web services

myGengo – human translation service that scales

Via this GigaOm blog post I came across an interesting service – myGengo. I’ve had plenty of projects that dealt with multi-lingual issues, and professional, punctual translations were always a pain in the process. So it is nice to see a company that uses, in my opinion, a very correct approach to the problem.

Right now, the translation market has two main segments: a high-end market dominated by full-time in-house translators, and a low-end market dominated by Google Translate. myGengo’s service aims to occupy the space in between the two markets by offering “human translation services at scale.”

Essentially, myGengo is like an oDesk built specifically for translation services. myGengo has assembled a group of more than 3,000 translators worldwide who work on a freelance basis through myGengo’s own dedicated software program. myGengo serves clients directly, and also has an API to let other startups include myGengo’s translation services in their apps. myGengo says it is targeted at people and businesses who occasionally need high-quality, fast translation services, but aren’t in the market to hire an in-house translator for the job.

0.5 USD cents per word, 1 to 16 hours per page (depending on the complexity of the document), human translation with pre-tested personnel, API integration – it sounds almost like a dream. Of course, for now they only support a dozen or so languages, but given that they just received a $5.25 million Series A funding, I expect the service to expand quite a bit in the nearest future.

More Picasa Web Albums space for Google+ users

Google Operating System blog tells:

Picasa Web Albums offers more free storage if you are a Google+ user. According to Picasa Web’s help center, “photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage”. If you upload photos from Google+, they’re automatically resized to 2048 pixels on their longest edge, so they don’t use the 1 GB of free storage that’s available in Picasa Web Albums.

For those of you not on Google+ yet, only pictures up to 800×800 pixels won’t count up on your storage. You really should let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.

Trying out IntenseDebate

It’s been some time now since I wanted to play around with IntenseDebate. Something triggered an action today and now this blog’s comments are powered by IntenseDebate. All previous comments are imported and fully synchronized, and the new comments should be working now (tweaking ahead though). I’d appreciate if you could leave a test comment to this post just so that I could see if it is really working. You could also tell me what you think of IntenseDebate – and that would make your comment so much better…

Backupify – your ultimate backup solution for the cloud

I have just learned about a really awesome service – Backupify. This a really simple yet extremely useful web application for those of us who use plenty of web services. Backupify, as you have probably guessed from the name of it, does backups. It can backup your data from a whole lot of services – Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and so forth. Backups are stored at Amazon’s S3 service. And you have an option of using your own S3 subscription if you have one. I don’t so I chose to use the one from Backupify.

As I said, the service is extremely easy to use. You just register for an account and then specify which of your online profiles should be backed up. There are options for daily and weekly backups and email notifications. Support for more services is in the works too. And the best part of it is that if you register today (before December 31, 2009), you’ll have a free account forever!

But if you were late for the free cheese, I’m sure the usefulness of such a service is beyond a few bucks that they will ask you for later on. Strongly recommended!