Accidental Internationalization

from the the-world-is-out-there dept

New businesses used to target their userbase geographically. However, thanks to the internet, it's sometimes impossible to prepare for where your offering might take off. Wired News is taking a look at some web-based services that have received a ton of use from foreign users they weren't even targeting. The best (and probably most well known) example is Google's Orkut -- which now has 66% of its users from Brazil (only 10% are American). What's interesting is that this number keeps increasing. A few months ago, a similar article noted that Brazilians made up something like 40% of all Orkut users. Of course Google's Orkut is based in the US and never did anything special to target Brazilian users. For some companies it becomes a challenge: how do they deal with users they never expected? Some startups now realize that they have to prepare for internationalization from the very beginning, while others are simply ignoring certain geographical markets. Either way, it's a very different type of challenge for young internet companies.
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  1. identicon
    dorpus, 31 Mar 2005 @ 6:29am

    Oh yeah

    I put out an ad for an apartment once, and got an international call from an Arab woman in Bahrain.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    dorpus, 31 Mar 2005 @ 6:35am

    Re: Oh yeah

    I also know an American woman in Chicago who suddenly started getting all these obscene phone calls from Ireland, because apparently an Irish radio DJ had made up a random phone number for a "horny American woman".

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    blorpus, 31 Mar 2005 @ 9:02pm

    interplanetary access

    What happens when your site gets visitors from other planets, like Dorpus?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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