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 …
Heading down the freelove highway
Along the theme of holiday travel, I give you David Brent’s rendition of the Freelove Highway… This never fails to make me laugh.
Counting in Tongues
HTML has long supported the ability to create numbered lists simply by using the <ol><li></li></ol> tags. But these tags are rather limited if you are developing websites for the world. …
Measuring translation quality: A Q&A with TAUS founder Jaap van der Meer
Every translation vendor offers the highest-quality translations. Or so they say. But how do you know for sure that one translation is better than another translation? And, for that matter, …
The slowly evolving airline website
I enjoyed this vision of the future of an airline website (by Fantasy Interactive), particularly this map of fares and destinations: Why haven’t other airlines embraced this vision yet? Probably …
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 …