2010 is going to be an exciting and crucial year for Transposh, just two days before it started I was happy to assist my Brother and his company Colnect in participating in the TechAviv peer awards, getting to second place with a margin of a single vote. The key was this presentation that I have helped him to create (I do have a fetish for building card towers ;)
So without further Edo, just watch this and have a great new year and vanilla biscuits.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
8,000 downloads
I promised, and I am here ;) The 8k mark was crossed on the 30th of November, about three months following the 4k mark so the rate is improving. Taking into account the long dry period I had this is not half bad.
The latest version added a feature which I am really proud of which is support for search in the translated version. This feature took a relatively short time to come to life. A day of thinking about it, two days of coding and a day of testing ;) I have had the chance to implement there a nice algorithm which I can describe here.
For each search term, find original strings that are translated into something that includes such term, than search for those strings in the original content.
A nice optimization here is that you don't actually need all the strings, but only the ones that are contained within others, for example if you searched for the word "cat" and got the two originals "cat walk" and "the cat walked" the search for the first one would suffice in finding the relevant content.
I hope I'll be able to come up with some more nice stuff, and in the meanwhile, some nasty bugs need my attention, mainly with the feed generation which works "sometimes".
See you again at the 16k mark :)
The latest version added a feature which I am really proud of which is support for search in the translated version. This feature took a relatively short time to come to life. A day of thinking about it, two days of coding and a day of testing ;) I have had the chance to implement there a nice algorithm which I can describe here.
For each search term, find original strings that are translated into something that includes such term, than search for those strings in the original content.
A nice optimization here is that you don't actually need all the strings, but only the ones that are contained within others, for example if you searched for the word "cat" and got the two originals "cat walk" and "the cat walked" the search for the first one would suffice in finding the relevant content.
I hope I'll be able to come up with some more nice stuff, and in the meanwhile, some nasty bugs need my attention, mainly with the feed generation which works "sometimes".
See you again at the 16k mark :)
Friday, October 30, 2009
End of dry season?
Yes, this blog have been quite dry for the last couple of month. Things are progressing but slower than I hoped for.
Some things have happened with Transposh which might keep the reader interested.
The first one is that Nokia used Transposh in its official ovi blog, and later seem to have stopped. Really wonder why, so if anyone have a clue you are invited.
The second was the announcement from a startup called mojofiti, the startup which claims to have ~10 people involved in it has taken transposh and used it on top of wordpress mu to provide multi-lingual blogging service. They say flattery is the best form of imitation (actually the other way around, but who cares) so its kind of imitating to see one using your slogan and software to break language barriers ;) I think it would have been wiser to cooperate here so both parties would achieve more but no expectations.
The skies have finally opened where I live, I hope this signifies that the dry season is coming to its end and I'll have more news to tell.
Some things have happened with Transposh which might keep the reader interested.
The first one is that Nokia used Transposh in its official ovi blog, and later seem to have stopped. Really wonder why, so if anyone have a clue you are invited.
The second was the announcement from a startup called mojofiti, the startup which claims to have ~10 people involved in it has taken transposh and used it on top of wordpress mu to provide multi-lingual blogging service. They say flattery is the best form of imitation (actually the other way around, but who cares) so its kind of imitating to see one using your slogan and software to break language barriers ;) I think it would have been wiser to cooperate here so both parties would achieve more but no expectations.
The skies have finally opened where I live, I hope this signifies that the dry season is coming to its end and I'll have more news to tell.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
4,000 downloads
I'll be reporting in multiples, so don't worry - next time is 8,000. It took two more months to get to 4,000 downloads yesterday. There have not so many releases in between, and the current rate seems to be somewhere around 20 new downloaders a day. The rating on the wordpress site has improved as I guess a few users probably read the how to donate section (mainly - vote your opinion of the project). I hope that as the summer vacation comes to an end, the release train will be back on track and that the new goal will be reached faster.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Focus
Its not very easy to keep going by yourself, but that's not the only problem. The problem I'd like to write about is maintaining focus and keeping on plan.
The original plan included raising money from VCs, which has failed and got reverted to plan B of doing it by myself. So according to the development plan I originally issued, we started with the wordpress plugin, and I guess that by now we probably have a few hundreds of sites using our plugin (a google search for transposh revealed over 1,000,000 results). The good thing is that we get lots of feedback. The problem is that some of it subverts us from the plan.
An example would be the usage of .css sprites for the flags used in the widget. This is a very nice feature, which is really nice to have, however it took me over two weeks in coding and testing (mostly testing) which were taken from more important features like advanced interface and more platform integrations. This delay will be carried for a long time, but I don't see a way to make sure that I keep focused (so many cool features to implement are requested).
Conclusion? none, focus is important, having fun is important. Balancing them is hard and tricky and I just hope I'l prevail
The original plan included raising money from VCs, which has failed and got reverted to plan B of doing it by myself. So according to the development plan I originally issued, we started with the wordpress plugin, and I guess that by now we probably have a few hundreds of sites using our plugin (a google search for transposh revealed over 1,000,000 results). The good thing is that we get lots of feedback. The problem is that some of it subverts us from the plan.
An example would be the usage of .css sprites for the flags used in the widget. This is a very nice feature, which is really nice to have, however it took me over two weeks in coding and testing (mostly testing) which were taken from more important features like advanced interface and more platform integrations. This delay will be carried for a long time, but I don't see a way to make sure that I keep focused (so many cool features to implement are requested).
Conclusion? none, focus is important, having fun is important. Balancing them is hard and tricky and I just hope I'l prevail
Thursday, June 25, 2009
2,000 downloads
This is not an accounting blog, but I still like numbers ;) only one month was needed to double the number of downloads to 2,000 after passing the 1,000 goal, this was aided by the previously mentioned 100 downloads day. Still a long way to go, seems we are on a good track overall.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The first 100+ downloads day
The first version to cross this bar was 0.2.6 which did this achievement on the 17th of June. The numbers are adding up nicely and I am very happy of the progress that we have made in the last couple of months. There are active users with streams of bug reports and suggestion that are beyond our capability to handle at this point (although we are doing our best). Still – the road ahead is long and seems like its worth walking it.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
1,000 downloads milestone
Today marks the 1,000 downloads mark for the Transposh wordpress plugin. Since the 0.2.0 release things have indeed started to move a bit faster.
However I did discover (yet again) a regression bug that crept back into my code.
I am staring the code for the client side of things, if this blog gives you weird alerts and errors, this is me at work :)
The google numbers now stand at 64,700 for the transposh search, the numbers were double that figure last week, and I guess they'll keep growing soon. Anyhow its much better than the 5 results transposh had before we started working :)
However I did discover (yet again) a regression bug that crept back into my code.
I am staring the code for the client side of things, if this blog gives you weird alerts and errors, this is me at work :)
The google numbers now stand at 64,700 for the transposh search, the numbers were double that figure last week, and I guess they'll keep growing soon. Anyhow its much better than the 5 results transposh had before we started working :)
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Winner of Startup 2.0
I am happy to inform my readers that Colnect, which was our beta site for our technology has recently won the prestigious European Startup 2.0 competition.
Amir Wald has presented Colnect to an enthusiastic crowd at Bilbao, Spain.
And was able to best the other 10 finalists with the following bright video presentation:
We at Transposh were very happy to be able to help Colnect get translated to 35 languages and believe that it was a part (even if a small one) in its recent success.
Amir Wald has presented Colnect to an enthusiastic crowd at Bilbao, Spain.
And was able to best the other 10 finalists with the following bright video presentation:
We at Transposh were very happy to be able to help Colnect get translated to 35 languages and believe that it was a part (even if a small one) in its recent success.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Small steps
Today we have reached 250 downloads, and progressing nicely. The product itself is moving forward, now supporting better integration of automatic translation which is quite unique.
Our plan is to keep the release train going fast, as it helps us receive feedbacks from real users and get things better, an example would be a bug report regarding integration with other scripts which allowed us to have a more compatible plugin, after some detective work ;)
See you at the next milestones
Our plan is to keep the release train going fast, as it helps us receive feedbacks from real users and get things better, an example would be a bug report regarding integration with other scripts which allowed us to have a more compatible plugin, after some detective work ;)
See you at the next milestones
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Alpha release
The time has finally come, our alpha version is finally out and may be downloaded directly from wordpress plugin directory.
A lot of work was done on the background, like preparing packaging and the various websites that are needed, like the product website, blog, forum and developer site (not all is complete yet).
The product is still alpha quality, but it works rather nicely and gives any wordpress site owner the option to translate his site to any language quickly - while getting help from his users. The idea behind such a release is to receive feedback and improve accordingly.
You are welcomed to try it out yourself, any ideas are welcomed.
A lot of work was done on the background, like preparing packaging and the various websites that are needed, like the product website, blog, forum and developer site (not all is complete yet).
The product is still alpha quality, but it works rather nicely and gives any wordpress site owner the option to translate his site to any language quickly - while getting help from his users. The idea behind such a release is to receive feedback and improve accordingly.
You are welcomed to try it out yourself, any ideas are welcomed.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Admiting failure, moving on
It is not easy to fail, but I have. In the recent months I tried to raise funds from Israeli VCs.
Many told me not to do it, for multiple reasons, with the top one being "the market is low, and so are chances". And indeed - they were right.
I got many rejections at the preliminary stage and did succeed to move onwards with some VCs, only to get the rejections later.
In themselves rejections are divided to various groups. One being - we don't care or not really into investing these days - please go away. Another is the rejection that comes from finding the flaws in the plan (there are no flawless plans) and pointing the simplest one out. This is probably the reason for tip #1 of the day - never start dealing with any VC on the associate level, it leads nowhere.
The third type of rejection is the one that comes from smart people, that have really sunk their teeth in your plan and could not get themselves to invest, this is the type that tells you - please prove me wrong and we'll meet in the next round, which although is quite annoying is still better than the first two types.
However - there are some good news, the process was lengthy and I learned a few things from it. It helped me think of what we'll do next and what goals I should reach.
We'll bootstrap transposh, and with a little luck be able to announce our alpha product in the coming weeks. Funding will wait till we mature a bit.
If anyone wants tips and tricks regarding Israeli VCs, contact number of various partners and just a bit of knowhow - feel free to contact me - its a free service for fellow entrepreneurs :)
Many told me not to do it, for multiple reasons, with the top one being "the market is low, and so are chances". And indeed - they were right.
I got many rejections at the preliminary stage and did succeed to move onwards with some VCs, only to get the rejections later.
In themselves rejections are divided to various groups. One being - we don't care or not really into investing these days - please go away. Another is the rejection that comes from finding the flaws in the plan (there are no flawless plans) and pointing the simplest one out. This is probably the reason for tip #1 of the day - never start dealing with any VC on the associate level, it leads nowhere.
The third type of rejection is the one that comes from smart people, that have really sunk their teeth in your plan and could not get themselves to invest, this is the type that tells you - please prove me wrong and we'll meet in the next round, which although is quite annoying is still better than the first two types.
However - there are some good news, the process was lengthy and I learned a few things from it. It helped me think of what we'll do next and what goals I should reach.
We'll bootstrap transposh, and with a little luck be able to announce our alpha product in the coming weeks. Funding will wait till we mature a bit.
If anyone wants tips and tricks regarding Israeli VCs, contact number of various partners and just a bit of knowhow - feel free to contact me - its a free service for fellow entrepreneurs :)
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Election is coming, anyone cares?
Election is near, actually coming in ten days, but it seems like no one really cares much.
Every single election - which are coming in Israel almost every other year, I have changed my vote, mainly because I was disappointed from the results achieved by the party I voted for. And now the time to vote is coming and I am almost out of options.
I thought about giving my vote to the green party, because I believe that environmentalism is something we should all try to push forward and can use some representation in our rule making systems. However - in a typical Israeli move, instead of one green giant - we have two small parties which will probably not make it, so why waste my vote there?
In order to help me decide I watched an event where questions from "youtube" were coming to the three major party leaders. However - no much help there as they all seemed very prepared (I guess their advisors can see the questions on youtube before they were asked live) and questions like biggest mistake were answered in a similar manner to the one that you would answer the question about a drawback in a job interview (tacky answer).
There was a review in Ynet regarding where parties stand with regards to technology. Nothing is there actually. And I was wondering, in a sectorial democratic system such as ours, what would be the chances for a hi-tech party, aiming for goals such as technlogy for all and advancing the terms of virtual democracy.
Maybe it will happen, when the stars align. One can dream...
Every single election - which are coming in Israel almost every other year, I have changed my vote, mainly because I was disappointed from the results achieved by the party I voted for. And now the time to vote is coming and I am almost out of options.
I thought about giving my vote to the green party, because I believe that environmentalism is something we should all try to push forward and can use some representation in our rule making systems. However - in a typical Israeli move, instead of one green giant - we have two small parties which will probably not make it, so why waste my vote there?
In order to help me decide I watched an event where questions from "youtube" were coming to the three major party leaders. However - no much help there as they all seemed very prepared (I guess their advisors can see the questions on youtube before they were asked live) and questions like biggest mistake were answered in a similar manner to the one that you would answer the question about a drawback in a job interview (tacky answer).
There was a review in Ynet regarding where parties stand with regards to technology. Nothing is there actually. And I was wondering, in a sectorial democratic system such as ours, what would be the chances for a hi-tech party, aiming for goals such as technlogy for all and advancing the terms of virtual democracy.
Maybe it will happen, when the stars align. One can dream...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)