Russian was once considered a “top 10” language — one that any company serious about global growth would support. But Putin’s horrific actions have put an end to that. Over the past two years, global brands have made a hasty…
A localized website is of little value if local users cannot find it. And yet many global websites continue to make visual and technical mistakes that keep local websites effectively hidden from their intended visitors around the world. Which is…
One of the major takeaways from the Web Globalization Report Card is the importance of providing “front doors” to your localized websites. These doors begin with the addresses themselves, which may not include the .com domain. In fact, I’d recommend…
As global expansion goes, Amazon has, over the years, moved slowest. But when it does commit to a market, it tends to stick around and increase its investment and service offerings. Like India and Australia, two of its more recent…
As in 150 million. According to Verisign, there are now more than 150 million registrations of .com (of which I account for about a dozen): .Com remains the most popular top-level domain. However, the total number of country codes now…
Hard to believe, but the country code for France turned 34 last week. There are now roughly 3.6 million registrations in use. Where has the time gone? Yet I must remind myself that the Internet is still quite young —…
In technology, as in life, actions speak louder than words. And if you look at the actions Amazon has been taking over the past 18 months, it’s clear that Amazon is heavily invested in succeeding in India. Consider the following…
Imagine if a Brazilian technology company created an online store called Appalachia. And, over the years, Appalachia.com grew to become a global giant, so much so that the company pursued exclusive ownership of the top-level domain Appalachia. So not only…
Thanks to a heads-up from Ali at CircleID, I discovered a new report by Oxford Information Labs (sponsored by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) gave Oxford Information Labs…
For quite some time people have asked me about creating a larger version of our Country Codes of the World map, something they could pin up in their conference rooms or on office walls. And a map without the legend,…
When I read about Swaziland’s recent name change, by decree, my first thought was: What about the country code? As in .sz? As far as I can tell, it’s way too soon to know if the president has thought this…
I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated my map of the world’s internationalized domain names for 2018: The map includes all ICANN-approved country code IDNs for the world — more than 50 across more than 30 countries and regions. I’ve…
There are more than three billion people on the internet today, yet fewer than 25% speak English natively. Roughly a billion of these non-English speakers connect to the Internet via mobile device. Hence this new poster from Byte Level Research. To…
I love to design custom Country Code or IDN prints for various companies and organizations. And, on occasion, these prints can be quite large, as shown below: This photo is from the London office of a US-based company. I hope to see it…
I want to thank internet researcher Anat Ben-David for sharing this photo of her office wall. I’ve usually seen our Country Codes of the World print framed in black but I think white looks better! PS: The Country Codes print is currently on…