The other evening I was inspired to see what the top three search results were in Google for the word Computer since I expected it to be generic enough to not be branded yet specific in such a way that all languages referring to it would be identifying the exact same concept in their word. To make it interesting I first stopped by the Babel Fish translation service and from the twelve non-English languages I translated the word computer into that language in the native character set.

Then where possible I went to the Google landing page for that country and executed the search by pasting in the translated word. Eg, for Japan I went to www.google.co.jp and entered “コンピュータ” which is what Babel Fish told me was the Japanese translation for the word.

What follows are my results followed by some observations.

In Dutch: “computer”

1. http://www.mycom.nl/
2. http://www.computertotaal.nl/
3. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

In French: “ordinateur”

1. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinateur
2. http://www.ordinateur.com/
3. http://www.dicofr.com/cgi-bin/n.pl/dicofr/definition/20010101003926

In German: “computer”

1. http://www.computerbild.de/
2. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
3. http://www.atelco.de/

In Greek: “υπολογιστής”

1. http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%97%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82_%CF%85%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CF%82
2. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%85%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CF%82
3. http://www.komvos.edu.gr/periodiko/default.htm

In Italian: “calcolatore”

1. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calcolatore
2. http://www.freeonline.org/calcolatrice_dtml
3. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

In Japanese: “コンピュータ”

1. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%94%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF
2. http://www.dell.co.jp/
3. http://www.apple.com/jp/

In Korean: “컴퓨터”

1. http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%BB%B4%ED%93%A8%ED%84%B0
2. http://www.compuzone.co.kr/
3. http://www.trigem.co.kr/

In Portuguese: “computador”

1. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computador
2. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/computador
3. http://www.dell.com.br/

In Russian: “компьютер”

1. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%8C%D1%8E%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80
2. http://www.sigmacomputers.ru/
3. http://www.depo.ru/

In Spanish: “computadora”

1. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computadora
2. http://www.monografias.com/trabajos15/computadoras/computadoras.shtml
3. http://www.alegsa.com.ar/Dic/computadora.php

In Chinese-Simplified: “计算机”

1. http://baike.baidu.com/view/3314.htm
2. http://product.enet.com.cn/price/plist3.shtml
3. http://www.enet.com.cn/computer/

In Chinese-Traditional: “計算機”

1. http://home.educities.edu.tw/tky999/top/top-right/tool/FinanceTools/calculator.htm
2. http://www.acm.org
3. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%8F%E5%AD%90%E8%AE%A1%E7%AE%97%E6%9C%BA

And last but not least, in English: “computer”

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
2. http://www.dell.com/
3. http://www.apple.com/

On a lark I dug into the English results to see where IBM showed up since I would think that they would be synonymous with the word computer to some degree… After lots of clicking I found it. At the bottom of page #57 in my results: http://www.research.ibm.com/compsci/

This kind of blew me away so I quickly did a search for the word “server” in English as well and found IBM at the bottom of page #9 with a link to: http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/

While I was not surprised to see Wikipedia frequently showing up as the #1 result in most countries/languages I did expect to see more academic material represented. I was surprised to see how well Dell and Apple were represented. I was also taken aback by the Chinese Traditional #1 which is a bland page with a giant basic math calculator square in the middle of the page.

Also, looking at this from a global SEO frame of reference, I think this nicely highlights that when you are doing global SEO analysis, it can pay to develop localized strategies. For instance it would seem to me that Russia, Korea and Spain might be low hanging fruit for an aggressive campaign to capture visibility on the word computer.

Tell me what you think about these results.

Cheers!

In 2007, it was estimated that 36%-40% of the world’s population carried a mobile device giving us an estimate of 2.4-2.7 billion people carrying at least one phone. At that same time several writers projected that based on current growth estimates, sometime around 2010 to 2012 (depending on who you asked) we might hit 3.3-3.6 billion mobile devices.

Well, here we are in 2010 and according to a UN report published in March 2009 it was estimated that there were already 4.1 billion mobile phone subscribers  at the end of 2008 (60% of the world population), with the fastest growing country being… Pakistan.

Additionally, it was noted that there had been a clear shift from fixed to mobile cellular phone use and that in the same reporting period there were over three times more mobile cellular phone subscriptions than fixed telephone lines globally. Two thirds of those mobile phones are found in the developing world compared to less than half in 2002.

Why does this matter?

Because among Gen Y (and younger) and throughout many parts of the developing world the cell phone or other mobile devices are becoming the first device of choice (or necessity) for interacting with the Internet, for making online purchases, for banking, etc… South Korea, a country considered to be at the leading edge of digital communications is a place now where nearly everything is done through your cell phone and the simple idea of getting a plastic card to use for purchasing is archaic and offered as a courtesy option to banking customers who think they might be traveling out of the country.

This leads us to another thing to be aware of when you look at that graph above. The racing climb of mobile devices also represents a growing class of web users that may be visiting your website, buying your products, trying to get customer support.

It was estimated that in 2008, the number of mobile Internet users had reached 1.05 billion, surpassing the number of PC web users (1 billion) for the first time ever.

The natural questions become, why isn’t your website mobile friendly? And, if you’re doing any kind of e-commerce, why isn’t your store front not only mobile friendly but able to accept payments in the common methods of payment frequented by your customer base?

If you don’t have the answer, your business could be in trouble. Even the best established business relationship or brand loyalty can dissolve in the blink of an eye when there is a major change in the way society communicates.

You can see this taking place right now across all aspects of the publishing world. Non-Internet based media companies have spent the greater part of decade trying to figure out how to apply their business models to Internet communications rather than the other way around. For example let’s take the contemporary case of the newspaper classifieds. Classifieds were the mainstay of newspaper revenue for over a hundred years in the U.S. but they were never a perfect process for users. Limited words, fees, trying to figure out what days you wanted your ad to show up… these things all presented challenges to customers using the service. Then a very basic website called Craigslist showed up which was free to read, free to post (short of fees for job postings and some services) and had no real limits on word counts or listing durations. Within a few short years the classifieds industry was decimated and many newspapers soon found themselves going out of business because they could not or would not adapt.

So let’s bring this all around… in short everything I’m talking about here relates to location and convenience. These fundamental elements have been key to business success since the dawn of time. Real-estate agents get it “Location, Location, Location!”. Traditional marketing people get it “Go to where the customers are”.

People are on the web, people are using their cell phones to use the web. People are using their cell phones for the majority of their day to day communications when you take in voice, SMS, web, chat, gaming, etc… Do your children have their own cell phone? Does each child have their own cell phone? When they grow up to be a consumer, will your company be positioned to communicate to them in a way that they expect to be talked to or are you simply expecting them to learn an archaic way to talk to you based on how you talk today? When you get that Fax with their answer let me know.

Get it? Good. Next you need to actually have something relevant on your website for visitors to see when they get there on their cell phone, but that’s another conversation all together.

My thanks to the following resources for my data:

• http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html
• http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2009/07.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/25iht-mobile.html
• http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3019
• http://www.tomiahonen.com/ebook/almanac.html
• http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

We’ve watched a couple of Vincent Price films lately and ended up “discovering” a film that none of us had ever heard of called Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. The movie was a total 60’s b-grade spy film parody where Vincent Price plays the role of the super villain out to take over the world. You just need to see it. It’s all kinds of awesome. Apparently it’s also a sequel to another Dr. Goldfoot movie that was released a year earlier that we need to watch now because the first one is apparently even better from the reviews I’ve found. Both films are on Hulu as of the writing of this post (here and here).

Speaking of Vincent Price, we also recently watched The Last Man on Earth (completing our I Am Legend related movie watching short of a the most recent direct to video production). I would have to say that all things considered this version seems to run closer to the book than any of the others. If you’re looking to watch these movies yourself I would say the canon (contrary to Wikipedia’s thoughts) would be:

• The Last Man on Earth
• The Omega Man
• Night of the Comet
• 28 Days Later (& 28 Weeks Later)
• I Am Legend
• I Am Omega

All of these are pretty awesome taken individually, and of course each has it’s own set of issues or variations on the book story. If you’re adverse to gory violence though, stay away from the 28 Days/Weeks movies. On that note, I can’t say anything one way about goriness with the last one on the list as I still haven’t seen it.

I was talking with someone recently about the state of game development and it caused me to go back and read one of the tongue and cheek articles on the GZ web site titled How to Be a Good Game Developer. This was originally published in January of 2000… hence the 10 years later comment.

It’s still just as painful a read today as it was back then due to how on the mark it is about much of the core games industry. Things are clearly getting better with the onset of Casual Gaming and other genres but I wonder in ten more years where we’ll be.

My favorite quote is still:

“When Moms and dads and kids and girls wise up to how cool assault solidiers, sports cars, grotesque space mutants and women with big boobs really are, then maybe they’ll buy more games; but until then, you’d better rely on the teenage guys for opinions or you’ll never sell anything.”

True… true… LOL  :p

I was recently revisiting some comic books and ran across a series from 1988 that gave me a surprising reaction.

In short, it’s what I consider one of the most poorly named comic book series created and given the time period in which it was created, I suspect the titling can be attributed solely to a marketing wonk. It irritated me at the time and surprising still irritates me.

The series is “The Mutant Misadventures of Cloak & Dagger“.

My problems were that #1 I’ve always considered them mutates, not mutants and while there is a mildly compelling argument for the later that is never how they are portrayed in their origins.

#2 is the use of the term misadventures. Going by the dictionary this is simply a synonym for misfortune or mishap, but in common use misadventures normally has a comical inclination. There is nothing happy or comical about these two characters.

They live a tragic life. They started out as runaways that were picked up off the street with other runaways. The children were injected with an experimental street drug and left in a room where all of the other children died except for them. The drug mutated them into what they are now and after recovery they set out to exact vigilantly justice on people who exploit children. Cloak is generally in favor of exacting a death penalty on these criminals.

The other story thread of this comic is the pseudo symbiotic relationship between the two characters. Cloak lives off of light released from other life forces. Dagger exudes light force that can be used as a weapon but she is also able to feed Cloak with it, thereby suppressing his almost vampire like potential for destruction.

The general premise challenged in this series was that of a black man and a white woman in a relationship which was still problematic for quite a few people in the 80’s. So this comic also was making a political statement by it’s very existence. The bottom line? A bi-racial teen couple in a pseudo adult relationship trying to find their place in the world while dealing vengeance to child molesters. You can’t get more 80’s than that.

Anyways, my point is this this is about as remote from happy or comical as you get short of a horror story, so “misadventures” always grated on me. Then again this was about the time I quit reading comics for reasons I can cover in another post. My point was that 20 years later I saw this title and it immediate pissed me off again… and hence this post.