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Object Management Group
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30th Internationalization & Unicode Conference Announces Keynote Panel
Full Program Agenda Available for Conference
November 15-17, 2006, Washington, D.C. USA

Mountain View, CA, USA – October 26, 2006 – The Unicode® Consortium today announced that a Keynote Panel titled, “Where Would We Be Without Unicode?” has been added to the program for the 30th Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC). The conference will take place November 15-17, 2006, in Washington, D.C. USA. The full conference program is available online at http://www.unicodeconference.org. 

In this Keynote Panel, leaders of standards organizations will explain how they rely on the Unicode standard to forge ahead with their own standards, and how the future of Unicode, in internationalization, localization and globalization, will support their own standards programs. Other industry experts will detail how Unicode is key to enabling new capabilities and relate the business reality of supporting additional languages. Finally, the panel will discuss trends in upcoming standards and new technology that affect internationalization.

The new Keynote Panel includes participants:

• Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman & CEO, Object Management Group (moderator)
• Mark Davis, President, UNICODE Consortium: Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications. Mark founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software internationalization library), and architected the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also founded and is the chair of the Unicode CLDR project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 “Tags for Identifying Languages” (RFC 4646 and RFC 4646), used for identifying languages in all XML and HTML documents. Since the start of 2006, Mark has been working on software internationalization at Google.
• Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead, W3C: Richard Ishida’s background includes international user-interface design consultancy, translation tool design, translating and interpreting, and computational linguistics.
• P.J. Plauger, President, Dinkumware, Ltd., which supplies the Standard C++ library for Microsoft Visual C++ and many other leading compilers. P.J. Plauger has been active for many years in the standardization of the C and C++ programming languages.
• Erkki I. Kolehmainen, Coordinator, Cultural Diversity Issues in ICT, CSC - The Finnish IT Center for Science: E.I. Kolehmainen has an international technical, marketing and product management background in the IT industry since the 60's. More recently, he has been involved in various standards activities at the European and global levels as the coordinator of the Finnish national initiative “Kotoistus” sponsored by the Ministry of Education.

Carl Hoffman, President, Basis Technology said, “Unicode 5.0 is the most important technology standard applicable to the construction of multilingual information systems. And the Unicode Conference is the best place to learn about the standard and the latest trends in multilingual software development. Come meet the experts and find out why such companies as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Yahoo have made Unicode central to their international development strategies.”

The Internationalization & Unicode Conference is the premier technical conference for both software and Web internationalization. Unicode experts, implementers, clients and vendors are invited to attend this unique conference. The interactive format makes the Internationalization & Unicode Conference a great place to meet and exchange ideas with leading experts, find out about the needs of potential clients, or get information about new and existing Unicode-enabled products.

The 30th Internationalization & Unicode Conference is sponsored by Gold Sponsors Microsoft Corporation (www.microsoft.com), Basis Technology (www.basistech.com); Silver Sponsor Google (www.google.com); Organizational Sponsors Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) (www.lisa.org) the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) (www.gala-global.org) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (www.w3.org); and Media Sponsors O’Reilly Media (www.oreilly.com), MultiLingual Computing Inc. (www.multilingual.com), Localisation Research Centre (www.localisation.ie), and Globalization Insider (http://www.lisa.org/globalizationinsider). 

For full conference details and to register, visit http://www.unicodeconference.org/.  Sponsorships and exhibit space are available, for more information on sponsoring and exhibiting contact jroussel@omg.org, +1-781-444-0404 x 106. For all other questions contact Kevin Loughry at info@unicodeconference.org, +1-781-444 0404.

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About The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. Members are: Adobe Systems, L'Agence Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie, Apple Computer, Basis Technology, Denic e.G., Government of India - Ministry of Information Technology, Government of Pakistan - National Language Authority, HP, IBM, Justsystem, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Oracle, RLG, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, The University of California at Berkeley, VeriSign, Yahoo! and about one hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium (http://www.unicode.org/). 

About the Event Producer
The Object Management Group™ (OMG™) is the new Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. The OMG is an open membership, not-for-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications. Our specifications include MDA®, UML®, CORBA®, MOF™, XMI® and CWM™. OMG's specifications are all available for download by everyone without charge.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at http://www.omg.org. 

Note to editors: Unicode Standard, Unicode and the Unicode Logo are trademarks of Unicode, Inc. Unicode Consortium is a registered trademark of Unicode, Inc. OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.