Stories about: Idiom

It was nearly 10 years ago that FedEx first decided to translate its Web content and applications for non-English-speakers throughout the world. At the time, it was ahead of the game, but today, companies in all kinds of industries realize it's crucial to speak to customers around the world in their native languages.

Programming languages and environments are an abiding passion of mine. I'm always on the lookout for a better mousetrap, and lately I've been working with three relative newcomers: the PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)-based plug-in architecture of the WordPress blogging engine; the Ruby on Rails framework; and Mark Logic's XQuery-based Content Interaction Server.

The other day I had to send somebody a trio of multimegabyte TIFF files. She asked me to e-mail them. Instead, I figured I'd make things easier for her by uploading the files to my FTP site and e-mailing her the URLS. Bad idea. She tried to open the files in her browser, but being a Windows browser, it wouldn't recognize them.

St George CIO John Loebenstein has delivered a peppery wake-up call to business leaders to stop blaming the IT department for project failures and take some responsibility for poor management culture themselves.

Establishing Web sites for your firm in 30 countries, all with local content, is one thing. Keeping them current while routing customer requests to the right people in the right countries and linking all that information to databases in the home office is something else entirely. Just ask Toni Corwin.

When e-commerce executives hear the word China, their mouths begin to water. Don DePalma, vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom, a web globalisation company, predicts that China will have 33 million Internet users and will produce $11.7 billion worth of e-transactions by 2003. With China almost certain to join the World Trade Organisation by the end of this year, the country presents a potentially lucrative marketplace for most e-businesses.

The Open Software Foundation (OSF), an industry consortium of Unix workstation vendors, developed Motif in 1989. Their aim was to ensure a consistent user experience -- in so doing, they focused on a style guide, a definition for a window manager, and a "look and feel" (L&F) in the personal-computing sense. Motif's visual style and semantics conform to IBM Corp.'s Common User Access (CUA) definition, as did contemporary Windows. Motif's competitors in its infancy included Athena and OpenLook.

Until recently, the concept of an EIP (enterprise information portal) invoked an image of a complicated mesh of heterogeneous systems, middleware development tools, report writers, information repositories, and data conversion routines. Even when a single point of access to enterprisewide information resources could be created, access to corporate data was usually reserved for a chosen few within the organization and often required extensive training. With the arrival of XML, however, the promise of a widely accessible and easy-to-use entryway to corporate information is being fulfilled.

As soon as America Online Inc. announced that it would convert $165 billion of its Net-valued shares into the hard currency of Time Warner Inc., investment bankers, reporters and chat room touts immediately began to dream up other complementary pairings.

AS THE INTERNET brings people from across the globe to the front door of your electronic-commerce site, you may find that your software needs to go to language school.