Border Busters!

Have your plans to go global stalled?

Well get global here!

Sourcing Abroad Gives Tiny Players An Edge

Sonia Seye spends her days braiding hair and turning multicolored hair extensions into intricate, fashionable coifs.

But running a busy Los Angeles salon is just the start for this 30-year-old immigrant from Senegal. Ms. Seye has dreams of a bigger, more profitable future: building franchises of her salon, Hair Universal, across California -- then supplying those salons with popular human-hair extensions.

And to make that happen, Ms. Seye is looking abroad.

A hat tip to Paul Barsch, Global Services Marketing, Teradata, a division of NCR, for bringing this article to our attention.

Global Fast-Food Invasion

After its first lap, globalization gets really interesting. The stuff you invented -- in this culinary case, fast-food hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza and doughnuts -- gets sent out into the world, is replicated by other countries and then comes back to you all crazied up, like a giant game of telephone. And if you hold that piece of Filipino fried chicken up to your ear and are really quiet, you can hear what the rest of the world is thinking about us.

Listen in here.

Global Timber Smugglers

In a grainy undercover video (click here to watch), the smuggler stands surrounded by stacks and stacks of lumber, large bales of freshly milled planks held together with steel bands. His gold watch glints as he begins counting money, methodically placing each bill on a desk. Sitting nearby, his partner watches through Coke-bottle glasses. They both appear to be in a good mood, laughing and joking with their clients.

The unwitting star of the video, Frankie Chua, managed an import/export business. Let's hope you don't run yours this way. The men Chua regarded as potential clients were, in fact, undercover employees of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

Interesting.

The Translation Quoting Process

International business is hardly an instant gratification activity. Many firms are often in contact with prospective clients for years before they are privileged with their patronage.

Find out more here.

Reaping International Rewards

Shortly after leaving church one Sunday, Mark Twain and fellow writer William Dean Howells were caught in a heavy rain shower. "Do you think it will stop?" Howells asked. Replied Twain: "It always has."

What does this have to do with anything international? Find out here.

Get Noticed Globally: Scribd

We posted this information in our Borderbuster e-newsletter today (4/5) but in case you are not a subscriber yet, check out the following.

Scribd -- the YouTube for documents! -- is a free online library where anyone can upload. Use their embeddable PDF player to publish and view documents right in your web browser. How cool is that? Try it out! We did here.

Be sure to view full screen for it looks a little better that way. For our first attempt, it's not bad. Give it a whirl. What an amazing way to track who reads what -- globally -- on your work!

World Wide Web Conference May 8-12

The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the University of Calgary cordially invite you to participate in the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), to be held at the world-famous Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park May 8-12, 2007.

The World Wide Web Conference is the global event that brings together the key innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies shaping the Web.

Organized by the IW3C2 since 1994, the WWW conference is the annual gathering place of the international community to discuss and debate the future evolution of the Web.

Find out more here.