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What do you get when you combine a great taste and an awesome name into a fruit that hasn’t even been around for 40 years? You get the Dekopon. And according to the L.A. Times’ David Karp, it’s the best tasting citrus fruit he’s ever had (he claims to have tried over 1000 citrus varieties).More »
DEMO Fall 2010 alumnus Bump.com, a social network that links people through their car license plates, has raised more than $1 million in its second round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.
As the DEMO Spring 2011 conference wraps up, Bump.com’s funding news demonstrates how the event, which VentureBeat coproduces with tech publisher, IDG, often sees graduates move on to greater and greater business success.
CEO Mitch Thrower wouldn’t disclose exactly how much the company raised in its Series B-1 funding round, but said the round was oversubscribed — meaning there was more offers for funding than Bump.com was willing to take from investors. The round was closed in a little more than two weeks, Thrower said. (The service is not to be confused with Bump, a content-sharing application for the iPhone.)
Bump.com users take a picture of a license plate and pass a message along through the Bump.com application. If the driver of the other car has registered their license plate with Bump.com, he or she will receive a text message or an email message. They can decide from there whether they want to respond. Drivers spend more than five years in their cars honking at each other when they could be actually communicating with each other, Thrower said.
There are a lot of applications outside of the social networking aspect as well. There are billboards in Los Angeles that track more than 250,000 license plates every day. The company is also setting up shop at the Coachella music festival in April — where it will track license plates as they enter the music festival and deliver discounts to songs played by bands at Coachella.
That’s a lot of license plates and data. So the company works on Amazon’s AWS cloud servers instead of running the service on in-house servers. The company makes money by supplying users with a subscription similar to AAA — it includes free towing and discounts to some other companies. Around 7 to 10 percent of users that claim their license plate on Bump.com end up converting to paid users, Thrower said.
Bump.com also partners with other companies to help deliver better advertising data. Partners, for example, might ask how many motorcycle riders pass through a part of the freeway in a given part of the day — and Bump.com can deliver that kind of information.
The actual site is launching a closed beta at the South by Southwest music festival in Texas later this month. Bump.com has raised $1.1 million from an initial funding round led by angels and money from the founders and employees. Bump.com was founded in 2009. The company’s first round of funding, which closed before it presented at the DEMO Fall 2010 conference, was also oversubscribed.
Tags: driving, license plate, social networking
This year’s edition of the Oscars has passed, but we thought that it would be nice if we selected some of the most interesting infographics about the wonderful world of cinema.
And that’s a huge task, especially if we consider that some sagas – like Star Wars or Harry Potter – have so many infographics about them, that we could make an entire post just with them – just for you to have an idea, we have over 400 on Visual Loop!!!.
Even so, we selected some from all over the world, so we hope you enjoy it!
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The building for frog design in New York’s Greenwich Village sits in an innocuous patch of offices just by the Holland Tunnel. Inside and seven floors up, however, is a bustling hive of designers and creatives thinking in broad strokes and typing details on their sundry Macs. Off the large, open workroom is a small, dark alcove filled with sticky notes, charts and candy: the hard work of MTV’s latest social good campaign, “The Get Schooled College Affordability Challenge.”
While the firm deals with numerous ongoing projects, MTV’s campaign has been its focus for the past two weeks. MTV set out to create a crowdsourced, student-led, digital tool to help increase college completion rates by making it easier for students to navigate the financial aid maze. After vetting more than 200 submissions, MTV narrowed those down to three finalists who would work with frog to break apart, redesign and refine their ideas.
The winner will get $10,000 and see his or her idea brought to life by MTV, the CollegeBoard and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, with a development budget of up to $100,000. Not too shabby but also not too easy. We sat down with one of those finalists, Larissa Simpson, to get a peak inside the intense design process at frog, and to find out what it takes to make a socially-minded digital tool.
Simpson came up with her idea — a video game that guides students through applying to schools and for grants and scholarships — while locked in a hotel room in South Korea. A part-time model and Brooklyn native, Simpson began modeling during her second year at Brooklyn College to make money while navigating her education. She spent much of last summer doing shoots in Milan, Germany and Korea as a way to build up her portfolio.
On one shoot in Korea, the models were asked not to leave their hotel rooms. Bored and searching for scholarship to help her pay for a new media program at the New School in New York, Simpson came across MTV’s challenge and began brainstorming. The game, nicknamed “The Avatar Project,” would function like a mix between Super Mario and the Sims, in which the challenges weren’t based on gold coins but actual funding and school applications. “You get to know yourself by applying to scholarships,” Simpson says.
Each of the three finalists have taken a unique approach to helping students pay for school. Dekunle Somade is building an SMS platform to serve as a college on-ramp for low-income students, while Devin Valencia is creating a Facebook app that will help students find and apply for FAFSA and other scholarships.
Simpson’s project draws from different parts of her background. “I did spend a lot of time doing computer games,” Simpson says, “Me and my sister used to sneak into the computer room secretly to play.” She was drawn by how games created their own space, a trait that could help educate students. “When I played games, what I really liked was being able to get into the world and tuning everything out and I think that environment could be really useful when people are learning,” she says.
She’s hoping to take that interactive element into her future studies and her future career: using video in an interactive, immersive way to improve people’s live.
All of this began thanks to a partnership between Viacom, MTV’s parent company and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aimed at improving college performance and completion rates in America called “Get Schooled.”
Viacom tasked its channels to embrace the challenge in their own way. MTV, with its naturally younger (and presumably tech-savvy) audience, went directly for enrolled and would-be college-students. Rather than just build a digital tool and call it a day, MTV wanted the project to spark conversation and come from the people that needed it most. “We could have just made [a tool] ourselves but we thought it would be much more impactful if we went to college students who go through the process every year,” says Jason Rzepka, vice president of MTV Public Affairs.
To that end, the MTV audience plays a large role in selecting the winners. While MTV has a panel of judges pulled from the project partners, the public will get to weigh in on the finalists, Rzepka says. An open, crowdsourced vote will play a significant factor in which project wins. To help all three projects be as ready, useful and polished as possible, MTV has paid frog design to devote a team of specialists to each contestant for a one-week intensive session. The days may be long, but the process is anything but.
Frog design is a place where people have titles like “interactive designer” and “technologist,” and meeting rooms are officially named “fish tank” or “grotto.” The seemingly vague descriptions are actually pretty spot-on for the kind of high-minded work that goes on at the design firm. A “technologist” doesn’t just code and program, he or she also has to understand what technologies best complement an idea or solve a grand, conceptual problem. Simpson was paired with technologist Elliot Winard, interactive designer Brandy Bora, a strategist and frog’s creative director JF Grossen, who also worked with Somade in New York (Valencia joined the Austin “frogs,” as they’re called).
Simpson’s work room is about the width and depth of a Hummer. Packed into that space are thousands of notes and sticky notes spread across two massive boards. At the center of the room is a faux-wood table, piled with three Macbook Pros, masking tap, pens and markers, bug-eye sunglasses, tea cups, coffee mugs and an untouched granny smith apple. The room is one of the only in frog without natural light, instead, a multi-bulbed floor-lamp and round wall lamp give off variable glow, depending on how many planning boards and flow charts are stacked in front of them.
Grossen, dressed in a dark grey, wool, shawl collar sweater, jeans and black leather shoes, explained the basic steps of any design process at frog. One board, measuring about three feet by six feet, is an “ecosystem map.” This is the first step and is essentially structured brainstorming. On it are references, ideas, inspirations and goals for the project. “Tell us everything,” Grossen says, “What space will the idea live in?”
Simpson’s ecosystem had pictures of Sims video games, a Super Mario over world map, the paperclip from Microsoft Word and a The Simpsons avatar creator, among many others.
The next step is a “journey map.” This deals more with the project’s narrative, taking all the references in the ecosystem and identifying what are starting points, end points, rewards, stages, challenges and so forth. The journey map is a flow chart of sticky notes, color coded to denote points (yellow), rewards (dark yellow), questions (pink), etc. A giant white board dominates an entire wall. It’s reserved for the project’s elevator pitch, revised and rehearsed every day. Simpson has to give the pitch to anyone that walks into the room. Still early in the process, there’s a lot of writing on the board. “It’s a pretty long elevator ride, right now,” Grossen muses.
Media training is a big part of this design boot-camp. Despite its charity-roots, MTV is still running a competition that requires Simpson to be able to present, speak and promote her idea in front of experts, camera crews and eventually her peers.
The inexperience of all the contestants is a blessing and a curse. It means that they bring a freshness and intimate knowledge of the problem they’re solving, but it can also mean that their ideas can get away from them. It’s a concern that everyone is aware of. “At the core, we’ve got three really powerful concepts,” Rzepka says. “This whole process is to refine that concept.” Frog’s mission is to make that a reality without steamrolling their young wards. Grossen says whenever Somade felt pressure, they would immediately re-adjust to make sure he was happy with the end project. Says Simpson: “I feel like the idea has remained pretty much what it’s supposed to be. Some things have been eliminated or put back in, but it’s still pretty much the idea I came up with in the first place.”
Since we spoke, Simpson has given a presentation to both a panel of frogs and project heads, she has been interviewed and filmed for MTV promos and longer pieces explaining her project. All this while working 9 to 5 days pulling her ideas apart and trying to put them back together. Voting begins soon.
If she wins, she’ll be given a budget of up to $100,000 to actually make her game. But the project doesn’t end there for MTV. Committed, via Viacom, to its partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rzepka says there are at least three more years of planned advocacy and support. The idea is to look beyond financial aid to other major hurdles in college completion, such as first-generation Americans, and developing other tools that can best help their young demographic get there, “This is a long term and sustained effort,” Rzepka says.
Regardless of whether she wins, Simpson has been inspired by the process. From a hotel room in Korea to a candy-strewn design studio in Greenwich, she has come a long way toward making her game — and the college dreams of young students — a reality.
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Image courtesy of Flickr, guidosportaal
More About: bill and melinda gates foundation, bill gates, charity, design, education, mtv, non-profit, social good
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Jani Penttinen is a founder and CEO of PremiumFanPage, a service that helps brands connect with their fans in any language, and Xiha, a multilingual social network with users in more than 200 countries speaking 140 languages. He blogs at janipenttinen.com.
Today’s Internet represents a momentous age in the history of global commerce. Never before have so many people met in one, international marketplace. It has never been so easy to reach so many people.
Yet, as tantalizing as a market of billions sounds, surprisingly few brands make the effort to seriously compete on a global scale. An English webpage is not enough: just because people in Austria or Zambia can access your website and recognize some of the words, doesn’t mean they will choose you over a local competitor who speaks their language. Winning customers around the world requires something more.
Companies like Groupon are global enterprises worth billions mostly because they compete like locals. The good news is that this no longer requires a massive marketing budget. With a few simple changes you can turn your local success story into a global phenomenon. Here are 10 tips to target people everywhere, take your website global, and (just maybe) take over the world.
In a world where English is accepted as the global language of commerce, translating your text may seem like an unnecessary burden. But just because customers can “understand” English doesn’t mean they will properly understand your English-only website or will choose your service if a competitor speaks in their native tongue.
As native English speakers account for only 25% of global web users, translating your webpage is the single most important thing you can do to take it global.
Choosing which languages to translate into is difficult, but generally, the more the better. If your idea works in one language, odds are good that it will work in another language as well. Once you have translated your webpage it is critical to keep the translations up to date with any changes you make to your English pages.
The good news is that translating content is not the tedious and expensive process it once was. Using services like MyGengo, you can get professional quality translations in a few hours at a very reasonable price. They even offer an API that makes it possible for you to embed the translation pipeline in your website.
Globalizing your content doesn’t end with language translations. Any time you talk about pounds or inches, a visitor from Europe will scratch his or her head. If you list the prices in US Dollars only, you’re asking some potential customers to spend extra time figuring out how much your product actually costs them. Avoid using phrases that relate to a certain culture or region, and try not to use terms which may mean different things to different people (such as “football” in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom).
It’s a good idea to place all your language versions on the same web domain, as this brings your community together and helps pool the traffic. Rather than having 10 different websites with low traffic, you could have one strong website.
Having said this, a single URL should only represent content in one language. If you try to create a system where the same exact web address dynamically shows content in different languages, it will confuse search engines. The two easiest ways to separate the languages are with a language subdomain (en.domain.com), or a language folder that comes after the domain (www.domain.com/en/).
I have used both over the past few years and prefer language folders. Either way works fine, so choose the option that best suits you. Avoid using parameters like www.domain.com/?lang=en, as search engines don’t like them either.
When a user visits your site for the first time, take an educated guess which language he or she prefers. The HTTP request header is often the best place to start, providing useful information such as the language of the web browser. If everything else fails, you can still take a guess based on the user’s location.
Of course, a user’s location is not a fully reliable way of detecting his or her preferred language. Some countries have multiple official languages and the user could even be traveling. Even the browser language can be wrong in some cases (for example, if the user is browsing from an Internet cafe in a foreign country). Despite such problems, detecting your user’s language is the most effective way to ensure your users can understand your webpage on first impression.
While detecting the user’s language is great, always make it easy for a user to change the language. If he or she does, ensure you remember his or her settings in the future. Whatever you do, don’t restrict the choice of languages based on a user’s location.
MySpace provides an example of what not to do. If you choose Finland as your home country, it automatically changes the website language to Finnish. If you choose Switzerland, it asks you if you speak German, Italian or French. If you are an English speaker, you need to choose US, UK or Australia as your home country regardless of where you actually live. Its important to give the user the choice of language, regardless of his or her geographical location.
One of the first things you’ll notice after translating your website into multiple languages is that you start receiving customer support requests in all those languages. It’s a positive problem to have because it means your plan for global domination is succeeding!
The good news is that you can leverage your existing customer support team by giving them translation tools, such as Google Translate. It doesn’t always do a perfect job, but it’s good enough to understand the problem the customer is having, and to suggest a way to resolve it.
Another option is to add the translation tool to your website’s trouble-shooting ticket system. This way English-speaking customer support representatives handling the ticket can use the tool to understand problems in other languages, and reply in English. If the customer doesn’t understand English, they can then use the built-in translation to get the text back to their own language. This is how the customer support has worked at the multilingual social network Xiha for the past two years, and the feedback from the customers has been overwhelmingly positive.
If you run a website with lots of traffic, you probably already know what a CDN is. If you don’t know, CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is a system which mirrors all static content from your website to servers (or nodes) around the world. When a visitor comes to the site, the CDN system automatically serves the content from the closest node.
This can have a big impact on the loading times of pages in your website even within the U.S., and the difference is like night and day when going global. I have seen websites load 5 to 10 times faster with a CDN. Using one is easy and quite affordable compared to alternative solutions, such as hosting the entire website on multiple locations around the world.
Remember that speeding up the loading times is not only going to make your visitors happier, but also boost your page rank on Google. Loading speed is one of the factors Google considers when determining how high your website will show up in search results.
WebPagetest.org is a great tool for measuring the load times from different points around the world. It’s a free service that lets you check how your website loads from various places, using different browsers, from New York to New Zealand to New Delhi. If you are not already using it, go and check how your website loads in Australia — you might be in for a shock!
Also be aware that some services are blocked in certain countries. If you have a Facebook or Twitter widget on your site, go and see what happens when your website is accessed from a country like China.
Some languages, such as Arabic, feature a writing system that goes from right to left. Arabic is currently the fastest growing language on the Internet, but most websites outside of Arabic speaking countries don’t support it. You can give your business a competitive edge by being among the first.
Fully supporting these languages usually means flipping over the entire layout of your webpage. Otherwise you’ll get a situation where the text is aligned to the right side and buttons are still on the left. Take a look at Google’s Arabic landing page for a great example.
Even if you are not consciously attempting to take over the world, you might still get international visitors. If you allow these visitors to give you money, making it difficult or impossible for them to pay is a great way to go out of business.
Although almost everyone in the U.S. and Western Europe has a credit card, they are relatively uncommon in many countries. At the very least try to support PayPal and Skrill (formerly known as Moneybookers). Both of these payment systems allow users to transfer money from bank accounts.
You should never control a user’s access to content based on his or her region. The only exception is if you’re dealing with licensed content, such as music or movies, that come with regional restrictions. Under normal circumstances though, there is rarely any benefit from such restrictions and they can really frustrate customers.
One example I came across was in Switzerland, when I was trying to put together a Weber barbeque set. I ran into problems and so went to the company website, which appeared in German. By using Google I was able to find out that they do have a manual available in English, but when I tried to open the English language website, I was automatically redirected back to the German website. I then checked the direct download URL to the PDF from Google’s cache, only to find out the access to the file was restricted! In the end I had to ask a friend from another country to download the file and send it to me.
There are a number of other examples I have come across when abroad where I have found websites that either refuse to work or limit access to the content we are normally able to browse. When considering adding any limitations, try to think what you are actually trying to achieve. If you’re worried that users from other countries will access your website and it’ll be expensive, think again. If you’re actually getting so much traffic from abroad that it is costing you money, don’t filter it out, monetize it!
If you have any other good tips or a question, please share your thoughts below. The world is listening!
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Image courtesy of Flickr, RambergMediaImages
More About: business, global, international, MARKETING, translate, translation, web
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