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Business Critical: Global Email, E-Commerce on Twitter and Doodles

Ryan Parlee

By Ryan Parlee

Business Critical is our weekly collection of what’s new, exciting, and insightful for business leaders from the world of the web, marketing, social media, and more.

Email is Going (Even More) Global

While English is the most widely spoken language in the world (followed closely by French, Arabic, Spanish and Klingon, of course), not everyone speaks English. More than that, not everyone speaks a language that uses Latin characters, the 26-letter alphabet that you’re reading right now.

The structure for email was based around the Latin alphabet, so Native Russian, Chinese and Japanese speakers – among many others – were forced to choose an email address in a language they weren’t familiar with.example-global-email And this trend continued for decades.

The technology is there to support email using various characters, but someone had to take the first step. This week, Google took the foray into the unknown allowing for non-Latin and accented Latin characters (example: ñ, é, 阪, ش) to be included in Gmail addresses.

It’s a huge leap for Google to further fuse the world of email together. Now we just need to remember how to type all of those characters.

Will Twitter Support E-Commerce Soon?

A recently leaked screengrab of Twitter user @JourneyDan’s app settings revealed an interesting hint at the future of e-commerce to come: a non-functional “Payment & shipping” button.

Twitter, who only started offering advertisements in the past few years, are (possibly) taking a foray into the world of instant purchases. While the details are very much in the dark at the moment, installing e-commerce into Twitter has some far-reaching implications. Users could conceivably purchase a pizza, a jacket — or most anything that’s advertised on Twitter now — through a quick swipe or tap.

Doodles: More Than Just Lines on a Page

A recent study mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article proves that our third-grade teachers were wrong all along: Doodling in the margins of your paper helps you stay focused, not the opposite. According to the study, some researchers suspect doodling may help the brain remain active by engaging its “default networks”—regions that maintain a baseline of activity in the cerebral cortex when outside stimuli are absent. That means scribbling during meetings, conference calls and other times may help you recall the information later. People who were encouraged to doodle while listening to a list of people’s names being read were able to remember 29 percent more of the information on a surprise quiz later.

Photos courtesy Google and Kai Chan Vong via Flickr Creative Commons

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