eBay recently announced Q1 results and, like Google, shows a significant rise in international revenues vs. domestic revenues. Domestic revenues actually decreased by 1%. Here’s a visual I cranked out that illustrates eBay’s transformation over the years: Like Google, eBay…
I am pleased to have been invited by John Yunker to contribute thoughts on the localization industry in China. I welcome your comments and suggestions for future articles. Here’s my first posting – Four years ago, I was working for…
China is on pace to surpass Germany as the world’s most popular country code top-level domain (ccTLD) — in about two or three months. Germany currently leads with roughly 11.5 million .de registrations, but China recently surpassed the 10 million…
Now that Google is getting into the music downloading business in China, 2008 promises to be a very interesting year in the battle between Google China and the leading Chinese search engine Baidu. Google today unveiled a “Year of the…
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China is poised to overtake the US in Web users very, very shortly. Here is a news article. CNNIC says that China now has 210 million Web users, an increase of…
France became a member of the million domain club with its one-millionth .fr registration on January 11th. Here are the top six country codes based on registrations: Germany: 11,120,000 China: 6,035,000 United Kingdom: 6,010,000 Netherlands: 2,545,000 Italy: 1,426,000 United States:…
Starwood Hotels has announced that it has launched Chinese-language Web sites for all of its hotel brands — from Westin to Sheraton to St. Regis. The hotel chain had previously offered varying levels of Chinese support across its hotel brands…
Motoko Hunt over at Multilingual Search writes about Baidu, China’s leading search portal, and its official entry into Japan As I mentioned in last month, Baidu has long had its sights set on entering the Japanese market. The launch date…
I’ve had Google Analytics installed on this site for some time now, which makes it a great resource for tracking the most popular posts of the year. So here are the top 10 posts of 2007 based on traffic: The…
As we come to the end of 2007, it is safe to say that Web globalization has evolved from an ancillary activity to a core piece of the marketing puzzle at many companies. So now it’s time to take a…
I recently finished reading Redefining Global Strategies: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat. This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. While The World is Flat may leave an…
I recently saw a movie that opened my eyes to the horror of shark finning. The movie is Sharkwater (www.sharkwater.com). Shark finning is the process of catching a shark, slicing off its fins, and dumping it back in the water.…
That’s right. According to the latest stats from China’s registry, roughly one million .cn domains were registered between September 1 and October 1. That brings the grand total to 7.1 million .cn domains that have been registered thus far, and…
The fine folks at Multlingual Search have published a report on the state of the search engine markets in more than a dozen countries. This report is a quick read and, best of all, it’s free. You can download it…
A flat world cuts both ways. A flat world is a great thing when you can get a brand new high-def TV for less than $700 because it was made in China. But it’s not such a great thing when…