McDonald’s Scores with “McRice Burger”
The Taipei Times (by way of McChronicles) reports that McDonald’s Taiwan has sold 5 million units of its home-grown rice burger after only six months on the market. Not bad. …
Wedgwood Adds American eCommerce Web Site
According to Internet Retailer “Waterford Wedgwood plc has launched its first online destination and first direct-to-consumer e-commerce site in the U.S. for its Wedgwood china products, WedgwoodUSA.com. The site was …
PG&E Launches Spanish Web Site
Pacific Gas & Electric Company has launched a Spanish-language site for the US market. Here’s the press release The Spanish site is parked at www.pge.com/espanol. But PG&E wisely also redirects …
SDL and Astoria Team Up For Siemens Medical Devices
Globalization services provider SDL and XML authoring software provider Astoria have partnered to help Siemens Medical Solutions save an estimated $1 million on localization costs, according to this press release. …
Think Globally; Wait Locally
The New York Times has an entertaining piece on culture and its role in how long people are apt to wait in line. The article focuses on the new Disney …
Corpse Bride En Español
I’m not sure if this is a first for Warner Brothers but it is the first time I’ve seen it. The movie studio is running a Spanish-language ad for the …
Of Global Consistency and Current Knowledge
Web usability consultant Jared Spool recently wrote about the difference between designing for “consistency” and designing for “current knowledge.” This concept has great relevance to the design of global Web …
There’s a New Global CMS Vendor in Town
Its name is Clay Tablet and it is focused purely on helping companies manage multilingual Web sites. It claims to have a patent-pending technology that makes the process of sending …
The New iTunes Demotes its Global Gateway
I just upgraded from iTunes 4 to iTunes 5 and, wouldn’t you know it, Apple changed the global navigation system. Instead of placing the link to the “global gaeway” in …
Unicode Is Really Getting Fashionable
Michael Kaplan called my attention the latest Unicode fashion accessory: For those who don’t get it, that funny little question-mark character is what Mac users see when their computers don’t …
What the World’s Listening To, According to Apple
Apple has posted a list of the top 10 songs purchased from its growing list of country iTunes stores. Even if you don’t use iTunes, you can view the list …
Of Yahoo!, Google, and Amharic
Web localization is all about managing expectations. Patrick Hall pointed out to me yesterday that although Google offers an Amharic (www.google.com/intl/am) interface it apparently hasn’t actually indexed any Amharic content. …
Baidu Beating Google in China
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) just published a survey of the Chinese search engine market. Baidu comes out on top in market share. But Google is more popular …
Google Adds More Languages: 116 and Counting…
Google continues to go where no other multinational has gone before, adding the following lanugage interfaces: – Cambodian – Corsican – Kazakh – Lingala – Pashto – Quechua – Shona …