The International Macintosh Users Group presents:

My "Shoe Size Web Page" Fetish or How Companies are Losing
Money on the Internet
Group: International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
(A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date: January 20, 2005, 7-9 p.m.
Speaker: Tex Texin (Yahoo, Inc.)
Topic: My "Shoe Size Web Page" Fetish or How Companies
are losing Money on the Internet
Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South into
Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
Infinite Loop.
Admission: $4, free for IMUG members
Contact: Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com

Here is a lighthearted look at a serious problem on the World Wide
Web - the failure to review and QA data made available to customers
on the Web and that is critical to business operations. A methodology
that worked well when customers came in to stores to physically try
on shoes does not work well over the web. Companies are losing money
and customers. Does anyone care?

Retail web sites for the shoe and clothing industries often suffer
from a class of problems that cause the vendors to lose money and
customers. The problems go undiagnosed and are hurting the online
retailing industry.

Reviews of several retail web sites in the shoe and clothing
industries have uncovered several problems that commonly occur.
These online retailers are not aware of the problems or their
losses. Brick and mortar business do not suffer the same
consequences, which is part of the reason that existing businesses
that migrate to online retailing do not anticipate these problems.
This is an update of a paper presented at the 23rd
internationalization and Unicode Conference in Prague in March 2003
and again at the 24th Internationalization and Unicode Conference in
Atlanta in September 2003.

Tex Texin has been providing globalization services, including
training,strategy, and implementation, to the software industry for
many years.

Tex has created numerous globalized products, managed
internationalization development teams, developed
internationalization and localization tools, and guided companies in
taking business to new regional markets.

Tex is also an advocate for internationalization standards in
software and on the Web. He is an invited expert to the Unicode
Consortium and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Tex maintains two web sites for internationalization, the popular
http://www.I18nGuy.com and http://www.XenCraft.com .

Tex is now Internationalization Architect for Yahoo!, having finally
escaped from years of shoveling snow out of his New England driveway
to lovely Sunnyvale, CA, where he spends his free time emptying
buckets of rain from various hallways.

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