Internet Globalization News

Global by Design: When Designing for the World, Less is More

Although every website is global from the moment it goes live, few are designed with the world in mind. That is, they don’t take into account the many modifications that must be made to accommodate different languages, scripts, and geographic and cultural requirements.

This article presents a number of best practices to ensure that a web design is truly global by design.

via uxmag.com

When Designing for the World, Less is More

Creating a global template that works globally requires input from all local offices. Many global web design mistakes originate from the idea that a design that is popular with one country or region will necessarily be popular in other places. As a result, companies sometimes try to force the exact same design across all countries and regions without listening to people in the local offices. Sometimes a company gets lucky and the design they created for the home market travels well. But more often than not problems arise.

For example, if a website uses photographs of people, these photographs don't always travel well. The ethnicity of models, their poses, and their clothing can lead to unintended negative consequences in different countries. Also, some local websites may not have the same diversity of products or degree of customer support as the global home page. These limitations have to be planned for when designing the global template.

And then there is product assortment. During the month of June, a fashion website may promote swimsuits in the U.S. but winter clothing in Australia. A global template should be flexible enough to support totally different products or services in different markets, such that the elements can simply be swapped in and out as needed.

The global template should be thought of as an underlying infrastructure for the web design. Culture-specific images should be avoided and navigation should be limited to the most global elements: "about us," "products," "services," etc. This template can then be rolled up into regional or divisional templates. But by beginning with an austere structure, each instance will support the same look-and-feel.

Languages of the World (Wide Web)

Looking at the language web in 2008, we see a surprisingly clear map of Europe and Asia.

The language linkages invite explanations around geopolitics, linguistics, and historical associations.

The outlines of the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas are clearly visible, which suggest geographic rather than purely linguistic associations.

Examining links between other languages, it seems that many are explained by people and communities which speak both languages.

The language webs of many former Soviet republics link back to the Russian web, with the strongest link from Ukrainian. While Russia is the major importer of Ukrainian products, the bilingual nature of Ukraine is a more plausible explanation. Most Ukrainians speak both languages, and Russian is even the dominant language in large parts of the country.

The link from Arabic to French speaks to the long connection between France and its former colonies. In many of these countries Arabic and French are now commonly spoken together, and there has been significant emigration from these countries to France.

Another strong link is between the Malay/Malaysian and Indonesian webs. Malaysia and Indonesia share a border, but more importantly the languages are nearly eighty percent cognate, meaning speakers of one can easily understand the other.

via googleresearch.blogspot.com

The web is vast and infinite. Its pages link together in a complex network, containing remarkable structures and patterns. Some of the clearest patterns relate to language.

Most web pages link to other pages on the same web site, and the few off-site links they have are almost always to other pages in the same language. It's as if each language has its own web which is loosely linked to the webs of other languages. However, there are a small but significant number of off-site links between languages. These give tantalizing hints of the world beyond the virtual.

To see the connections between languages, start by taking the several billion most important pages on the web in 2008, including all pages in smaller languages, and look at the off-site links between these pages. The particular choice of pages in our corpus here reflects decisions about what is `important'. For example, in a language with few pages every page is considered important, while for languages with more pages some selection method is required, based on pagerank for example.

Cloudwords Enables Localization with Launch of Industry’s Native Cloud Solution

During the week of Dreamforce 2011, the most important conference dedicated to Cloud Computing, Cloudwords released their Translation Management Automation solution to help companies manage their localization process in an easy, efficient and effective way.

Cloudwords offers a SaaS platform that is a great alternative for companies that have plans to develop or are already implementing an international expansion strategy and need to localize and translate their contents.

via finance.yahoo.com

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Cloudwords Inc., the world’s leading global Translation Management Platform, today introduced and formally launched the industry’s first native cloud-based translation platform, becoming the most innovative and cost-effective way for companies to completely manage their translation process. The Cloudwords Translation Management Automation (TMA) solution helps companies expand their global presence faster, more easily and with enterprise-class quality. Available in two editions, Basic and Professional, the cloud-based solution includes a translation project management platform with unmatched scalability, security and ease-of-use features, resulting in significant advantages over any other solution currently available within the market. Going global with Cloudwords is easier, faster, less expensive and more reliable than with any other solution in part because of centralized project collaboration, seamless integration with business critical applications and cutting-edge business analytics. Cloudwords customers experience a lower cost of ownership, saving an average of more than 50% on their first translation initiative.

 

Netflix Will Speak Spanish and Portuguese - Shares Soar to All-time High

Netflix yesterday announced they will be releasing their (stream-only) service in 43 countries of Center and South America, including Brazil, the biggest market in the region and one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

As reported by one of the main newspapers in Brazil (article in Portuguese), Netflix will be partnering with Netmovies, an online movie rental service controlled by the American fund Tiger Management Corp.

As a result of these news, Netflix's shares soared in the Nasdaq to an all-time high, taking the company to a whooping $ 15.1 Billion valuation.

Last, as a long-term Netflix user, I hope this move brings more Brazilian and South American movies to US-based users as well - and not only crappy or dubbed ones...

via blog.netflix.com

We’re excited to share with you the news that later this year, Netflix will expand to 43 countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, offering unlimited TV shows and movies streaming instantly over the Internet to TVs and computers for one low monthly subscription price.

Members in the region will be able to access Netflix.com in Spanish, Portuguese or English, depending on their preference, and will be able to enjoy entertainment on their TVs via a range of consumer electronics devices capable of streaming from Netflix, as well as on PCs, Macs and mobile devices.

Netflix Stock evolution since 2008 (the beginning of the global financial crisis)

 

Twitter Crowdsourced Translation Center - Don't Fire Your Translator Yet

In a move that very few companies can make, Twitter announced today the release of their new (crowdsourced) Translation Center, a product that will allow users to translate the Twitter interface (for free).

As the Twitter team says in the blog post, crowdsourced translations are not new for them, since users have been able to translate the Twitter interface for almost two years (for free).

Why is it that only a few companies can make a move like that? Mainly, because most companies do not have millions of passionate users around the world willing to translate (or do, as a matter of fact) anything for free. So far, Facebook is probably the only other company that has successfully implemented a crowdsourced translation platform.

In the case of Facebook, though, millions are still spent in what is called "linguistic quality assurance", performed by professional translators through a Localization Service Provider. And, as a high ranked Facebook employee mentioned at a conference, crowdsourcing their translations is mainly used for speeding up the overall localization process, rather than a way of saving money.

With this in mind, what can companies that do not have millions of users willing to work for free, or that do not want to leave their legal or technical translations to non-professionals do? Basically, have a localization manager internally to manage their translation projects, and find one (or more) high quality translation vendor. Cloudwords, a new start-up based in San Francisco, just released a web-based translation management platform, that helps companies not only manage their translation projects, but also find the best translation vendors for their needs -- if the crowdsourced solution is not for your company, I suggest you take a look.

via blog.twitter.com

Crowdsourcing translations isn’t new for us. Since October, 2009, we’ve counted on Twitter users to volunteer as translators and help us localize Twitter. For this launch, we created a completely new system, based on feedback from translators, to improve the translation experience.

image via tadej.eu

Microsoft Near Completion of Internationalization of Office Apps for the Cloud

Given the "search results" affair unveiled this week between Bing and Google, one wonders if Google will claim that Microsoft is copying their plans to dominate the world through free, cloud apps...

Starting today, people in over 150 more countries can use the Web Apps to view, edit, and share Office documents from anywhere with a browser and an internet connection. This includes viewing, editing, and sharing Office document attachments in Hotmail.

via news.softpedia.com

The promise from Microsoft is that next month, the services designed to extend Office 2010 into the Cloud will reach global availability. Meanwhile, the Redmond company has made an immense leap forward in terms of internationalization by opening up Office Web Apps to users in an additional over 150 countries on top of the markets in which it had already been launched.

The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution

Interesting article from The Economist about the future of the Internet, analyzing specifically the current trends towards the end of total freedom and accessibility, with Governments, Telcos and others trying to create walled gardens.

via www.economist.com

Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.

First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. Recently several countries have demanded that their law-enforcement agencies have access to e-mails sent from BlackBerry smart-phones. This week India, which had threatened to cut off BlackBerry service at the end of August, granted RIM, the device’s maker, an extra two months while authorities consider the firm’s proposal to comply. However, it has also said that it is going after other communication-service providers, notably Google and Skype.

Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet. Third, network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet.

It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries. (The picture above is a visual representation of the “nationality” of traffic on the internet, created by the University of California’s Co-operative Association for Internet Data Analysis: America is in pink, Britain in dark blue, Italy in pale blue, Sweden in green and unknown countries in white.) Just as it was not preordained that the internet would become one global network where the same rules applied to everyone, everywhere, it is not certain that it will stay that way, says Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Photo of a "walled garden" by philgo. Some rights reserved.

Sustaining the Future of the Internet with Hyperbolic Mapping

From time to time, we post articles related to more scientific subjects, always related to the expansion and/or future of the Internet. Today, this research shows how applying hyperbolic space mapping might help avoiding the scaling limitations that the Internet faces today.

via Nature Communications

The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet —routing information packets between any two computers in the world— cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. Guided by a constructed map, which we show below, Internet routing exhibits scaling properties that are theoretically close to the best possible. Besides this immediate practical viability, our network mapping method can provide a different perspective on the community structure in complex networks.

We have shown that the Internet hyperbolic map is remarkably robust with respect to even substantial perturbations of the Internet topology, implying that this map is essentially static. It does not significantly depend on topology dynamics, and can thus be computed only once. This property is desirable in view of long running times intrinsic to likelihood maximization algorithms. Our method improves their running times drastically, and the Internet map computations take approximately a day on a modern computer. However, for substantially larger networks, the running times may still be prohibitive even for one-time mapping. Therefore, alternative methods for network mapping, not relying on likelihood maximization, are highly desirable, and our work in this direction is underway.

An Autonomous System (AS) is, roughly, a part of the Internet owned and administered by the same organization3. AS range in size from small companies, or even private users, to huge international corporations. No central Internet authority exists that dictates to any AS what other AS to connect to. Connections between AS are results of local independent decisions based on business agreements between AS pairs. This lack of centralized engineering control makes the Internet a truly self-organized system, and poses many scientific challenges. The one we address here is the sustainability of Internet growth.The size of AS nodes is proportional to the number of connections they have with other AS. The font size of the country names is proportional to the number of AS that the country has. Only the names of countries with more than 10 AS are included.

The top 20 countries on the Internet, and what the future might bring

Looking at the evolution of emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines and Russia, and as the Internet penetration in these countries rise, the balance of power on the Internet will start to shift. In five to ten years, the order in the top 20 list will be quite different.

[That said, and even with Nigeria in the Top 20 list, I think the future of African countries, as their present, does not look very promising in terms of Internet usage/penetration, which can also be used as an economic development indicator].

via royal.pingdom.com

The Internet is almost like its own world, so when you’re thinking about what countries are the largest in that world, it makes sense to count Internet users instead of real-world population.

Not only is China the largest in terms of real-world population, the country also has by far the largest number of Internet users. This may not come as a huge surprise, but looking past the absolute top of the list, there are some countries that may be unexpected residents in the top 20.

A few additional observations:

• The tenth largest country on the Internet is Nigeria. So although Africa as a whole is often considered to be a bit behind the curve on the Internet, it does have a presence among the top countries.
• Seven out of the top 20 countries are Asian (35%).
• Five out of the top 20 countries are European (25%). Six (30%) if you also count Russia.
• Three of the top 20 are English-language countries (four if you count India).

Some Mind-blowing Social Media Statistics Revisited

As we have done in the past, it is time to stop for a moment and check some impressive numbers related to usage of some internet services. The original report was published at the end of January/2010.

via econsultancy.com

• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of 2009, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
  
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
  
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Astronomers have found a galaxy forming stars in a long tail behind it. The stars are being left behind as the galaxy plows through a galaxy cluster.