No Ordinary Disruption: It’s time to reset intuitions
I was given a review copy of No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, which I read over the weekend. The authors are Richard Dobbs, James …
Countries
Google to the Internet: Go mobile or watch your sales rank fall
Four years ago, for the Web Globalization Report Card, I began noting (and rewarding) those websites that supported mobile devices. Even then one could easily see the virtual grounds shifting in favor of mobile …
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 …
Global Gateway Fail: Yandex
Yandex is Russia’s leading search engine and, following in Google’s footsteps, is eager to take over much of Russia’s Internet, which naturally includes the web browser. Yandex is also in …
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 United Languages of America
Very cool map courtesy of the WashPost based on US Census data: “More than a quarter of counties in the United States have at least one in 10 households where …
Google launches its first Japanese IDN
I’ve long talked about the importance of non-Latin domain names, or IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names). Google has gone live with one if its many IDNs: みんな. I want to emphasize here …
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 …
Is Pocari Sweat the next Gatorade?
It used to be that you had to travel all the way to Japan to be amused by the popular drink Pocari Sweat. The drink has been around since 1980 …
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 …