The author attended the first Worldware conference in March, which focused on business issues around software internationalization and globalization rather than technical issues. The conference featured presentations from executives of major tech companies and included discussions on quantifying return on investment from internationalization, leveraging crowdsourcing for localization, challenges of internationalizing Agile development processes, and best practices for organizational frameworks to support global software products. Though the conference had outstanding material, attendance was relatively low at around 70 people total. The author provided highlights from their notes of several presentations on topics such as data on customer preference for localized software, challenges of internationalizing existing code, and tips for getting internationalization efforts approved within organizations.

1. Worldware Conference Summary – Not as good as being there
Internationalization Articles April 15th, 2
In March I attended and presented at the first Worldware conference, which took place in Santa Clara,
California in the heart of Silicon Valley. I became really excited about this conference as it proved to be
the first to directly target business issues around software internationalization and globalization. Too often
in other conferences, the focus is very low level on technical issues, while missing greater business
planning and operational issues that affect every organization that looks to build and maintain world-ready
products. In fact, that issue had been a long running annoyance for me when attending conferences like
Unicode and LocalizationWorld. So I was eager to get involved in Worldware and sat on its board as well.
The conference had outstanding material, and featured various business leaders from well known world software brands. The downsi
was that the conference was not particularly well attended. There were probably a total of about 70 people there, including speake
but at least we all got to know one another. Presentations featured executives from companies like EMC, Microsoft, Linden Labs,
Oracle, Mozilla, Sun, Adobe, Yahoo!, Intel, various industry consultants and of course me.
Here’s a few items from my notes and memory, in little particular order:
• Don Depalma, of CommonSense Advisory, had some excellent data showing return on investment and overwhelming custom
preference for software which was internationalized with locale sensitive language and formatting support. His numbers were
the Holy Grail that managers have been asking for. A big point was that even when end-users are perfectly capable of reading
writing and speaking English, they vastly preferred software in their own language to the point where they made choices and
spent more in line with that preference. Don had data broken down even per country. I can’t wait to poach some of these
slides.
• Common points were that i18n is an enabler for localization and ultimately revenues. A way to waste a ton of money is to
pursue localization before you’ve properly internationalized.
• Organizations like Mozilla and Linden Labs (Second Life) are making great use of crowdsourcing to enable new features and
localization. So if you have a product which has an emotional type of rabid following, crowdsourcing is a relatively new form
getting help, though it needs its own adaptation for management.
• Some companies, like EMC, must simultaneously ship for all top tier locales when releasing new products. So globalization
isn’t an afterthought.
• Executives don’t understand internationalization but understand the cascading effect.
• Invest in internationalization expertise. Too expensive to “wing” it.
o Empower product teams
o Create i18n boot camp training

2. • Some companies demonstrated that they have built whole organizational frameworks to support internationalization.
Particularly Intel and Yahoo! presented how they are using technologies for automatically auditing global readiness. Happy to
say Globalyzer got many accolades.
• There was a lively Agile (extremely popular development methodology) discussion as it relates to internationalization. This
because if i18n is built into the product development from the start Agile works great. When there are Agile cycles and i18n o
existing code going on simultaneously, both efforts are very unlikely to synchronize well. Lots of reasons for this, which woul
probably make a great future article for this newsletter. This issue came up multiple times and Tony Jewteshenko gave a who
presentation session on it (but I wasn’t able to attend that one).
• It’s extremely difficult to take back a language after you release for a particular market. So consider that request for your
software in Klingon carefully.
• How you communicate around the world will empower your organization.
o Brand recognition
o Market Share
o ROI
• I presented along with Daniel Goldschmidt on how to get an i18n effort going
o Technical buyer, vs. Management objectives
o Need to get a good plan for budget approval first, design second
o Showed Globalyzer 3.0 and scanned some open source code
o Demonstrated a project plan
o Daniel broke down i18n projects into a 3 phase approach
• Transportation – moving data from A to B
• Application – doing something with the data (e.g. sorting)
• User Interfaces
o Then we both talked about keeping software world-ready and answered questions
• Kamal Monsour of Monotype Imaging gave a most informative presentation showing intricacies of digital fonts in languages l
Arabic and Hindi.
• I was on a panel along with Ed Watts of Oracle and Mike McKenna from Yahoo! on Assessing and Quantifying efforts. Ed
emphasized the role of pseudo-localization. Mike was his usual incredible reservoir of information and experiences both
organizationally and on the technical side in supporting i18n. I talked about how we essentially have had to learn to estimate
and execute internationalization projects and still make a profit, and that’s why we’ve created tools and methodologies to d

3. so.
• Aaron Marcus of Aaron Marcus and Associates gave a presentation on cross cultural user-experience design showing many
cultural differences, certain scales by which cultures accept power hierarchies and how that shows up in site design.
• Mike McKenna showed a fabulous presentation on trends in internationalizing which featured several i18n initiatives at Yaho
As a bonus, I got a Fight Mojibake sticker (ghost characters), which is now on my notebook. In particular, they work to get
people enthusiastic and understanding that they are creating products for the world. He also talked about how his team
supports i18n with tools like Globalyzer. Thanks Mike.
• Barbara Burbach of Cisco talked about staffing models, including outsourcing for i18n and l10n. She felt i18n outsourcing fo
an existing product was a good idea, as it keeps the core development team focused on new features. For new products being
internationalized from the beginning, she preferred in house engineering.
• Tex Texin (i18n Guy) discussed how he has worked with various teams to promote internationalization, and how decisions
were often affected. He also gave Globalyzer a nice recommendation. Tex was formerly in charge of internationalization at
Yahoo! and NetApp, both of which are Lingoport customers. Thanks Tex.
I’ve missed a ton in this quick summary, as I haven’t managed to master being in two places at once and couldn’t have attended all
sessions.
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