A lot has been written about exporting of or copying of successful models of online businesses from the west to the east (or from the US to Europe), but the opposite also happens. Om Malik: “The six year old company has made a successful business out of bringing hit South Korean
games to the West”.

An excellent overview of languages and countries by John Greenwood.

Inspiring: “His first loan consisted of $27 in total, which Dr. Yunus used to
help 42 basket weavers regain their dignity and independence from creditors (who charged exorbitant interest rates and yielded mere
pennies in profits). What followed was a lifelong pledge and journey of
an educator turned banker, who arms the poorest of the poor with the
tools […]

A great podcast interview with Apala Lahiri Chavan about UX in India. Some salient points:

Mobile phones are a business tool, which explains (partly) their popularity.
Mobile phones empower women by letting them build social networks that they couldn’t build so easily before.
On the differences between India and China: India continues to be very hierarchical and male-focused, […]

I’m looking for global usability and ux consultants: people and companies who specialize in providing usability, design, ia and such services for global websites. Contact me if you know any or leave links in the comments. Thanks!

When I talk about global information architecture, I always talk a lot about how categories are cultural (even when they’re not).
A lot of my thoughts around cultural categories come from this one book: Sorting things out - classification and its consequences, by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. (at Amazon.com)

In it, the authors […]

An excellent and free report on the global search market. (via) As John says: “while Google is by far the leading search engine globally, it still does not lead in a number of key markets, namely China, Russia, Estonia, Czech Republic, and South Korea.”

Working out the structure of your locales can be surprisingly difficult. The world is fairly well organized around the concept of countries (after all, we wage wars to define them), but locales often aren’t countries, but languages, regions, markets or combinations of the above, and those are much fuzzier.
I’ve been looking into the structure of […]

Download this report in PDF format
This free report provides a brief introduction to Latin America for information architects and user experience designers.
Introduction.
“Latin America” is generally considered to consist of the countries south of the US. The Caribbean islands are sometimes included. However, as Wikipedia says: “There are several definitions of Latin America, none of them […]

Our first post ever. Let me explain the name first.
290 is a category in the Dewey Decimal system. It stands for “Other religions”. It’s a famous example of a culturally biased category.
Melvil Dewey grew up in New York state in the late 1800s, and after considering becoming a priest (his parents were fairly strict Christians),  […]