I read this morning that Mark Zuckerberg spends an hour a day studying Mandarin. I’m very impressed. What a great investment of his time! I’ve been considering doing this for several years now. Imagine how fluency in this language and familiarity with the Chinese culture might impact Facebook’s value and reach in the coming years.Continue reading “Zuck is learning Mandarin–are you?”
Category Archives: International Business
“World Collection” From WorldVitalRecords.com
The worldwide reach of the internet never ceases to amaze me. Earlier this week, after the announcement of our World Collection, containing genealogical data from more than 30 countries, I received an internal company email that said:
We now have subscribers from 48 countries. We increased our country count by 5 in January.
The bolded countries are new in January.
$100 Laptops, $2500 Cars
In this morning\’s post I mentioned low cost cars coming from India. Today Business Week reported that Ratan Tata\’s new $2,500 car, called the Nano, is being met with \”extreme enthusiasm\” and is going to put India on the map in the auto world. CrunchGear indicates that Tata plans to introduce the Nano to other low income areas like Africa and South America in the next four years.
Genealogy in India
Oh yes, I forgot to mention that World Vital Records\’ India page ranks #3 in MSN for "india genealogy." I\’m still trying to convince FundingUniverse.com to roll out 6 regional web sites in India, as suggested by an Indian entrepreneur who explained to me how startup funding might naturally happen in that country. I don\’t know if I\’ve blogged about it, but 3 years ago I read "India Unbound" by the first venture capitalist in India, Gurcharan Das. It is an absolutely incredible look at the economic revolution that has been occuring in India since 1991. I am very optimistic about the future of India, which will be the world\’s most populated country by about 2030.
Sweden Opens Embassy in Second Life
http://www.thelocal.se/6219/. This article says Second Life is approaching 3 million users, a third of them having joined in the last 60 days. A lot of companies are jumping on the Second Life bandwagon, but this is even more interesting.
International Genealogy Search Engines
Our World Vital Records team has launched international genealogy search engines for 11 countries, with 18 more in the pipeline already.
Our intial list includes a search engine for genealogy in China and a search engine for genealogy in India. Other countries include Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Kenya, the Philippines, Tonga, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Family History Is A Global Phenomenon
In December our web analytics showed that Worldvitalrecords.com had visitors from 117 countries. Now we are up to 141 countries. The web is truly a global phenomenon. So is family history. World Vital Records is helping people all over the world find their ancestors. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements in the coming months.
Goal For 2007 — Focus On One Thing!
After some wonderful time off with my family, I regretfully went back to work yesterday with one of those feelings of being completely overwhelmed — there are so many hundreds of things on my to-do list and so many dozens of things to blog about. I know I\’ll never catch up so I won\’t even try.
One of my main New Year\’s Resolutions is to not get behind on email. Last year I ended the year with about 1,700 "unread" messages in my inbox. The problem is that I had read many (maybe even most) of them on my Blackberry, but they didn\’t show up in gmail as having been read.
It is frustrating to occasionally use my Desktop email only and to see so many unread messages that you know you can\’t even make a dent in them. And trying to remember which ones you\’ve already read is also frustrating.
Marketers Note: Most Traffic to Popular US Web Sites is International
A new Comscore study shows that most traffic to U.S. ad-based web sites comes from outside of the U.S. It reports that 89.1% of Google\’s page views come from international visitors. This is actually pretty staggering. All online marketers need to focus more on geographic targeting.
Annual Report from China
The economic growth in China continues to be high, 9.9% according to Premier Wen Jiabao\’s 2005 report. The goal for GDP growth in 2006 is 8%.
