I will be taking the stage this week at the Unicode Conference in Santa Clara with Claudia Galvan, Technical Advisor at Early Stage Innovation, to collaboratively lead the session “Practical Approach to Internationalization for Startups.”
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation “devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data.” Unicode is the standard by which text is represented in modern software products, and the significance of its adoption in global software development cannot be overstated.
Translating Years of Internationalization Experience
Galvan and I bring extensive internationalization experience to the session. Galvan has led product development at Oracle, Adobe, and Microsoft, with products that have reached billions of people around the world. More recently she has focused on helping startups in Silicon Valley launch products internationally.
I founded Lingoport, the leading software internationalization company in the market, with billions of lines of code scanned, and with the leading i18n and L10n process management solution (Lingoport Resource Manager) saving clients thousands of hours each year.
Making the Business Case
All startups are not created equal in terms of funding, strategy, maturity, and stage of development. The level of cultural understanding of globalization may differ. In addition, there are differences among startups with regards to balancing the creation of technical debt in pursuit of immediate goals at the risk of introducing costs down the road.
Regardless of the startup, it’s critical that the business case is well though-out and understood. Galvan and I will be providing examples of early stage firms that baked globalization into planning once past the prototype MVP stage, as well as those who were forced to address it for a sale.
Strategy Development & Best Practices
In this talk, we will review global strategy development, addressing technical debt, defining international requirements, and i18n and l10n best practices to aid pivoting successfully an early stage startup into a global player. We’ll cover the common challenges that startups face when thinking globally, including money, time, team, and focus, not to mention the handling of diverse programming languages, internationalization and localization knowledge, and scalability. We’ll look at the requirements for successful i18n and L10n, and discuss strategies for companies to consider.
Takeaways
Key takeaways of our session will include:
- Moving from tactical to strategic product and development planning
- Addressing technical debt
- Developing requirements for MVP through common user scenarios
- Continuous systems and practices for supporting ongoing i18n and L10n
For more information on the Unicode Conference, visit the event website here.
– Adam Asnes, President, Lingoport, Inc.
