It actually happened. There were doubters, but on Thursday, May 6th 2010 the web has its first non-Latin web addresses! My question is how will people with say standard US keyboard setups get to these sites? There are people elsewhere in the world who know the language and writing of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Do those people have to switch the settings of their keyboards just to get there or hope to find links they can click on from sites with Latin web addresses?
My previous post: Internet domain names set to appear in non-Latin scripts

‘Historic’ day as first non-Latin web addresses go live (on BBC News)

Page last updated at 15:41 GMT, Thursday, 6 May 2010 16:41 UK

Website for the Egyptian Ministry of Communications Egypt’s Ministry of Communications is amongst the first live web addresses

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

It said the new domains were “available for use now” although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were “mostly formalities”.

Icann’s senior director for internationalised domain names, Tina Dam, told BBC News that this has been “the most significant day” since the launch of the internet, adding that “it’s been a very big day for Icann, more so for the three Arabic countries that were the first to be introduced”.

Icann president Rod Beckstrom described the change as “historic”.

The introduction of the first web names using so-called country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) is the culmination of several years of work by the organisation.

Previously, websites could use some non-Latin letters, but the country codes such as .eg for Egypt had to be written in Latin script.

The three new suffixes will allow web addresses to be completely written in native characters.

The first country codes:

* Egypt: مصر
* Saudi Arabia: السعودية
* United Arab Emirates: امارات

Source: Icann

“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” said Kim Davies of Icann in a blog post.

One of the first websites with a full Arabic address is the Egyptian Ministry of Communications.

Egypt’s communication and information technology minister Tarek Kamal told the Associated Press that three Egyptian companies were the first to receive registrar licences for the ‘.masr’ domain, written in Arabic.

Mr Kamal described the development as a “milestone in internet history”.

Masr means Egypt in Arabic.

Some countries, such as China and Thailand, had already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language.

However, these were not internationally approved and do not necessarily work on all computers.

Ms Dam explained that the change was “not about shutting non-Arabic or non-Chinese speakers out of the internet.

“It’s about including that large part of our world into the internet today.”

She said there had previously been a risk the internet might have started to split.

“The chances are people would start creating their own internets, where it was only in Chinese, Arabic, Thai or whatever,” she said.

Icann warned that the internationalised domain names (IDNs), as they are known, would also not work on all PCs immediately.

“You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--”s mixed into the address bar,” said Mr Davies. “Or it may not work at all.”

Previously, Icann has said that people would have to update the software on their computers to view the domains.

“Computers never come with the complete set of fonts that will allow it to show every possible IDN in the world.

“Often this is fixed by downloading additional language packs for the missing languages, or specifically finding and installing fonts that support the wanted languages.”
Global access

When Icann first announced its plans for non-Latin web names it said it was the “biggest change” to the net “since it was invented 40 years ago”.

“Over half the internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language,” said Mr Beckstrom at the time.

“IDNs are about making the internet more global and accessible for everyone.”

Icann said it had received 21 requests for IDNs in 11 different languages, including Chinese, Russian, Tamil and Thai.

Website owners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will now be able to apply for web addresses using the new country codes.

The below post is a column from Inc magazine. Being that I am starting my business from home and know some of my clients are too I thought I would share this.

Bed and Boardroom

From 1986 to 1991, my husband and I lived in the dilapidated 19th-century farmhouse at Stonyfield Farm (the land for which our yogurt company is named). The huge, wood-heated building housed the offices and yogurt works, as well as two apartments: one for us and one for our partners, Samuel and Louise Kaymen, and five of their six kids. Newly engaged and fresh from living in my own apartment, I adjusted easily to sharing quarters with Gary. It was shacking up with his business that was hard.

We had zero privacy. Trucks groaned up our narrow gravel driveway at all hours. Employees were ever present, glancing at what was for dinner and frequently using our bathroom if the public one was occupied. When our best yogurtmaker couldn’t find a babysitter for her son, yours truly would rock the boy to sleep while his mom worked the night shift. Our kitchen table overlooked the yogurt works, so we couldn’t get through a meal without distractions from outside (Did that guy really just throw a lit cigarette into the Dumpster?). Hosting guests was a challenge. Arriving for a relaxing weekend in the country, they’d inevitably get caught up in the madness — grabbing a shovel to help dig out a truck stuck in the mud — before going to bed and nearly freezing to death in our unheated spare bedroom upstairs.

One afternoon, I walked into our kitchen cradling bags of groceries and found a young man I didn’t recognize grabbing cutlery and plates from our cupboard. I stopped in the doorway and stared. “We have a lunch meeting in the office,” he said nonchalantly. I was speechless, feeling completely invaded at the most basic level. This was my kitchen. My stuff. Then I chided myself. These were the people keeping the company afloat, and we all believed in using fewer disposables. Why couldn’t I feel good about sharing; why was I so uncool? Still, I thought, there have to be boundaries. Only, where did they lie?

That question was answered a few months later. One Sunday morning, Gary and I were in bed when into our room walked an unfamiliar teenager. He announced he’d been hired to clean the offices, and did we know where to find the broom? By Monday night, our apartment door had a lock on it. But that bit of iron was mostly symbolic, a finger in a leaky dike. Employees, job applicants, investors, and suppliers still flowed freely through our home — only now they knocked first.

The moment you create a business, you step into a twilight zone where the barrier between what is work and what is not starts to break down. The deterioration accelerates for entrepreneurs who work out of their homes. You may start off with a home-based business but soon find yourself with a business where you and your family also happen to live. I got an earful about this from Anna Breyer, whose husband runs a construction business. She is irked that trucks and trailers are always parked in her yard and feels awkward having employees walk through her house when it’s piled high with dishes and laundry. “Sometimes, I’ll have to sign for an early-morning lumber delivery while I’m still in my PJs and the dog’s barking and my kid’s screaming,” she told me recently. Anna says things have improved with small changes, such as putting a coffeemaker and microwave in the garage for employees to use, instead of having them in her kitchen.

Privacy isn’t the only issue. In homes shared with companies, living space may be drastically reduced by the demands of workspace and inventory storage. Sandy Abrams, an acquaintance in California, described to me how she was once literally imprisoned by her business supplies. Fifteen years ago, when she started Moisture Jamzz, a company that makes skin-conditioning gloves and socks, Sandy filled every room of her L.A. apartment with fabric rolls and shipping boxes. The dining-room table was piled high with packing tape and stationery. One day, an earthquake caused the fabric and boxes to tumble in front of the door. Sandy and her husband spent 10 terrified minutes clearing a pathway so they could exit.

Sandy still runs Moisture Jamzz out of her house (though she doesn’t manufacture or keep much inventory there). But now she has strategies to contain it. She limits the company’s impact on her space by storing stationery and press kits behind closed doors in her home office, and limits its impact on her time by letting business calls go to voice mail after 5 p.m. She also protects her family’s privacy by meeting with vendors at the local Starbucks.

Of course, certain hazards of sharing a home with a business apply to anyone with a home office. We’re all familiar with that slippery slope of nipping in after dinner — just to clean up a few e-mails — and emerging at midnight. (A friend of mine who frequently found herself making middle-of-the-night visits to her home office eventually put a sign on its door — “Get a life” — to remind her somnambulating self that she was being obsessive, and whatever it was could wait until morning.)

But for home-based entrepreneurs, daylight brings an additional challenge: diplomatic separation of the family’s waking hours from the company’s operating hours. A friend who wrestles with this commented to me that most people, including his wife and kids, have an ingrained belief that work is something you leave home to do. They assume that if he’s home, he ought to be available to the family. Sometimes, his wife pokes her head into his office to see if he’d like to take a break and have lunch together. “She doesn’t understand that I just don’t want to break the work spell,” he said. “I’m in the zone and need to stay there during the workday. But she takes it personally.”

This resonated with me as I recalled those times I’d walk into Gary’s home office while he was on a business call, only to watch him wince at my intrusion. And I realized that I react the same way. When Gary or one of the kids interrupts me on a work call, I brush them off with that frantic wave that is more desperate dismissal than greeting. Such behaviors inflict small hurts, little bits of damage that accumulate. Over the years, Gary and I have learned to deliver messages by silently slipping in and placing sticky notes in each other’s line of sight. We have trained ourselves to distinguish between physical presence and availability. Though my eyes tell me that Gary is in his home office, he is not, for my purposes, at home. He is not available for figuring out where to meet friends for dinner or how to celebrate Danielle’s birthday. I don’t take it personally anymore, nor does he.

Cohabitating with a business increases the stress level of entrepreneurship exponentially. When home and company share an address, entrepreneurs and their families need to find ways to create the emotional equivalent of physical distance — a gap that keeps worlds from colliding. Sometimes, the only means available will be closed office doors or a new location for the microwave or some sticky notes placed in front of your spouse. It might not hurt to scrawl “Get a life” on one or two of them.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

[Inc.com]