It’s time for your website to go flag free
If you are flying the Taiwan flag on your website, consider yourself warned. By China. As I’ve written many times over the past year, China is paying close attention to …
Countries
Yet another reason to avoid using flags on your global gateway
As readers of this blog well know, I often refer to China and Taiwan when making the case for avoiding the use of flags on a global gateway. There are …
Welcome to the driver’s seat: Which automakers are doing the best job of welcoming female drivers in Saudi Arabia
It’s been a month since women have been legally allowed to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and I wanted to get a sense for how this massive new …
To create a world-ready mobile app, think small, as in “lite”
If you don’t know what your mobile app weighs (in kilobytes), then it’s safe to say your emerging market strategy could use some tweaking. That’s not to be harsh, but …
Think you can succeed in India supporting English only? Think again.
#serveinmylanguage It’s more than a hashtag; it’s a social movement. And it’s growing. A movement among Indian consumers to force the vendors who depend on their business to actually support …
Country codes of the world. XL.
For quite some time people have asked me about creating a larger version of our Country Codes of the World map, something they could pin up in their conference rooms …
Welcome to the Kingdom of eSwatini, formerly known as Swaziland
When I read about Swaziland’s recent name change, by decree, my first thought was: What about the country code? As in .sz? As far as I can tell, it’s way …
A unique look at the emerging multilingual Internet
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more …
A (free) font to celebrate Lithuanian independence
As a font geek, I loved this promotion courtesy of the Republic of Lithuania to develop a font that draws on the signatures from the Act of Independence of Lithuania. …
The Chinese Typewriter
I recently read The Chinese Typewriter by Thomas S. Mullaney. I love typewriters and languages, so this book was a sure thing as my interests go. And I learned a great …
Think Outside the Country (now available in Japanese)
I received my copies of the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country and am very impressed. The book, like the English edition, is in full color and uses high quality paper. …
Is your vendor putting your international business in jeopardy?
You hire a vendor to conduct a global survey. And let’s suppose this vendor refers to Taiwan as a country and the email goes out to people in China who …
The top 25 websites from the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new …
Marriott in China: Website still down two weeks later (and three takeaways)
The Marriott website was taken down in China and Taiwan on or around January 11th. You can read why here. And here we are two weeks later and the websites …
Can displaying the Taiwan flag get your website shut down in China?
The short answer: It depends. The context of how you display this flag can make all the difference; for example, do you display the flag on a global gateway with …