Legal Research

The Global Language Tipping Point

From the New York Times just before New Year's Eve:

Writing the Web?s Future in Numerous Languages

By DANIEL SORID
Published: December 30, 2008

"The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States."

The cool technology descirbed in this article is a weak signal from the future. As the Boomers become less important as a consumer group for some products, they are catered to less. It will be the same as English speaking countries or those using the English alphabet decline in importance. Money and development priorities will follow the markets. No way of knowing how this will ultimately play out but just looking at the potential of touch screens on all phones and you can see opportunities for exponential change. If you've used the predictive typing on your phone you'll also see it learning and doing some surprising things - good and bad.

Interesting.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).