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 at www.apple.com/euro/itunes/charts/top10songs.html.

"You’re Beautiful" by James Blunt is number one in France, Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere but, oddly, not in the UK. I say oddly because the song is in English and the singer is from the UK.

Pop music can be funny that way...

According to the Deloitte and NVCA 2005 Global Venture Capital Survey, VCs are increasingly looking outside their borders when making investments.

What this non-intuitive exhibit shows is that US VCs will be boosting non-US investments signficantly, most heavily within China and India, while non-US VCs will be increasing their investments in the US. So it seems the US is going to see no shortage in VC money anytime soon. But one of the keys to tapping into this money will be having a global business strategy in place. And a global Web site certainly couldn't hurt either. Web globalization is often viewed as something only large multinationals invest in; but I believe that start-ups stand to benefit the most from Web globalization.

Business Week features an article about the "secret" brand that is Muji. According to the article, "Muji is short for mujirushi ryohin, which translates roughly to 'no label, quality goods,' and its mission is to provide well designed, useful products at affordable prices." Muji currently has 285 stores in Japan with 61 others in the UK, France, and China. And it is contemplating setting up shop in the US. I believe it already has some products at MOMA.

Anyway, here are a few pics from my pilgrimmage to Muji back in January. These are from the main Kyoto location.

I really wanted this bike.

The cafe was reasonably priced and had lots of great take out snacks. For some reason the Muji bottled water just tasted better than other brands.

The clothes didn't fit my non-localized body. But I did buy a pair of glasses. They had these mix-and-match stations set up and I really enjoyed building my own specs.

And one more shot before I left...

What I most liked about Muji is how uncluttered the place felt. And I realize now that it was because you didn't have all these little products everywhere screaming out at you with their unique logos and color schemes and oddball shapes. At Muji, because they make and "unbrand" all their products, the color schemes, the labeling, the layouts are all very simple, consistent and serene.

I miss Muji.

Dell didn't report the revenues that analysts were hoping for but it certainly posted solid non-US revenues.

According to its earnings release today...

Revenue from outside the United States accounted for 39 percent of Dell's total for the quarter and grew 24 percent year-over-year.

• Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) revenue grew 24 percent year-over-year.
  
• In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, revenue was up 21 percent over last year.
  
• Excluding the U.S., the Americas region revenue grew 34 percent year-over-year.
  

Dell plans to double manufacturing capacity in China next year.

As the stock offering for Chinese search engine Baidu quadrupled on its first day of trading on the NASDAQ, I couldn't help but wonder what the folks at Google are thinking right about now. They sure must be sick and tired of others ripping off their austere design...

Baudu

Google China

The rumor is that Google tried to buy Baidu at one point. I wouldn't be surprised. eBay bought its way into the market, as did Amazon. One thing is for sure -- this battle between Baidu and Google China is going to be a great case study in Web globalization and localization. Look at how Baidu describes itself and its uniquely local mission...

Baidu chose a poetic Chinese name because it wants the world to remember its heritage. As a native speaker of the Chinese language and a talented engineer, Baidu focuses on what it knows best - Chinese language search. Applying avant-garde technology to the world's most ancient and complex language is as challenging as it is exciting. At least people here at Baidu think so. As having diligently disclosed in the Prospectus of our recent Initial Public Offering, we believe there are at least 38 ways of saying "I" in Chinese. It is important that we master all the ways of addressing oneself in Chinese because our users depend on us to address every one of their daily queries. And trust us, pin pointing queries in the Chinese language is an art rather than a science.

To improve user experience, we constantly make improvements to our products and services. For example, we introduced "phonetic" or "pin-yin" search which allows our users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets. This feature is designed to skip the switching from English inputting to Chinese inputting and for when the user is not sure of the written form of a keyword. Our users definitely notice the many little things that we do differently to ensure a simple and reliable search experience every time.

I first asked can Baidu out-Google Google? Perhaps the question really should be: Can an outsider like Google out-Baidu Baidu?

The long-awaited iTunes Japan site is up and running..

Japan is the 20th country store now available. Plenty of room left to grow. The site offers 1 million songs which cost roughly ¥150 each.

So now that Japan is live, who's next? Australi? New Zealand?

That's what Intel plans to do as it opens up design centers in India, China, Brazil, and Egypt, according to CNET News. Says the article, "the so-called definition centers will examine local conditions and economies and then try to design PCs, components and software for the people who live there."

Intel is simply following the money; more than 70% of its revenues come from outside the US. And in this brutally competitive and increasingly commoditized environment, Intel knows that localized products will give it a competitive edge.

The fact that Egypt is one of the target markets is also telling. I'm seeing early signs that multinationals are awakening to the Middle East market, both through product development and Web localization.

The recent bankruptcy announcement of AOL LatAm draws to an end a six-year case study in how not to expand a business into new markets. This article touches on many of the challenges that AOL encountered when it ventured south (some local and some self-inflicted).

According to the article, AOL's strategy of mass-mailing software CDs to every household didn't make much sense in markets with very low PC and credit card penetration. Says the article, "A former AOL Latin America executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that AOL's U.S. strategy hadn't translated well in the failed venture. The executive noted that CD mailing costs were about 30 percent to 40 percent higher in Latin America and response rates about half those in the United States."

And then there is the local compeitition. In Mexico, for example, there is Telmex, which is not only a virtual monopoly but also a pretty creative company. It sells the Prodigy Internet service and has enjoyed great success by selling a package that includes the service along with a low-priced PC. And, the last I heard, Telmex is now the largest distributor of PCs in Mexico. While AOL was pushing CDs to people who may or may not have had a PC, Telmex was selling a total solution.

So what are lessons other companies can take away from AOL's saga? For starters, it's probably best not to call yourself a regional player until you truly are one. Better to pick one market and expand from there.

Next, be prepared to ditch the strategy that made you a success in your home market. If you're not prepared to do that, then maybe you should look at just those markets that will support your home-grown strategy.

And be prepared for the locals to work together to see that you fail. Nothing unites local competitors like a foreign competitor with deep pockets. AOL clearly faced a tough, and not entirely fair, fight in every market it entered.

This month's issue of Fortune magazine has an in-depth piece on Wal-Mart's adventures in China. Despite having been operating in China since 1996, the company has just 43 locations operating today (it has 3,719 locations in the US). But it was only recently that foreign retailers got the official green light to expand outside the large cities. The race is on.

And this excerpt pretty much sums up how much Wal-Mart has riding on this country...

Wal-Mart can't sustain the astronomical U.S. growth rates of the past decade forever. Sooner rather than later, the company will need help from overseas. But the Beast of Bentonville has yet to emerge as a dominant player in any of the foreign markets that account for about 20% of its global sales. In Germany it is still struggling to stanch losses at the two retailers it acquired in the 1990s. In Japan it has yet to articulate a clear strategy for its 38% stake in the troubled Seiyu chain. The company has had better luck in emerging economies, such as Mexico, where there are fewer entrenched incumbents. But executives have long viewed China, with its vast population and booming economy, as their best bet for long-term global growth. In an interview with FORTUNE last year, former Wal-Mart CEO David Glass proclaimed China "the one place in the world where you could replicate Wal-Mart's success in the U.S."

As for the Internet, Wal-Mart is in need of a truly global Web design and management strategy. Currently, Web sites are managed locally and have little in common except for the logo. A more consistent template will allow for greater sharing of content between countries and greater efficiencies all around.

PS: Wal-Mart plans to have 90 locations by the end of 2006.

From the eBay investor call today...

-> eBay now has more than 157 million registered users worldwide.

-> eBay Spain now has 1 million registered users.

-> Europe: 40% growth year over year.

-> The UK achieved first-ever $100 million revenue quarter.

-> France and Italy combined equal Germany in size.

-> Launching a new PayPal fraud protection service in Germany in August. Launching in Germany first before other markets.

-> eBay China (EachNet) added 1.6 million users in Q2, giving it a total of 13.2 million users.

-> No more details on China. eBay is "pleased" with progress thus far.

-> PayPal China is now live (includes buyer protection service). PayPal China is offered free right now. They believe direct payment will be more popular than credit cards in China than in other markets, which will minimize risk.

-> India: 1.7 million registered users.

-> No mention of eBay taking another stab at Japan.

-> US PayPal Merchant Pro service: Meg says merchant feedback is good and the price is right. (I found the documentation for this product both light and confusing, though the pricing is very good).

-> Meg says eBay is one of the "top two" paid search advertisers globally.

-> Meg mentioned that they put a priority on sharing best practices across country units.

eBay's non-domestic revenues continue to climb upward. In Q2,

According to their press release:

-> U.S. Marketplace net revenues totaled $423.6 million in Q2-05,
representing 27% year-over-year growth.
-> International Marketplace net revenues totaled $418.8
million in Q2-05, representing 51% year-over-year growth.

(And if you look just at net transaction revenues, non-US revenues passed US revenues in Q2.)

The fastest growing non-US sites were the U.K., up 94%, and Korea, up 78%.

It has been a good quarter for PepsiCo, driven by a healthy spike in international sales. According to this article...

In the standout international division, snacks volume rose 3 percent, while drinks volume jumped 10 percent. PepsiCo said it saw strong snacks growth in developing markets like India, China, Russia and Turkey, while drinks volume growth was led by the Middle East, China and Argentina.

If your company offers a multilingual Web site (or plans to offer one), I encourage you to take a moment to complete our landmark Web globalization survey. You can participate by clicking here.

In return for your valuable time, you will receive a free executive summary of the survey. You will also be entered in a drawing in wich we will give away three copies of our popular 2005 Web Globalization Report Card.

If you are a translation agency, please tell your clients, as we are also conducting a study of vendor awareness among all those who take the survey.

While McDonald's has operated in China for some time now, Burger King now appears close to opening its first branch in the country -- in Shanghai. BK has high hopes for the country, as do other fast food chains.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Wendy's is scouting out locations and Hormel Foods is looking at opening hot dog stands.

But the article notes that not all restaurants have thrived in China. Schlotzsky's Deli withdrew from the market and McDonald's recently cited "weakness" and put in a new management team. And then there is pricing. BK is charging 40% to 50% less than what it charges in the US.

Nevertheless, it's safe to say that any multinational fast food chain has little choice but invest in China. BK has 7,956 locations now operating in the US, so there's not much room left to grow. China, despite the risks, despite the low margins, despite the inevitable cultural missteps, is where the action is.

What about the BK China Web site?
While McDonald's offers a China Web site, Burger King does not. It's early yet of course, but BK does not have the best track record in Web globalization. If you visit the corporate site you'll be hard-pressed to find links to the country sites. As best as I can tell, many countries that BK does business in do not have localized Web sites.

To complicate matters, Burger King is known as Hungry Jack's in Australia.

Apple's globalization of iTunes appears to be moving right along. According to the press release, "iTunes Music Stores were launched in the UK, France and Germany in June 2004, and now operate in 17 European countries including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The European iTunes Music Stores have catalogs of over one million songs each, and feature content from all major music companies and over 1,000 independent record labels."

Now we wait for Apple to tackle Asia. Sites for Australia, New Zealand, and Japan are expected this year.

eBay held its annual developers conference and, according to this article, is not close to launching any translation service for sellers. Here's an excerpt:

Another questioner wanted to know if eBay had any plans for a translation feature, saying it was difficult for sellers to sell in a multi-cultural, multi-language region, for example on a European site where browsers might be from Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. Steinhorn responded they hadn't thought through all the ramifications of such a service, for example, if eBay's translation was "less than spectacular." Don Durbin suggested a good approach might be to partner with someone within the country to do the translation, and indicated one seller had created a tool with tabs within a listing for different languages such as English, Italian, etc. She said she did not expect eBay would be offering translation services in the near future.

And eBay's loss of Japan to Yahoo! is clearly still a source of pain:

Cobb and Jordan's answers seemed to highlight the international focus of much of the conference. The "biggest blight" on the record of international has been Japan, said Cobb. "We were late" in the Japanese market, said Jordan. The Japanese didn't respond to an English-written product with dollars," he said wryly, to laughter from the audience.

What eBay doesn't highlight is that their classified portal, Kijiji, is already localized for Japan; so to some extent they are trying to get back in. And, I believe, they really have no choice but take another shot at Japan. I wrote about this earlier this year in our eBay Global Profilereport.

On a separate note, eBay has partnered with B-B trade portal in China, Global Sources. You can read about the deal here.

I spent Saturday at the Association of Language Companies conference in Pasadena and gave a talk on Web globalization. I'm glad I went. I'm seeing more and more agencies trying to grab a share of the rapidly growing Web globalization industry. My presentation was on the "Web globalization opportunity (and risk)."

Because I had so many requests for the presentation, I've posted it online here: www.bytelevel.com/global.

The key takeaways from the presentation are:

1. Web globalization is inevitable for most companies and, as a result, a huge opportunity for translation agenices.
2. Many translation agencies avoid Web globalization because they think they don't have the skills or tools. And yet many Web globalization projects are surprisingly easy to manage.
3. If you want to hone your Web globalization skills, start by globalizing your own agency Web site. Doing so sends a message to prospects that you are skilled at Web globalization. You don't have to translate your entire Web site - a "brochure" Web site in a few languages will do the trick. Be sure to include Chinese or Japanese (or both); Arabic is a hot language these days as well.
4. When selling Web globalization services, remember that your buyer may be new to translation. They may not know the difference between internationalization and localization and they may not appreciate it if you assume that they should know it. That's why I use the term Web globalization or web site globalization. People get it. When selling Web globalization services, you're going to have to invest the time to educate your clients. So many companies are just dipping their toes into these waters.
5. Just because you are already the "agency of record" for a company does not mean you'll also get the Web globalization account. It's important that you stay in touch with the marketing and Web teams so they know to include you in the RFP.
6. Along these lines, Web globalization is often the "back door" for aggressive vendors into new accounts. The danger of ignoring Web globalization opportunities is that you allow competitors to develop a relationship with your clients. And, since so much content is moving toward to the Web, you risk being marginalized down the road.
7. If you think you're too late to the Web globalization game, think again. Most companies are just getting started localizing their Web sites. Opportunities are enormous.

There was a great article recently in the Wall Street Journal that describes the challenges that Disney faces in launching Hong Kong Disneyland later this year. According to the article, there are more than 290 million consumers in China under the age of 14. Imagine the number of Mickey Mouse hats they could sell!

And yet Disney has had very mixed results with theme parks outside the US. On one hand you have Paris, which is still struggling to make ends meet; on the other hand there is Tokyo, which is a massive success. The big question is whether China's culture will embrace Disney's culture. This article excerpt illustrates the uphill battle that Disney faces:

While Hong Kong's relatively wealthy 6.8 million citizens are well versed in Disney's cartoons-and-Cinderella culture, the brand is far less pervasive in mainland China. Many Western media and consumer-products companies have stopped exporting their Western goods, choosing instead to develop more locally tailored fare. Chinese consumers are drawn to luxury, but still want culturally relevant products. And sometimes the government demands Chinese goods: It recently proposed banning foreign-made cartoons on prime-time TV.

Britney Spears doesn't burn up the charts in China. Today, 70% of music and 90% of all programming on Viacom Inc.'s MTV China is made in China. At Yum Brand's KFC, 85% of the menu is unique to China, with some cross-cultural hybrids, such "Dragon Twisters" with Peking duck sauce.

So Disney is making some attempts to localize the experience for its Asian guests, like creating more photo opportunities and changing "Main Street, U.S.A." to "World Bazaar." And let's not forget the now-infamous "shark fin soup" episode; Disney recently agreed to take that item off its menu after pressure from outside Asia. Which begs the question: How local can you be to one culture without offending another culture?

Cultural speed bumps are inevitable these days. I am glad to see Disney putting the effort into balancing its global culture with China's culture. My prediction is that Disney will do well in Hong Kong and exceedingly well when it sets up shop in Shanghai. That is, until a local competitor builds a "Chinaland" equivalent, trying to beat Disney at its own game.

The announcement by the WSJ that Google is prepping a payment service is big news in the ecommerce world and, I think, good news for consumers.

According to the article, "Exact details of the search company's planned service are not known. But the knowledgeable people say it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts. Some consumers like PayPal for the security it offers, since it allows them to share their banking or credit-card numbers only with PayPal without having to divulge the information to merchants."

PayPal is a great service. My company uses it and it has allowed us to accept payments from all over the world. My only concern has been the flood of PayPal phishing spam and what effect it is having on user trust and behavior.

But now we have Google getting into the game, with a service possibly called Google Wallet. At the very least I believe that Google Wallet will pressure eBay to rethink its global expansion strategy for PayPal. Currently, PayPal follows in the footsteps of eBay. When eBay launches a country Web site, it's just a matter of time before PayPal supports that market.

However, PayPal might be wise in expanding into markets ahead of eBay because Google has a track record of "going global" at a blistering pace. eBay knows well, after ceding Japan to Yahoo! a few years back, how being a late entrant into a market can hurt. And yet Google is going to face its share of roadblocks along the way. The reason PayPal has gone global relatively slowly is not so much technical but legal. PayPal needs to forge partnerships with local banks and get regulatory approval in these markets before it can enter, and you can imagine the time and lobbying involved; I've heard that this process alone can take up to 18 months per market. There is still no PayPal China.

I would imagine that Google is going to have to do jump through the very same hoops that PayPal has jumped through, unless it is taking a different approach altogether.

Regardless, I'm glad to see Google getting into ecommerce in a global way. It will push PayPal to be even better, most likely keep processing fees low, and keep the folks at Visa, MasterCard, et al at bay.

According to the Moscow Times, Starbucks has opened its first retail location in Russia.

No Russian Web site yet, but I have no doubt that one is in the works. That makes it 19 countries (and counting) for Starbucks.

And, after a brief trip to Osaka, I have to say that Starbucks is doing very well in Japan. The chain is not nearly as ubiquitous in Osaka as it is in Tokyo, but it's getting there...

UPDATE: I stand corrected. There are more than 30 countries around the world that include at least one Starbucks. Here is the current list (Russia not yet included):

• Australia
  
• Austria
  
• Bahrain
  
• Canada
  
• Chile
  
• China
  
• Cyprus
  
• France
  
• Germany
  
• Greece
  
• Indonesia
  
• Japan
  
• Jordan
  
• Kuwait
  
• Lebanon
  
• Malaysia
  
• Mexico
  
• New Zealand
  
• Oman
  
• Peru
  
• Philippines
  
• Puerto Rico
  
• Qatar
  
• Saudi Arabia
  
• Singapore
  
• South Korea
  
• Spain
  
• Switzerland
  
• Taiwan
  
• Thailand
  
• Turkey
  
• United Arab Emirates
  
• United Kingdom
  
• United States
  

The news that Microsoft's new China MSN blogging portal is censoring "prohibited language" such as "democracy, freedom and human rights" is unsettling to say the least.

"MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates," said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager.

Every country has its rules that companies must play by, but what if these rules are just plain wrong? I understand that Microsoft is desperate to do business in China and I understand that if Microsoft doesn't play by China's crazy rules that some other multinational most certainly will (see Yahoo!, eBay and countless others). Privately, many executives tell me that they are playing nice with China in the hopes that these rules one day are relaxed. But by playing by the rules aren't you giving China less incentive to relax them?

The mark of a great company is one that is not afraid to turn away business if it violates their sense of ethics. When American-based companies assist a government in banning the use of words like "freedom" and "democracy" these companies have become part of the problem and not part of the solution. This isn't localization; this is capitulation.

The standards organization OASIS recently approved Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard -- a "status that signifies the highest level of ratification."

So what exactly is DITA?

According to the press release, "DITA consists of a set of design principles for creating "information-typed" modules at a topic level. DITA enables organizations to deliver content as closely as possible to the point-of-use, making it ideal for applications such as integrated help systems, web sites, and how-to instruction pages. DITA's topic-oriented content can be used to exploit new features or delivery channels as they become available."

Still not clear?

I'm afraid this is one of those standards that only an information architect could love. Fortunately for me, I did have the benefit of an Idiom presentation on DITA recently. The presentation illustrated how the standard will aid in managing content across languages as well as across departments and media (Web, print, mobile).

And there is a real need among enterprises for an XML standard that allows them to "chunk" content in a way that allows for such wide-scale reuse and translation. I'll know more when I see some real-world success stories, of which there are none as of yet. But I'm sure the folks at Idiom and Arbortext are writing up their case studies as we speak.

So where will we be seeing DITA commercially?

Here are the principal vendor supporters: Idiom, Arbortext, BMC, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, and Sun. The ones to watch are not just these folks but also the folks not on the list, particularly Documentum, Interwoven, and Vignette. It will be interesting to see if other CMS vendors jump on the DITA bandwagon.

If you want to learn more, and have a few hours to spare, here are the tech specs on DITA.

PayPal continues its strategy of following in eBay's footsteps by lauching PayPal.es to support eBay.es.

According to the press release the "new site (https://www.paypal.es) is written in Spanish, offers information customized for Spanish PayPal account holders, and enables payments in Euros, the common currency in Spain."

PayPal currently supports six currencies: U.S. Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Pounds Sterling, Euros, Japanese Yen, and Australian Dollars. I find it very interesting that PayPal supports Yen even though eBay offers no Japan Web site (yet).

PayPal Spain joins the list of 11 PayPal countries currently supported. There is plenty of room left to grow, as there are more than 22 eBay country Web sites (and counting).

Last week I received a "Factory Tour" invite from Google but didn't give it much thought. I wish I had because I missed a preview of the company's ambitious machine translation (MT) efforts.

Thankfully, Philipp Lenssen includes a great recap of the Webcast at this site: Google Blogoscoped. It's worth a read.

Apparently Google is taking massive libraries of source and target text and dumping them into a database where the relationships between source and target text are analyzed and memorized. This database is then leveraged to translate new source text. Philipp explains it better than I...

This is the Rosetta Stone approach of translation. Let’s take a simple example: if a book is titled “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in English, and the German title is “Also sprach Zarathustra”, the system can begin to understand that “thus spoke” can be translated with “also sprach”. (This approach would even work for metaphors – surely, Google researchers will take the longest available phrase which has high statistical matches across different works.) All it needs is someone to feed the system the two books and to teach it the two are translations from language A to language B, and the translator can create what Franz Och called a “language model.” I suspect it’s crucial that the body of text is immensely large, or else the system in its task of translating would stumble upon too many unlearned phrases. Google used the United Nations Documents to train their machine, and all in fed 200 billion words. This is brute force AI, if you want – it works on statistical learning theory only and has not much real “understanding” of anything but patterns.

This sure is brute force MT. I'll be very interested to know just how long a string a text Google can effectively translate. More important, how will Google handle the flood of brand names, oddball terms, and local slang?

But let's just assume that Google does make this ambitious project a success; how will this affect the translation industry in general and Web globalization in particular?

Assuming this all does work moderately well, companies will be incented to pull all text out of graphics to make the most of this free translation service. After all, if Google is providing users in Vietnam a free translation of your company's Web site, why not do what you can to make everything translatable.

This would also be yet another blow to Macromedia Flash, not that the emergence of AJAX isn't doing enough damage.

But what about the impact on translation vendors? i don't think they have much to worry about, yet. The need for high-quality, human-edited translation isn't going away anytime soon. Long term, however, all bets are off. Google should be on every translation vendor's radar; this company has lots of money, lots of smarts, and lots of incentive to provide the world's text in all the world's languages.

Here's an interesting article about a book that might be worth checking out: The INSEAD-Wharton Alliance on Globalizing: Strategies for Building Successful Global Businesses. Okay, it's not the most exciting title, but the article is worth a read.

It introduces the concept of a global branding continuum, which basically means that there are "various levels of being truly global. It is not always achievable, nor desirable, to go the full extent. Some form of local adaptation may be necessary, either in the product/service that is offered or in the positioning relative to competition."

Here's a good example of this concept:

What kinds of products do not lend themselves to global brands? Food is one category where, literally, differences in tastes from culture to culture compel global companies to adapt to local conditions, according to Day. At the other end of the spectrum is a company like Intel, whose products and markets make it easier for executives to establish a truly global brand with a memorable catch-phrase: "Intel inside."

Naturally, you could extend the continuum concept to Web globalization. While Intel uses a consistent global design template across most countries, a fast food company like McDonald's may be more likely to "go local" with the design. Compare McDonald's China to McDonald's US and you'll get the idea.

I would still argue that McDonald's can still use a global template while remaining locally effective (and save a ton of money along the way). Besides, its use of bandwidth-heavy Flash in markets where broadband penetration is relatively low doesn't make much sense. But I digress...

I like the global branding continuum concept because it emphasizes the immense complexity of taking a business global.