Month: October 2010

October at Get Localization and the world of Crowdsourcing

It has been rather busy at our office during last couple of weeks. Additionally we’ve been busy meeting interesting people at different. Sadly we missed #Pyconfi at Turku last week but I hear it was a great event. We just love Python and Django (that powers Get Localization) and it would have been interesting to see what other people have created using them.

But we went to Slush10 and we are happy to see that localization is something that startups really get. We talked to many people and saw many good presentations. One of the things that got our attention was that many startups mention localization as a necessary step in growth of a service and reaching new markets. We couldn’t agree more on this. Localization is not just something you do after you have grown. For many services the localization is the means for growth (see the story about Runtastic). Web services and especially mobile services are really personal. When you serve people personally you serve them with their own language. Nokia’s EVP Niklas Savander put this  very nicely in an interview yesterday: “Location not just navigation will be big in many markers. ‘we have the availability of locally relevant apps. It doesn’t matter if you have 200,000 applications in Vietnam if they are all in English.'” See the story here.

On other news you may have noticed a story by Talouselämä later on picked up by Arctic Startup on how Nokia is putting more emphasis on crowdsourcing and they have a chief of crowdsourcing. Story by ArcticStartup here and original Talouselämä arctic in Finnish. Article gives you a good insight on how to plan and organize your crowdsourcing project.

Runtastic and Get Localization

Just a quick pointer to a story by one of our friends Runtastic here: http://blog.mobclix.com/2010/10/25/how-localization-increased-downloads-by-100-for-runtastic/.

This story is an excellent example of how great services become even better serving their customers when they localize their service. Runtastic experience: over 100% growth in downloads after localization!

We are alive!

Current status

Just a brief status report to remind you guys that the blog and Get Localization itself is really going well and we don’t have plans to go anywhere, except up! We’ve been really busy on improving the site, for example we’ve increased reliability, added some requested format supports like Adobe AIR, Android and basic INI file used in PHP, Windows and others. We have also a demo project that can be used for playing around with the service, see the demo project link at our main page http://www.getlocalization.com.

Regarding reliability, we’ve been doing lots of fixing and polishing so you wouldn’t see any errors when for example importing or exporting your files. We are really happy with the result so you can except Get Localization to get out of the Beta stage hopefully soon.

Nokia World and other events

Get Localization was attending Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit this year. Nokia released lots of great devices and with Qt the development for mobile devices is easier than ever! We’ve been doing some Qt development here as well and can really agree with the message, it’s easy and really powerful platform. With single source code, you can get your application running on Symbian, MeeGo, Maemo, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux etc. Community is also porting it to Android, iPhone and many others it so it’s truly a cross-platform environment.

Get Localization also fully supports Qt localization format. Just upload the file and use crowdsourcing or professional translators do the translation for you. It can’t be easier!

We will be attending numerous events and conferences this fall. Currently confirmed are:

And possibly many others! Let us know if you want to meet (also outside of the list, we are happy to get tips of new conferences). Also if your conference needs a speaker about how localization should be done in year 2010, just let us know!