“Yandex” is an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.” and is the leading search engine in Russia. Their search engine automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs, and searches documents in the major Cyrillic languages — Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian — as well as in English, French, and German.

As of August 2008 Yandex had approximately 55% of the Russian search market, compared to Google’s 21%.  Yandex now allows visitors to limit searches to only foreign websites, meaning non-Russian websites.  This global search is also available at the company’s experimental Yandex.com portal launched for testing new search algorithms.

Twitter already stated earlier in the week that it was geting about 50 million tweets being sent out per day. New data released shows that approximately half of those tweets are in non-English language. Approximately 25 milion foreign languge tweets being sent out per day.
A lot of people are using Twitter in languages other than English, and those numbers are expected to grow, as Twitter recently has put out statements seeking help to crowdsource their platform into FIGS.

The number one language aside from English is Japanese, with approximately 14% of all tweets being sent out in Nihongo. Portuguese, Malay and Spanish closely behind.
 
Source: Techcrunch

They’re coming! Perhaps around mid 2010, domain name URL’s written in non-English language will become available for the internet. So a new gold rush is set to begin.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as “.com” and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN’s board at this week’s gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

This is going to be a big change, and we will keep on top of it and report about it on this blog. Here is the full article on the matter.

In a move to compete with Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google, Intuit launched a cloud platform for 3rd party developers called Federated Applications.

Applications do not have to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process to adapt. This is a major breakthrough for reaching an international audience.

According to Leena Rao:

Intuit’s Partner Platform provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy apps that can be integrated with Intuit’s small business accounting software, QuickBooks. QuickBooks has close to 25 million users within 4 million businesses who can buy these apps on Intuit’s own version of its Salesforce.com-like App Store, Intuit Marketplace.

With the multilingual “Federated Applications” functionality, developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform can quickly and easily publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace.

CafePress and Spreadshirt competitor Zazzle, who specialize in mass customization, are going global and localizing their website for the Australia and Canadian market.

Zazzle has also expanded its existing UK site, launched in late 2008, to the greater European market by accepting payments in Euros.

Earlier this year, Zazzle underwent a reduction in force of 15% of their staff due to the sluggish economy. So it’s a good sign to see they are expanding into the English language foreign markets.
 
Competitors Cafepress and Spreadshirt both already have an established international presence.