. An excerpt: The first wave is rolling in More than 1,200 gTLDs have …
The world’s unluckiest number
I came across an interesting story in the WSJ about how 2013 has been a slower year for weddings because of the number 13. Here’s an excerpt from the CEO …
From Russian to Arabic to Chinese, new TLDs have arrived
This screen is from a website advertising two new top level domains in Cyrillic. Here are the two domains and what they represent: .САЙТ (Website) .ОНЛАЙН (Online) Two other domains …
Tips and Best Practices for Targeting an APAC Audience (Part II)
Here’s my latest post for client Pitney Bowes: Any company with global aspirations cannot afford to ignore the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. It’s a region that includes more than two billion …
How the NSA is threatening the future of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others
When I read government arguments in defense of the NSA, an oft-repeated line was: We’re not targeting Americans. We’re targeting foreigners. Foreigners. I really dislike that word. And I’m sure …
Tips and Best Practices for Targeting an APAC Audience (Part I)
Here’s my latest post for client Pitney Bowes: Any company with global aspirations cannot afford to ignore the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. It’s a region that includes more than two billion …
Starbucks in Asia: From serving expats to serving locals
Starbucks currently has 19,000 locations of which 11,000 are in the US. According to this Wall Street Journal Q&A (reg. required), Howard Schultz remains optimistic about Asia: Outside the U.S., Starbucks …
When localizing social content for China, think beyond Facebook and Twitter
So your company is successful on Facebook. And Twitter. And now you want to expand your social reach into China. Well, you can pretty much forget Facebook and Twitter, because …
The next Internet revolution will not be in English
Imagine if, every time you wanted to visit a website, you were expected to type in letters from a foreign language, or worse, an entirely foreign script, such as Arabic, …