GROWING DIGITAL BUSINESSES ACROSS BORDERS

Introduction

• Recent research from Forrester tells us that the importance of a multilingual presence on the web has never been greater - for US companies multilingual sites are no longer an optional extra but a necessity. Building a multilingual site is imperative for those companies wanting to position themselves for a piece of the global eCommerce market forecast to be worth USD3.3 trillion by 2004. However, at present 63 of the Fortune 100 web sites are available in English only.
• We like to think that, as Europeans, we are much better than our US counterparts at being both global and local - ?glocal? - in our approach to content and perceived wisdom suggests that we can migrate this empathy for cultural and linguistic diversity into the digital environment with equal success. We spoke with two movers and shakers in the European new media marketplace to find out how they are dealing with the challenges of growing their digital businesses across borders.