Presentations
Language Standards for Global Business©
Barcelona, Spain
May 29-30, 2006

Donald A. DePalma, President, Common Sense Advisory, Inc., USA

Don is an industry analyst, author, and corporate strategist with expertise in business- and marketing-focused application of technology. He lectures, writes, and is frequently quoted on the topics of online marketing technologies, content management, high-end application development, and globalization. His book, "Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing" was published by John Wiley & Sons. He is a member emeritus of the Board of Directors of GALA (the Globalization and Localization Association), a member of the GALA Advisory Board, chairs the Language Standards for Global Business summit and the BITcon-Asia conferences, was co-chair of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) Committee, is on the jury for the American Society of Competitiveness Journal of Global Competitiveness, and served as a judge for the SIIA CODIE Awards. He has helped coordinate translation and document processing activities for the Chernobyl Children Project.

Previously Don was the vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom Technologies, a supplier of software and services for globalizing businesses. Prior to Idiom, he was a principal analyst at Forrester Research where he wrote trendsetting reports and consulted to senior management at Global 2000 companies. While at Forrester, Don initiated the firm's coverage of content management (1996), application development for strategic Internet systems (1994), digital marketing technologies (1998), ethnic marketing (1998), knowledge management (1996), and business globalization (1996).

In the 1980s Don co-founded Interbase Software, developer of the era's most technologically advanced relational database server and was a key contributor to Digital Equipment Corporation's information management offerings (now part of Hewlett Packard and Oracle). Before deciding in 1980 that software would define his future, Don labored in the ivory tower of academe, focusing on generative grammar, computational linguistics, and the historical phonology of Slavic languages. He holds graduate degrees from Brown University and the State University of New York, and has also studied at Charles University, Moscow State University, the Moscow Linguistic University, and at ILISA in Costa Rica. In 2005 he completed his Master Diver certification with Professional Scuba Association International.

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