The Four Seasons improves its global gateway
I was pleased to see the Four Seasons embrace the globe icon for its global gateway. It is well positioned in the upper right-hand corner. The Four Seasons website ranked 145th …
Amazon pluralizes Singles Day
Leave it to Amazon to turn Single Day plural. And why not. If we can extend Black Friday to Cyber Monday, why not extend Singles day an extra day? Here’s a screen …
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 …
Is your global gateway stuck in the basement?
When you welcome visitors into your home, you probably don’t usher them directly to the basement. Yet when it comes to websites, this is exactly how many companies treat visitors from around the …
Bulgaria (at long last) gets it own internationalized domain name (IDN)
Five years ago, Bulgaria applied for an IDN but was denied by ICANN on the basis of “string similarity” with the country code of Brazil. Here is the Bulgarian IDN side …
You say Sea of Japan. I say East Sea.
Who said the life of a map maker isn’t interesting? Every other day it seems there is another disputed territory, which usually means another disputed name. I’ve already mentioned the …
Apple continues to neglect its global gateway
Every time Apple updates its web design (which it did recently) I get hopeful that the global gateway will receive a similar upgrade. But this has not yet happened. Apple’s global …
One probable beneficiary of Scotland independence: .SCOT
So today is the big day for the people of Scotland as well as the UK. One question that occurs to country code geeks such as myself is what country code …
What’s the ROI of web globalization?
I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile. A few months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly said this at an investor meeting: “When we work on making our devices …
What’s wrong with this global gateway?
A few things. First, using flags to indicate language is almost always a mistake. Second, why are the language names all in English? Only the “English language” text needs to be …
Managing language expectations when you can’t translate everything
I don’t know of any large company that translates all of its content into all of its target languages. I won’t go into the many reasons for why this is …
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 …
GoDaddy’s expanding global gateway
You can tell a lot about a company simply by keeping an eye on its global gateway. Here is the GoDaddy global gateway menu in March, 2014: And here it …
Gmail leads the global (as in non-Latin) email race
It’s official. Gmail supports (to a degree) non-Latin email addresses. That is, you can receive an email from someone with a non-Latin email address, as well as send an email …
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, …