rednano – miyagi.sg

A good reason to localize: two killed over sms error

Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

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Maybe rednano should try scare tactics.

Localisation could have saved the lives of two people in Turkey (via Gizmodo):

The surreal mistake happened because the ex-husband’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “Ä±” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkeyâ€”where this happenedâ€”the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sÄ±kÄ±sÄ±nca” he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

Superfluous search

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I might have been mistaken when I said rednano was superfluous or even redundant, because that implies it duplicates what something else already does. Apparently, when you do a search on rednano for banks in Singapore, the websites of UOB, DBS, POSB and OCBC don’t turn up on the first few results page.

Rednano’s shepherd’s pie vs Google’s shepherd’s pie

Free photo of Shepherd’s Pie, courtesy of Creative Commons search on Flickr – photo by Andy Ciordia

I thought I might join the fray, notwithstanding that rednano is this week an advertiser right on top of this webpage.

So SPH launches rednano with the intention of localising search results when I would have thought the way to go was to internationalise and globalise everything. But never mind, they say what is what lor.

Some bits of rednano’s ad campaigns focus on how when you do a search for PIE (because you don’t know where the PIE is) on any other search engine that is not localised Singaporeananly, you’ll get irrelevant results like ShepherdsPie.Com, which delivers shepherds pies… oh wait… in Singapore! How cool is that? I don’t need to drive down the PIE any more. Just call ShepherdsPie.Com at 6789 0707 and they’ll deliver!

Of course, if you really wanted to search locally on any other search engine, you’d refine your search by adding the word “Singapore” somewhere in your search term, just like I did when I Googled “PIE Singapore”.

So, really, rednano, notwithstanding the fact that they’re advertising on top of this website this week, is a superfluous search engine, unless you wanted to view SPH’s media library to see what media files you can purchase.

Now when you search “superfluous search engine“, you might get “rednano”. Search that!

Now for some of that delicious pie.

Poll:

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