P1: "Finally, Data to Prove the ROI of Localization" An eight-country survey of 351 business buyers of software

Speaker: Don DePalma (Common Sense Advisory)
Format/Topic: Keynote

Synopsis: What kind of financial return should your company expect when you localize its products? If you translate your marketing website, will more people buy what you're selling? Or is English enough for both products and the websites that market them? This keynote addresses those oft-asked, usually-badly answered questions with an eight-country survey of 351 business buyers and their buying preferences for localized business software. DePalma presents the data, Common Sense Advisory’s analysis of what it means, and the correlations between purchasing likelihood and localized products across a range of buying cycle events.

This keynote has implications beyond the subject of localized productivity and enterprise applications. Software serves as a proxy for a range of consumer and business products that include a user interface, require detailed documentation, and offer technical support when things don't work. Think medical devices, machine tools, airplanes, and automobiles as similar offerings, especially given the software foundation that underlies many of them.

Tuesday, March 17, 9:00-10:00

P2: Internationalization as a Business Process

Speaker: Claudia Galván (Microsoft)
Format/Topic: Plenary

Synopsis: From grass roots efforts on the engineering side to creating business processes for internationalization, how can we drive international requirements in a strategic, scalable and sustainable way? Is there a silver bullet on how we can break into established business processes to prioritize international needs? There has been great progress on bringing awareness of the importance of Unicode and engineering investments, however, we often miss the opportunity to establish an international roadmap as part of the initial business goals. This includes understanding of the market opportunities and competitive landscape, how the product or service fits into the local culture, the level of investment needed to be successful in the local market and what success looks like.

Tuesday, March 17, 10:30-11:30

P3: Internationalization today — Not Business as Usual

Panelist: Jessica Roland (EMC), Melissa Biggs (Sun Microsystems), Seth Bindernagel (Mozilla Corporation)
Format/Topic: Panel Discussion

Synopsis: In today's current economic climate, scaling the internationalization program may take a back seat for those who are making management decisions within a company. In a time when costs are being cut, how do managers convince their organizations to continue to invest in these areas? This panel will discuss both current-climate and traditional obstacles faced in their companies, why internationalization should remain a strategic focus, and which practical approaches are providing the most leverage for continued progress.

Tuesday, March 17, 11:45-12:45

P4: I18N at Intel: 10 years of bug fixing and influencing. What works, what doesn't, and what's ahead?

Speaker: Loïc Dufresne de Virel (Intel Corporation), Michael Kuperstein (Intel Corporation)
Format/Topic: Plenary

Synopsis: Michael Kuperstein and Loïc Dufresne de Virel, respectively SW Engineer and Strategist within Intel's in-house localization team, will share some insight on Intel's I18N strategy, based on their 10-year journey working on a variety of SW and web localization projects, and comment on their experience promoting I18N at Intel.

Tuesday, March 17, 11:45-12:45

P7: Multilingual Text: An Insider’s View

Speaker: Kamal Mansour (Monotype Imaging)
Format/Topic: Keynote

Synopsis: Today, we are able to compose documents that include text in various languages and even various scripts. Around 15 years ago, this was still relatively difficult to do, especially if one included scripts that are written in opposite directions. What has changed in the picture? If you've ever wondered how many types of scripts are in use today, you might be surprised to hear that it's only three. How do they differ from one another? What are the hidden links between various scripts? If we need to display a line of text sometimes in a simple style, other times in an ornate one, can the underlying digital representation be identical? Come hear how small alphabets such as Roman and Arabic have been extended to support large sets of languages. Do you know that in one country with near 100% literacy, one is expected to know more than 2000 symbols to read a newspaper?

Wednesday, March 18, 9:00-10:00

P8: Panel Discussion: Assessing and Quantifying Internationalization Efforts

Panelists: Ed Watts (Oracle), Adam Asnes (LingoPort), Mike McKenna (Yahoo!)
Format/Topic: Plenary

Synopsis: Managers understand international revenue, markets, and schedules, but what about cost? Internationalisation efforts are canceled many times when executive management is confronted with either unknown or unexpectedly high costs. True, internationalisation of legacy systems can be expensive, but the whole equation of long term benefit, ease of market entry, and reduced support and international development costs must be weighed as well, along with the costs of not doing internationalisation with lost opportunity, lost markets, and increased support and maintenance.

The panel discussion will delve into the experiences of a group of seasoned professionals as to what they use to assess and scope the efforts involved in new and legacy internationalisation and how they deal with management to give them a solid picture of the true costs - short term as well as long term.

Wednesday, March 18, 10:30-11:30

P9: Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design: What? So What? Now What?

Speaker: Aaron Marcus (Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.)
Format/Topic: Plenary

Synopsis: User-experience design is at the top of concerns for Internet-based product/service user-interface development, especially for global deployment. How  do culture differences affect that experience? How do the similarities and differences affect emotions, trust, persuasion, intelligence, and even cognition. These questions cut across all design disciplines, all platforms (e.g., Web, client-server PCs, mobile, appliances), applications (e.g., productivity, entertainment, commerce), user communities (e.g., professional, consumer), and markets (e.g., office, home, industrial), and all content themes (e.g., video/music  media, information bases, games, etc.). Mr. Marcus surveys the issues of cross-cultural communication, introduces culture dimensions, and discusses issues, with examples,  that are challenging analysts and designers worldwide. All developers are seeking to embrace this additional set of concerns that  impact usability, usefulness, and appeal. Mr. Marcus helps show the way to improved user experience. He has presented this lecture as an invited plenary addresses at CHI-South Africa 2005; UPA 2005 in Montreal,Canada;  the Danube University of Krems, Austria; theVocational Training  Institute in Hong Kong, China;  the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei, Taiwan; IsraCHI, Herzliyah, Israel; and Bezalel Academy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and elsewhere in  China, India, Japan,  Russia, and the Ukraine.

Wednesday, March 18, 11:45-12:45

PWS1: Architecture Panel Discussion

Panelists:  Ienup Sung (Sun Microsystems), Jim Walsh (Microsoft)
Format/Topic: Plenary

Synopsis: We are all curious to know how major market players envision the future of internationalization. This panel discussion will explore some of the directions in which internationalization trend-setters Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are going, and then we will open up the floor for brainstorming and debate. Bring your own ideas to the discussion to bounce them off like-minded peers!

Thursday, March 19, 9:00-12:00

A5: Our Strategy is Going Global - what's next?

Speakers: Adam Asnes (LingoPort), Daniel Goldschmidt (Localization Flow Technologies)
Format/Topic: Strategy

Synopsis: Internationalization, either of an existing software product or a newly design one, might be complex project. Yet, by structuring it correctly, an i18n project can de done within budget and on time. We will present the steps for going global, starting from marketing research and defining the global and local requirements through code analysis and project planning for internationalization of the product.

You can break down analysis into the categories of what is not in the code, which needs to be added, and what is in the code that needs to be changed. This must then be turned into a project plan so that the budget, timing and personnel can be accounted for. We will also review a sample project plan and walk through the various steps from design to implementation to testing.

Tuesday, March 17, 3:15-4:15

A6: GB 18030 – Regional Challenges in Internationalizing Software

Speaker: Ken Lunde (Adobe Systems)
Format/Topic: Strategy

Synopsis: Developing software that targets customers in China includes an additional hurdle, specifically the requirement that the software is compliant with their GB 18030 standard. Compliance with this standard entails going through an established testing and certification process. This presentation provides guidance, suggestions, and best practices for addressing the GB 18030 requirement.

Tuesday, March 17, 4:45-5:30

A10: The Value of Supporting Unicode from Day 1 in the Development Cycle

Speaker: Asmus Freytag (ASMUS, Inc.)
Format/Topic: Technology

Synopsis: After more than twenty years since its invention, Unicode is a mature and ubiquitous technology; an industrial strength solution to supporting international character encoding. Why are there still projects being developed that don't use Unicode from Day 1? The presentation explores different aspects of this apparent contradiction, from issues of implementation strategies to cost/benefit considerations and how to present this issue to management.

Wednesday, March 18, 2:00-3:00

A11: Font Handling in Multiligual Software

Speaker: Thomas Phinney
Format/Topic: Technology

Synopsis: Fonts are a critical part of making software world-ready, and applications must test with the right fonts. Various font formats take different paths to dealing (or not dealing) with the needs of the world’s languages. Operating systems offer varying levels of support for the different formats. Learn how to navigate and escape this maze!

Wednesday, March 18, 3:15-4:00

A12: Fear of the Unknown: An Internationalization Case Study

Speaker: Jeffrey Klein (Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics)
Format/Topic: Technology

Synopsis: It is a classic story: Build a very large, complex, FDA monitored and audited system to be sold first domestically, then later globally. Success? No, the product had been developed exclusively for North America, whereby speed to market was a primary criterion that trumped longer-range, international vision. This session will explore the evolution of the system engineer’s thought processes as he encountered challenges with scheduling, peer developers, code merging, and management expectations during his internationalization of the code for global release. He will also share insights and lessons learned about how to keep code internationalized once it has been done, and what kinds of partners either can or might be able to help out in such an effort.

Wednesday, March 18, 4:30-5:30

B5: Brave New (Virtual) World: Internationalization of, and in, Second Life

Speaker: Danica Brinton (Linden Lab)
Format/Topic: Tactics

Synopsis: Second Life is a virtual world, a social networking MMORG with a highly developed internal economy. It is also a popular open source platform with most of its content created by Second Life "residents."

Linden Lab is taking advantage of its virtual world's unique value proposition to internationalize, globalize and localize it. The presentation will share some of these original ROI-savvy strategies and tactics that have helped Linden Lab's successful international expansion, user retention and revenue growth.

Tuesday, March 17, 3:15-4:15

B6: Global Product Management – 34 Markets, 48 Languages, 500 Million Users and One Product Manager

Speaker: Thomas Fenrich (Yahoo!)
Format/Topic: Tactics

Synopsis: “Global Product Management – 34 Markets, 48 Languages, 500 Million Users and One Product Manager” Recommendations and practices for effective product management on a global scale.

Developing products for international distribution? Just how do you go about collecting and evaluating product requirements from different markets, for users you will never meet, where “things just work differently”? Where do you even start?

Organizations frequently struggle to determine how to collect, vet, and evaluate requirements for global products, have trouble identifying who should be involved with this process and have an even more difficult time deciding among the many requests for different features.

Often, international program or project management, country product marketing or even internal localization teams are involved – as a product owner responsible for satisfying users around the world, just how do you coalesce all of this input into an effective process that helps you identify, vet and develop requirements for a multitude of markets and still get a successful product out the door? This gets even more complicated with attempting to execute on a global scale in a dynamic development environment with agile release processes.

In this conference discussion, we will identify the principles that can be applied to drive a global product management approach, review some experiences with different practices, and highlight some recommendations for an effective organization of the product management process for global applications.

Tuesday, March 17, 4:45-5:30

B10: I18n and L10n in the Context of Agile Development

Speakers: Tony Jewtushenko (Product Innovator), Iris Orriss (Microsoft)
Format/Topic: Process

Synopsis: This session will provide an overview of agile development and management practices using the popular Scrum methodology and the opportunities and challenges it presents for I18N and L10N. Theory is supplemented with a case study providing real-world practical advice, challenges and benefits from the Microsoft experience of adopting agile methodology for delivering SQL Server 2008 in 21 languages simultaneously.

In theory and praxis we will cover what the shift to ‘Agile’ means for globalization and localization teams. How does Agile adoption affect fundamental practices? How can you prepare your organization for Agile adoption? How to have it all with Agile… double-digit cost savings and increased quality.

Wednesday, March 18, 2:00-3:00

B11: Staffing Models for  Internationalization

Speaker: Barbara Burbach (Cisco)
Format/Topic: Process

Synopsis: In-house, out-source, off-shore? Which of these option(s) will work within your company's development and staffing models.

Wednesday, March 18, 3:15-4:00

B12: Templates for MRDs and International Functional Specs

Speaker: Richard Sikes (Localization Flow Technologies)
Format/Topic: Process

Synopsis: Extracting a clear, cohesive, and reality-driven global delivery plan from Product Marketing or Development Management can sometimes be like the proverbial herding of cats. The speaker will describe some of the tactics he used to regain his sanity by clarifying communication between department players during his tenure as Director of Globalization for a large software company.

Wednesday, March 18, 4:30-5:30

C10: Trends in Web Globalization

Speakers: Mike McKenna (Yahoo!)
Format/Topic: Web

Synopsis: Web 2.0 is characterized as "Social, Open, Mobile". But from a global point of view, you need to define where is social, who is open, and what is mobile. This brings up a new set of problems that internationalization and localization have not been confronted with before:

• Identifying interface ownership with global mash-ups
• Analyzing issues related to privacy, censorship, and filtering
• Understanding the role of the social web in other cultures
• Using the social web for crowd-sourced translations
• Examining Unicode, mobile devices, and internationalization headaches

This session will explore each of these topics in the context of large-scale web applications and web portals.

Wednesday, March 18, 2:00-3:00

C11: Trends in HTML

Speaker: Addison Philips (Lab126 [Amazon])
Format/Topic: Web

Synopsis: With the first incarnation of the Web behind us and with “Web 2.0” becoming mainstream—if not downright boring—how are the standards and technologies of the Web changing and maturing? Are we on the brink of new, highly integrated, highly capable Web experiences (with efforts from WebKit to HTML5 driving globalization onto every desktop, er, device)? Or are we about to fall into an abyss of fragmentation as new “walled gardens”, IDNA hijinks, and other developments lead away from a universal Web? If you’re curious about the forces shaping the Web today, this presentation will review upcoming standards at W3C, Unicode, and elsewhere—not to mention some of the ecosystem changes that will impact you and the Web.

Wednesday, March 18, 3:15-4:00

C12: Decisions in Internationalization

Speakers: Tex Texin (XenCraft)
Format/Topic: Web

Synopsis: Business and engineering managers walk a tightrope delivering products that can appeal to diverse regional markets with efficient cost and time to market. This session will identify key methodology and technical decisions that need to be made and offer recommendations for making choices. Guidelines will take into account large company vs. small company requirements as well as contrasting ideal internationalization goals vs. practical compromises that companies often need to make to be both successful and profitable.

Wednesday, March 18, 4:30-5:30

WS1: Globalization Features in Microsoft .NET

Speaker: Bill Hall (MLM Associates)
Format/Topic: Technology

Synopsis: Microsoft .NET provides 29 classes in its System.Globalization namespace. Within each class you can expect to find members, fields, constructors, methods, properties, and enumerations. As a result, getting your mind around the complexity takes some time to learn. On the other hand, the system is quite well structured, and after spending some time with the various classes, you begin to grasp how nicely System.Globalization is structured and the relative ease of using the tools that are presented to you.

In the first part of the presentation, we will put together a fairly simple but interesting example that has roots back into the 17th century In the latter part, we will look at a few simple but useful programs that exercise interesting features of System.Globalization. In particular, you might enjoy a particular example that runs through Unicode and presents the amazing varieties number shapes and types that are used in the world.

Thursday, March 19, 1:00-2:30

WS2: Creating World Ready Software

Speaker: Gwyneth Marshall (Microsoft)
Format/Topic: Process

Synopsis: TBD

Thursday, March 19, 3:00-4:30

WS3: Best Practices for Mobile Content and Devices

Speaker: Achim Ruopp (Achim Ruopp Internationalization Consulting)
Format/Topic: Best Practices

Synopsis: In this workshop we first go on a trip around the world to look at different cultural and economic aspects of mobile device usage. We then explore what implications these aspects have on the design of mobile content and applications. Lastly we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty technical details on how to implement these designs to make your mobile content and applications compelling to the users in the target countries and regions while keeping localization costs low.

Thursday, March 19, 1:00-2:30

WS4: Using the XML Internationalization Tag Set (ITS)

Speaker: Yves Savourel (ENLASO)
Format/Topic: Technology

Synopsis: ITS is a W3C Recommendation that provides a set of common attributes and elements anyone can use in their XML schemas and documents to enable internationalization-related features. This session will look at the different ways of integrating ITS within your own XML format, or to use it as a standardized mean to provide internationalization-related information on legacy data. Topics covered will include: Global and Locale rules, defaults, cascading and inheritance, the ITS data categories. It will be illustrated with concrete examples.

Thursday, March 19, 3:00-4:30

WS5: Productivity Tools for International Development

Speakers: Florian Sachse (SDL Passolo), Adam Asnes (Lingoport)
Format/Topic: Process

Synopsis: In this workshop we will be using internationalization and localization productivity tools, Globalyzer and SDL Passolo, to work through finding and fixing internationalization issues and localizing user interfaces. We’ll start with an open source code base, identifying and externalizing embedded strings into resources, then work through locale-limiting methods, functions and classes and programming patterns. We’ll also interact with resource files to illustrate the localization process. Attendees will learn about using tools to facilitate global readiness across their development enterprises under a wide variety of technology and developer demands, while gaining great efficiencies for the localization process.

Thursday, March 19, 1:00-2:30

WS6: Locale Awareness and I18n GUI Design

Speaker: Henry Meinig (Lionbridge)
Format/Topic: Best Practices

Synopsis: This presentation teaches the fundamentals of locale awareness with emphasis on Java, C/C++, and .NET examples. It provides an introduction to culturally specific issues and linguistic issues tied to locale which are reflected in software applications. Technical details of locale-reactive software implementation are presented and some caveats and guidelines are given for managing locale-reactive elements. In addition, various aspects of GUI design which have direct impact on localized software are covered. To provide i18n program managers and software professionals with a complete picture of locale aware software and the impact of localization on a GUI design. The course describes how to approach locale awareness through identification of cultural/formatting issues, linguistic/orthographic issues, and utilization of the innate locale support of the O/S and programming paradigms. As well, the course describes locale-related issues which will affect the GUI design (locale switching, translated text resizing, graphics, styles, and bi-directional & Asian specific issues).

Thursday, March 19, 3:00-4:30