27 Nov 2007
I’m about 1/4 of the way into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier somewhere in the supposed play by Shakespeare revealing the first 007, oh what a trip. Strongly recommended.
12 Sep 2007
from reddit Ron Paul is Seriously Flawed as a Candidate; We’re Just So in Love With Him That We’re Not Paying Attention …. Except everything they list as reasons he’s flawed I agree with. It’s just more reasons to love the guy.
#politics
17 Aug 2007
So… there’s over a year gap between this post and the last. At some point my email to blog script broke and I was just too damn busy to fix it. The week the server I was running the blog broke and I had to move the services on it. While in NY last year I wrote a blog using Django, and while installing the new server I installed that and polished it up a bit. Goodbye pybloxom, I never did submit all the patches I wrote for you.
I need to clean up a bit of spam on this site. Seems like some spammers found my trac sites for some of the projects I had listed here and had a little fun. I have two trac.db files that are 300mb full of spam.
Shouts out to Steven N. and Zooko.
27 Jun 2006
Heike Caldwell, Localization Manager, Rockwell Automation. How to get Management Buy-in for Strong Localization Support.
- apply Lean Enterprise principles (is this like Lean Manufacturing)
- (she’s reading right off the slides).
- Use simple language, expect a lot of questions.
- Why not only use English, because your competitors are doing it.
- Rockwell only has a site in English. Globalization in progress.
- Holistic approach. Taking into account business, region, subjects (not labeled on the slide) in a single process.
- (I’m thinking of starting a fire to warm myself. I guess they are scared people are going to fall asleep.)
- LEAN Enterprise, one step below 6 Sigma (look this up).
- (It’s a challenge to figure out how to scale down some of their solutions for RS).
- % of overall sales vs. cost of localization: less than 1%.
(so far the focus seems to be on technical products manuals, technical product marketing. I’m very unsure these approaches apply to an educational product like RS.)
- “we give these vendors so much business that the pricing went down”
(One guys asking a question was from the World Bank, another from the European Commission)
(Who is our localization Czar?)
- The presenter is the only one doing localization full time at Rockwell.
(oh look, some guy in jeans. at this point I’d rather have a parka).
#lisa2006nyc
27 Jun 2006
April Singer, 20-year localization veteran from IBM. How to convince your org. to globalize.
- Nokia CTO – world will be defined not by geography but by the 'Net. *Non-G8 (had some other term I didn’t catch) countries will double the % of their GDP and become competitors and consumers by (some date).
- McKinsey Quarterly (look this up) 8 out of 10 top trends revolved around globalization.
- IBM CEO to London Fin Times: not a US company doing biz in China, but a borderless company who looks to locals as a local company.
- (I’m wishing I packed a sweater about now)
- How are we going to pretend to be a global company if the first thing we do is screw up our website?
- Google, Yahoo, eBay say their are having problems with globalization.
- (I think RS needs a “customer advocate” for each language we launch into)
- (I wish I could pull the slides I have into this post. )
- Rob Glaser, CEO, Real Networks – Customer good will is key to what makes customers gravitate towards one product or another. (this is hystraical coming from the company who I will never install software for. Maybe they are waking up to the fact they have cased off their customers with bad will).
- (take a look at IBM.com and it’s locale segmentation scheme)
- IBM thinks they can help us all. “If you are growing too fast” (they could help soak up that excess cash? ;)
- IBM said their will be one e-experience, one host, (see slide “Mission of IBM.com”)
- “We can’t possibly meet this demand [for globalization services]”. (If that is the case why are their only 70 people in this room? I don’t doubt this is important, but perhaps this conf. didn’t fit in the schedules of the masses working on this at breakneck speed. I know I felt that I should be back in H’burg working on our .de site).
- (ended with a 15 min QA)
- (It’s so cold in this room that my breath is fogging up my glasses)
- One Q: if you were in the $500M space, what would you do:* What do you do best? pick your niche, be the best in your space * Work with local, knowledgeable resources.
- (how was our call center contract in EMEA picked?)
- Q: One of your goals was a rapidly deployable site, what time frame are we talking about. A: 2 weeks for a site like one we already have.
#lisa2006nyc