The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘china’

There is a steady stream of tablet PCs flowing out of China recently. Most of them are just the same ol’ thing, but this SayCool tablet stood out from the rest with a 7-inch capacitive screen that’s apparently multitouch capable. Now, the tablet runs Windows XP, which isn’t nearly as touch friendly as Win7, but it certainly can be done with the right cocktail of software and hardware.

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The SayCool tablet mates a 7-inch multitouch display to Windows XP

70% of users on the web do not speak English. Considering how many web sites and services are done entirely in English, obviously, this is a problem. Smartling thinks it has the solution. And now they have $4 million in funding to prove it.

The realtime website translation tool has raised the Series A round led by Venrock. Also participating are U.S. Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and several angels, we’re told.

There are professional translators out there that will convert your site into a different language, but they’re usually expensive, and it can take a while. Meanwhile, services like Google Translate are pretty much instantaneous and free, but accuracy is an issue. Smartling attempts to find the middle ground. They offer fast, accurate translations at a low cost.

How? They use a hybrid model which essentially allows you to pick between professional translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. The key is managing it all, which can be done with Smartling’s software. With it, you can pick and choose which part of your site to translate which way.

As the web continues to grow quickly in places such as China, translation is going to be a very important aspect of an increasing number of sites and services. Smartling, which only started itself last year, seems to be in a good position to expand its operations now with the new money.

Someone passed this post along to us, and since our Chinese is limited here in CrunchGear-land, I’m afraid we can’t vouch for it. The video contained may, in truth, provide the recipe for a lovely London broil for all we know, so take it with several healthy grains of salt. But at least the basic premise is amusing

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Don’t Call Tech Support. Try Orkin Instead!

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The Playstation Move makes its advertising debut

Man, two new trailers in the same day. Our cup runneth over, and so forth! Anyhow, here’s the newest trailer of EA Sports MMA , which should hit stores “late 2010.” That’s all in-game footage, too, so no smoke and mirrors nonsense. Featured prominently are Bobby Lashely, Brett Rogers,Cune Le, and Nick Diaz (!)

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Video: EA Sports MMA trailer (but where’s Fedor?)

PayPal has seen the future, and apparently it lies out East. The eBay company has just announced plans to double its presence in the Asian-Pacific region by the end of 2010, and made a couple of other, separate announcements to underscore its focus on Asia.

At PayPal’s new international headquarters in Suntec City, Singapore’s technology hub in the middle of the nation’s central business district, the company said that it plans to double the number of employees in Asia Pacific from 1,000 currently to more than 2,000 by the end of the year. The company plans to add more than 100 new jobs at its international headquarters in Singapore alone, as it represents all of the company’s business outside of the United States.

New jobs will be located at all seven offices in the region including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. For its Singapore business headquarters and development center, PayPal will be recruiting Singapore-based professionals with expertise in technology, product development, infrastructure design, risk and engineering.

PayPal says it has processed more than $6 billion of total payment volume (at spot rate) in Asia Pacific in 2009, an increase of 38 percent from 2008. Since its establishment in the region in 2006, the company has struck dozens of partnerships with Asian companies including this morning’s announcements today with DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, and China UnionPay, China’s bankcard association.

As part of PayPal’s plans to help grow the e-commerce ecosystem across Asia Pacific, the company also announced that the PayPal mobile payment software development kit (SDK) will be made available to developers in the region. That way, developers can add a checkout button to accept mobile payments without the need to collect financial information from customers with just a few lines of code.

The mobile SDK, which will initially support iPhone app development, will be available in the second quarter of 2010 to developers in the region.

Mobile social networks have tremendous potential to flourish in developing countries where mobile phone usage trumps internet connectivity. SMS based social networks like SMSGupshup have gained considerable traction in Asia because of this. For example, in India, there is currently a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio. Mig33, a mobile social network that involves VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and picture sharing, has accumulated 35 million registered users of its service and is growing fast in South Asian markets such as Indonesia and India. Assuming 3 to 10 percent are active on a monthly basis, that would be 1 million to 3.5 million active users.

Mig33’s users are now sending over 1 million virtual gifts a month, and posting approximately 100 million messages a day on its network, or 1,000 messages every second. Twitter, in comparison, just passed 50 million a day. Mig33 is eying the virtual gift economy as a revenue maker because of the model’s success for China’s similar application, Tencent QQ. According to Mig33, the Chinese mobile social application has nearly 8% of its over 500 million users in China paying about $2 per month in virtual gifts and goods. Mig33 is hoping to emulate that model in markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bosnia.

Mig33 is available worldwide and optimized for more than 2,000 different mobile devices. The startup has steadily added to its app by integrating social games, user-owned groups, virtual gifting and, most recently, avatars. Avatars are actually a source of revenue for mig33, by charging users to customize and enhance their avatars. Mig33 is looking to expand the virtual economy. In fact, the startup says that its revenue stream has grown to over $1 per user per month in countries such as Indonesia and India.

Founded in 2005, mig33 is backed by Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM and has raised a total of $23.5 million.

Today seems to be the day of cheap Android tablets , and while I doubt we’ll ever see any of these in the U.S. they are worth mentioning

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Even more cheap Android tablet computers

Here’s a rather unique DIY project for you: a russian builder created a USB key design using a block of wood, a switch, and a fan.

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DIY Russian style: wooden USB drive

It seems that quite a few children were discovered working in the factories where they assemble Apple products and components. Why this would come as a surprise to anyone is beyond me. Did people think Apple had a special brushed-aluminum facility surrounded by parks and fountains, where volunteer workers happily put together iPads just for the chance to be part of something magical?

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Shock! Apple admits it uses factories that employ children