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 …
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 …
So what if the icons are ugly, iOS 7 now supports Tamil
So I just spent an hour upgrading my iPhone to iOS 7. My first thought was: Boy, these icons are ugly. And there’s this strange mix of text-only buttons and …
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, …
When does localization become capitulation?
I begin this post with a question because I don’t have an answer. A book making news these days is The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. It’s about Hollywood’s active self-censorship …
Questions to ask before entering an emerging market
Here’s my latest post for client Pitney Bowes: For companies in search of global growth, emerging markets are hard to resist. But like the California gold fields of the 1850s, …
Apple opens online store for Russia (and a call for improving the global gateway)
Not exactly breaking news, but Apple Store is now live in Russia. I love the art they used for the launch: The global gateway that Apple uses for its online …
Pricing for good luck in Asia
I’ve written an article for client Pitney Bowes on pricing strategies in Asia. Here, for example, is how the iPad mini is priced in China: All those 8s are no coincidence. Find …
The Dutch love .nl
Country codes (ccTLDs) provide local and regional “front doors” to websites. They also can be used as local brand extensions, as shown here with Amazon: Not surprisingly, country code registries …
On creating your own Web Globalization Report Card
I first published the Web Globalization Report Card about 10 years ago. Since then, a number of companies have developed their own internal Report Cards (and I’ve assisted with several). Adobe, in …