As you’re probably already aware, China is one of the top emerging international travel markets. In fact, it’s been estimated by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) that by 2020, the number of outbound Chinese travelers will hit 100 million. “China has shown by far the fastest growth with regard to expenditure on international tourism in the last decade, multiplying expenditure four times since 2000. Ranking as the seventh biggest source market in 2005, it has since overtaken, respectively, Italy, Japan, France and the United Kingdom.” (Source: UNWTO Tourism Highlights 2011 Edition)
Not surprisingly, the U.S. is feeling the effect. “So huge is the Chinese travel market potential that major U.S. travel suppliers — including hotels and airlines, as well as major cities and even shopping malls — are sending sales representatives to China… And hotels in this country are now serving rice porridge for breakfast and seeking Mandarin Chinese speakers to handle the phones and check-in desks.” (Source: Chinese tourists visit U.S. in record numbers, January 2012)
For a company within the travel and hospitality industry, what’s the online equivalent of serving rice porridge for breakfast and hiring Mandarin Chinese speakers specifically so they can communicate with travelers? Continue reading »
Drug and device makers have asked for regulators to issue rules on the use of social media. Earlier this year, the FDA issued a draft guidance to address how companies should respond to certain requests for information on off-label use of products. Although the draft guidance will not give the device and drug manufacturers a roadmap to navigate social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it does provide some direction on how companies should process without getting in trouble with regulators.
As an Internet professional, I care a lot about URLs. Whereas some casual surfers may never notice what appears in the address bar of the browser, I am constantly looking at the URL to give me context about what I am looking at… Where does this page fall within the site hierarchy? is it protected by HTTPS? Was I redirected to a phishing site?
I am not the only one who cares about URLs. Search engines care about them too. We hear about search engine friendly URLs but the most important thing is that the URL is the unique identifier that a search engine uses to catalog its index. If you care about getting found in a search, you better make it easy for both users and search engines to be able to understand what information is available at each of your URLs.
When you run a global website that serves multiple markets and languages, the problem of URL management gets harder because you are adding more dimensions to your site for the search engines to understand. You want your localized content to appear in search results so that audiences go to the sites that have been localized to serve them.
URLs play a big part of that because they can help a search engine segment and group content. You want your global URLs to communicate the following information.
Day one at ICE Totally Gaming 2012 is coming to a close, and we could not be more excited! With our current track record of successful partnerships with companies in the gaming industry, we knew that participating at ICE Totally Gaming would be a good bet.
Ok, all jokes aside—We have had such a great experience with the event so far. Plenty of great meetings with potential clients, and even some of our customers, like William Hill.
Today, Emma Durant is speaking at the IT Support and Digital Marketing Seminar Theatre at 15:00-15:45, giving her presentation on Managing Global Web Operations Effectively – The Top 5 Trends. If you didn’t make it over there today, stop by our booth L1-21 to chat with Emma one on one, on how clients can maximize their Global Digital Operations:
Looking forward to day two with the team. Don’t miss Stuart Sklair in the IT Support and Digital Marketing Theater at 15:00-15:45 as he provides insight into:
Best practices for getting online gaming into multiple languages—the full lifecycle of localization and translation. Your content comes from all areas of the business, from back-office systems, web applications, and from the static website itself. Formats vary widely, and include text, graphics, and audio. All of these variables must be accounted for, and must be equipped for publishing to the web as well as various mobile devices.
The apple orchards in the western suburbs of Boston are just starting to bear fruit, and the early apple macintoshes (the kind you eat, not the kind with which you compute) are now ripe for picking. As my family members with heavy New England accents would say, “They’re very taht”.
But I digress.
