TEDxAcademy Women – 8th Dec 2010
Niki Siropoulou organiser of TEDxAcademy offered us the opportunity to try out Babelverse in a real-world situation (thanks Niki!) We interpreted the live video feed between Athens and the main TED event in Washington featuring Hillary Clinton, as well as a selection of other talks between Greek and English.
When we announced this on Twitter, we had people out there also wanting to volunteer to interpret the talks in other language pairs, the response was amazing, people were really answering the call!
We have 2 wonderful volunteers that will translate #TEDxAcademy session 2 from Greek > English.. a first 4 @babelverse http://bit.ly/eSUnsD
— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010
Then – a stroke of luck – one of the speakers was running late, Niki immediately offered us the stage to present Babelverse, we had no presentation prepared and were in the middle of a trial run, but of course we took the opportunity to talk about Babelverse.
We presented/demoed Babelverse on stage of #TEDxAcademy Was totally last minute, so hope u understood, otherwise: http://bit.ly/hmHt7I
— Babelverse (@babelverse) December 8, 2010
Open Fund
During this time, we were doing a lot of planning, mock-ups and business-plan writing, spending many late nights running on Freddo Cappucinos, in preparation to present our project to the Open Fund board, soon after which they offered to invest. We also talked with several other early-stage investors in Europe during that time, with a few of them showing a keen interest.
Startegy 2 – 29th Jan 2011
We were then invited by Startegy organiser Vicki Kovolou to come back and share our experience and progress since the 1st Startegy event, to encourage and inspire others starting out on their ventures.
Had the opportunity to present at #Startegy and talk about our progress with @Babelverse since coming up with the idea at previous event
— Babelverse (@babelverse) January 29, 2011
@mayel2b and @josef talking about @babelverse and their previous #startegy expirience http://plixi.com/p/73255191
— Alice Corovessi (@alicecorovessi) January 29, 2011
Our FIRST TV interview on Greek national TV
The subtitles say Bubble and not Babel?!?!?!?! 🙂
Turning down funding and our decision to bootstrap
Taking outside money should not be taken lightly. Our project was very early-stage and we felt that we had spent a lot of time focusing on this. We talked in depth with the Greek fund, yet had not progressed our project as swiftly as we would have liked. Our attention had been taken away from it, we wanted to develop Babelverse further and then think about funding if and when we absolutely needed it.
So we decided to turn down the funding amicably and bootstrap. So… bootstrap we did. Fortunately for us, very soon after this something was about to come up which would change Babelverse for the better! (more on that in later posts.)
In the meantime we recieved some media coverage, by the leading Greek tech blog away.gr “Γνωρίστε το Babelverse, το Translation μόλις έγινε 2.0“ (ENG: “Meet Babelverse, Translation 2.0 has arrived”)
Coverage on leading Greek tech news site @away_gr:
— Babelverse (@babelverse) February 21, 2011
"Meet Babelverse, Translation 2.0" http://bit.ly/fFnsN0
Thank you @kalavros 🙂
We worked on building a comprehensive database of spoken languages
The list of (currently 6,916) languages we will support is now available at http://babelverse.com/#/linguistics/ Feedback much appreciated!
— Babelverse (@babelverse) February 4, 2011
We also had did a test run of Babelverse during an OpenCoffee event in Athens.
Test went very well 🙂 after finding the right cables/adapters to plug into the sound system and a volunteer interpreter, thanks Aggelos!
— Babelverse (@babelverse) March 11, 2011
External validation
In May, Japan’s giant telecom company NTT DoCoMo announced that it was working on the prototype of a simultaneous speech translation app, but powered by speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech. Babelverse was no longer the only real-time voice translation app (except ours is powered by people!).
NTT DoCoMo testing (2nd after @babelverse😉 simultaneous speech translation app, but machine-powered http://t.co/y7P6hrJ via @engadget
— Babelverse (@babelverse) May 31, 2011
In January, Google had also launched the experimental “conversation mode” feature on Google Translate for Android, for automated voice translation between Spanish and English.
Google announced in May that it would shut down the Google Translate API, due to its massive popularity. They will reportedly be relaunching it with a paid model, demonstrating at the same time the great demand for translation, and it’s business potential.
Google is shutting down the translation API … Wait … WHAT? http://t.co/UmMfig0
— Chris Blow (@unthinkingly) May 29, 2011
During that time, we also attended the 1st European translators & interpreters conference in Rome, organised by ProZ, and had the chance to talk with many seasoned people in the industry. It was encouraging to hear what they thought of the challenges facing them (like low-quality automated translation) and their feedback and excitement about Babelverse…
@danielazambrini @henrydotterer and all @ProZcom conf, thanks for great event & interesting discussions, looking forward to more! #przrom11
— Babelverse (@babelverse) May 22, 2011
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