The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘offices’

Yours truly was in Finland most of last week, visiting a bunch of technology startups at their offices, paying a visit to Nokia’s research center and attending the great MindTrek conference (thanks again for organizing the tour, FinnFacts).

One of the items in the packed schedule was a visit to the Demola facilities, essentially a type of incubator where students from the three universities in the city of Tampere and beyond can come work on projects in an ‘open innovation environment’.

One of the demos there that made a lasting impression on me - and the other bloggers who were invited to the tour - came from startup Ball-it. The fledgling company markets a golfball-sized device that is able to interact with your computer, TV or mobile phone thanks to physical wireless sensing technology that was popularized in large part by the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The technology has been under development for quite a while; tech blog Venturebeat profiled Ball-it about 10 months ago.

I’ve been in London for two weeks pretending to be part of the Traveling Geeks contingent of bloggers. But really I’ve been doing some deep investigative work on this whole Last.fm scandal.

I showed up at their offices and guess what I found? A pile of servers sitting in a corner waiting to be delivered to the RIAA. Sure, they said they were just old servers… likely story.

I also discovered that Last.fm is getting into a new business: Michael Arrington Target Practice Kits ™. I got a demo in the office (see video below). Ev, can I put you down for a case?

michael fires me from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

VoIP startup Jajah has just scored major deals with eHarmony and Match.com, two of the web’s most popular dating sites, to provide online daters with semi-anonymous voice chat. The new features are part of Jajah’s ‘Platform for Dating’, which is also currently being tested on a number of other dating sites (though Jajah won’t name them, yet).

The new feature offers a good middle ground between the text interactions you typically go through on dating sites and actually meeting your potential match face to face. The integrated Jajah widget will allow you to talk with a prospective match though an online voice call, without having to divulge any of your real contact information should things turn messy.

Voice chat is a premium feature on both eHarmony and Match.com, going for around $5/month. Jajah declined to share any details regarding the revenue split between the dating sites and the VoIP service, but it sounds like the company is going to be generating quite a bit of money from the deal, especially given the negligible costs associated with actually connecting the calls.

This isn’t the first time dating services have implemented voice chat — Match.com previously offered its own service that was powered by the now-defunct Jangl, but it’s been out of action for the last nine months. This is the first time eHarmony is implementing a similar service.

And in case you were curious, Jajah has given us a few initial stats from its pilot program at eHarmony. The results aren’t too surprising — in short, having a voice call with a match seriously increases your odds of getting a real-live date:

* Men are twice as likely to make phone contact than women;

* Women are nearly three times (2.7 times) more likely to meet a new
partner after having talked to him, than having had contact via email or
messaging alone;

* More than a third of women (37%) pass judgment on a match after just one
phone call

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

TechCrunch Europe is holding an afternoon of presentations, panels and pitches exploring the German tech scene today, from 3pm (Berlin time) onwards. Here you’ll find the live video stream provided by Sevenload and we’re holding it at the office of Zanox. Thanks also to Gründerszene, Dwight Cribb Personalberatung and Seedcamp for their support. See below for our schedule. Update: Due to the popularity of the event (which sold out a week ago) we’ve now arranged an after-party from 9pm at the offices of Soundcloud. Details are here. In addition, I will be hanging at Caras Gourmet Coffee at Neue Schönhauser Str. 9 on Thursday afternoon. Feel to get in touch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Only a handful of blogs picked up on Google’s fresh Translator Toolkit, which the company launched yesterday by means of a blog post, but this new service really deserves a second look, if only because Wikimedia apparently sees the tool as something that could “change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages”.

You can read an extensive review of the product over at Google Blogoscoped, but here’s the gist:

Google Translator Kit enables anyone to upload documents for a variety of formats (HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text, OpenDocument Text and Plain Text), enter the URL for a file on the web or input a direct link to a Wikipedia article or Knol entry. After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.

Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. Color-coded segments will depict ‘exact’ matches and ‘partial’ matches, so you can edit the text based on the memory as well as previous, human translations. In addition, you can use the computer-generated translation in the Computer Translation tab to jump-start the translation of your current segment. When available, the toolkit will also search Google’s multilingual glossaries to help you translate specific terminology for your language, or you could use the Dictionary tab to do custom searches on Google’s multilingual dictionaries.

Besides the self-learning ability of the toolkit, the service also makes it incredibly easy for people to collaborate on translations, bringing a human, crowd-sourced touch to the automated process of Google’s Translate service.

(Thanks for the heads up, ArabCrunch)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.