[This is an archive of the original 1995 IMUG web page. Click here to return to the event archive index.]
Selling your products overseas does not have to be a blind leap into the unknown, and you do not have to do it alone. There is a method to this marketing, and there are many government services that can make developing overseas sales as easy as doing business here in the US. Joe Katz of the US Commercial Service will offer a structure for easily organizing your planning and implementation of an international marketing strategy, and will explain one of the best-kept secrets of the U.S. government: a worldwide network of federal, state, and local export development assistance that rivals anything offered by Japan, Germany, or our other international trade competitors.
Joe Katz recently returned from Beijing, China, where he served as a Commercial Officer at the U.S. Embassy on temporary duty. His agency, the Commercial Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is committed to helping American businesses enter and expand their sales to foreign markets. His work in computer hardware and software marketing dates to the mid-1980s, and included the position of General Manager of Pacific Rim Connections, a distributor of multilingual computing solutions. He is currently posted to the Silicon Valley office of the Commercial Service in Santa Clara, and expects his next assignment - in northern China - to begin, with his luck, in whatever turns out to be the coldest day of 1996.
Osamu Sugimoto will present his experiences in doing business on the Internet between the U.S. and Japan. The presentation will cover:
He will also introduce some interesting activities around the Internet in Japan.
Stanford Publications International exports publications, including books, magazines, and CD-ROMs to Japan using the Internet.
Showcasing Microsoft Windows 95 as a Chinese computing environment, Jim Turley will present a detailed demonstration of Chinese character input methods. Efficient keyboard data entry of Chinese characters has historically presented challenges to Chinese computing. As a result, many different methods of entering Chinese on a keyboard have been developed. This presentation will provide a background on how and why these input methods evolved. Keyboard input will be demonstrated, including an English input method that allows non-Chinese speakers to produce translated Chinese characters.
Jim Turley works for XA International, a software engineering company specializing in Asian language computing for the Internet.
Asian software markets are the fastest growing in the world. Multimedia is starting to take off in Asia, and a lot of the content is developed locally. Michelle Perkins will discuss the emerging Asian multimedia markets, and will bring some samples of locally developed multimedia titles for us to see.
Michelle Linhua Perkins was born and raised in Shanghai, China. She now works for Macromedia, a leading provider of multimedia authoring tools, with primary responsibility for marketing activities in Asia and Latin America. She can be reached at mlperkins@macromedia.com.
For a long time, PC markets in Asia and Latin America had been seen as dumping grounds for low end products that were no longer selling in the United States and other developed countries. But no more. Buyers in these regions are demanding the latest and greatest in PC technology, and microcomputer companies are facing fierce competition on both price and performance.
The more intense competition comes as PC markets are booming in Asia and in parts of Latin America. Asia Pacific and Latin America PC sales are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 27% and 15% through 1999, respectively. In 1999, sales in Asia Pacific alone (not including Japan) are expected to reach 14.1 million units! This presention will examine these markets country by country and provide insights on what the big PC companies' strategies are for tapping these high growth regions.
Paul Kelash is editor-in-chief of the paid subscription newsletter Marketscan International, which tracks PC and networking markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Mr. Kelash has served as editor of several publications on international business and economics over the past six years.
The Microsoft Win32 API offers an extensive set of definitions and functions supporting the platform's internationalization features. In this talk, we shall cover these features from a developer's viewpoint by looking at the areas of character sets (including Unicode), the definition and application of locale, national language support, resource management, and keyboards. Demonstration programs illustrate the concepts.
Mindset and perspective can make or break software design. This will be a brief workshop to enable you to design international software outside of the constraints of past convention. You will be creating an international product which will meet the needs of diverse communities as described in an initial scenario. The emphasis is on participation - no technical knowledge is required. Be prepared to relax and let your creative juices flow.
Andrea Vine has a B.A. in Linguistics from Yale, 12 years of experience in software development, 5 years in internationalization and localization, and the firm belief that the successful localizer must maintain a good sense of humor.
Steve Cottingham and Dan Cook will demo WorldWrite, a powerful, easy to use, professional word processing application with page-layout capabilities. It is also fully WorldScript savvy. This native Power Macintosh application supports System 7.5 features such as Drag and Drop, PowerTalk, text-to-speech processing, QuickDraw GX printing, and Apple Guide.
WorldWrite's WorldScript compatibility allows it to operate with localized system software or language kits. During this presentation WorldWrite's functionality will be demonstrated, highlighting its Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and English capabilities.
Join us once again when Jim and Andrew attempt the close-to-impossible. We will show you what is possible and what might not be... the present state of surfing in several Asian languages. Tools and torture aside, it will be fun. Internet newbies welcome.
We have a special treat. Bob Jung and Tony Xue of Netscape Communcations will show us a Beta version (available for general release now) of their Japanese-enabled (but not localized) Netscape WWW Browser. Something we've all been waiting for. In fact, Tony and Bob suggest you ftp it from ftp.netscape.com and try it out before the meeting!
Audience participation Welcome (how could we know it all). We are looking specifically for new cool tools and URLs for WWW browsing, especially Double Byte enabled ones.
Thomas Hedden, an independent translator and localizer, will compare and contrast techniques for Macintosh and Windows localization, and make suggestions to improve localization tools on both platforms.
Macintosh software localization has traditionally been done using resource editors such as ResEdit or Resorcerer. These tools work well, but make it difficult to reuse translations or to split large projects up into parts. There are also some batch tools such as AppleGlot, which fulfill some of these requirements. A brief demo will be given of AppleGlot, and its use in large projects will be discussed.
Windows localization is usually done differently, for example using localization tools such as XL8. A brief overview of Windows localization techniques, tools, and resources will be given.
There are now Windows resource editors available such as Borland's Resource Workshop or Microsoft's AppStudio, which have some similarities to ResEdit. There will be a brief demo of Windows resource editors.
In the first presentation of this meeting, Stephen Amerige (CJK Font Tools) will provide an overview of Adobe Systems' CID-keyed (Character ID-keyed) font technology. This technology is specifically designed for building fonts with large character sets, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) fonts. How this technology works along with its benefits over existing technologies will be covered.
The second speaker, Ken Lunde (CJK Type Development), will discuss Adobe's CJK character collections for use in developing CID-keyed fonts, including information on specific character sets and encodings. CJK character collections under development will also be discussed.
Documentation about CID-keyed fonts is available on the net:
Current textbooks (and whiz bang CD-ROM-based textbook emulators) are moderately useful for teaching languages to us, but very poor tools for maintaining our skills. In order to efficiently maintain something, you need someone (or something) with the ability to figure out specifically what's "broken" and who can prioritize the broken parts. This lets you focus your limited resources on the repairs that will do the most good.
Native Guide(tm) attempts to do this for foreign language vocabulary. Native Guide contains an "agent" that uses fuzzy logic to track your memory of vocabulary, item by item. It studies you over time, tracking each item's changing forgetting function. Based on this real-time model of your memory, it works to optimize your vocabulary in several interesting, and totally personalized ways. There are no predefined lessons, you never "finish", it's not at any particular skill level (it mirrors yours), and within its very narrow domain it has a very detailed knowledge of you. As it teaches you, it studies you. As you learn, it learns--and gets better. It won't solve all the problems of language study, just one very important one: developing, and especially keeping, a powerful vocabulary.
Glen Perkins was a strategy consultant (Bain & Co.) living in Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and used Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Malay daily as part of his work. He says Native Guide began as a "secret weapon" to make him seem smarter than he really was! Only recently has it become a commercial product. He also works for Insignia Solutions, makers of SoftWindows for Mac and Unix, as Product Manager for Asian Products.
