I absolutely love the beauty, silence and peace Nature provides. I am more of the Walden-type than the High-tech-type. No question about it. But one lives the times one is destined to live and the Zeitgeist is more tinted with High-tech colours than those of Mother Nature. Ignoring it would be sheer foolishness.
So, after this little touchdown with reality I continue building the choo-choo-train of Amazing Internet Enterprises (my own little AIE-train) with my writing device and these humble texts I send to the world via The Huffington Post (what a wonderful post!)
The world is huge and I am small and I like to do things in an orderly way, sort of, so I won't abandon the Finnish scene until I have found out about all the Amazing Internet things going on in here. And I have a new discovery that flows like a clear river and is so adequately called Transfluent.
No one can deny English is the international language par excellence, but let's not forget that there are other languages spoken by heaps of people in the world. Spanish and Chinese are two of these; something Transfluent wisely acknowledges. And anyways, there are so many languages used daily by millions of people. No need to ignore any of them.
Transfluent is a rapid translating service used for Facebook, Twitter, Websites, press releases, blog posts, magazine articles, Web stores and even game dialogues. Humans not machines power Transfluent, which means that it automates the process of translation not the text to be translated; therefore the translations are never clumsy or irrational, as often happens with translations done by most of the automatic translating services. (I once read a hilarious column written by a Finnish journalist in which she had had translated a fragment of the Bible with the Google translator, first from Finnish to some other language, then back to Finnish and then to a third language and so forth. The final translation just made me cry with laughter! But that's another story, let's go back to this fascinating Transfluent). When a client puts forth a commission of translation, it will take Transfluent 15 minutes to publish the translated text in the Web. How is this possible? Crowdsourcing is the answer (so of our Zeitgeist!)
Transfluent has 15,000 professional translators from all around the world working with more than 60 different languages. Day or night one of the 15,000 will be available to perform the translation in the required short minutes. The service offers a wonderfully effortless possibility for anybody to publish its communiqués in various languages. Getting started with Transfluent is as easy as clicking a few times on your computer, tablet or smart phone. No need to be a high-tech genius. Entities as varied as Aalto University in Finland and rock star Michael Monroe (ex-singer of the now historical Hanoi Rocks) are clients of Transfluent. Michael Monroe, for instance, has his facebook translated into Japanese to the highest delight of his Japanese fans. And he can communicate with them thanks to Transfluent, even thought they do not share a common language (as far as I know, Mr. Monroe cannot speak Japanese).
Though created by the mathematically brilliant brains of Finnish Jani Penttinen, Transfluent focuses at the moment its entrepreneurial activity on the US market and has for a mission to bring communication in Spanish and Chinese in the USA.
In 2010 16.3% of the US population was Hispanic. This translates to 50.5 million people. That's a lot of people. The growth rate from July first 2005 to July first 2006 was 3.4%; that is about three and a half times the growth rate of the nation's total population. The projected Hispanic population of the USA for July first 2050 is 132.8 million people, or 30.2% of the nation's total projected population for that date. There are towns in the USA where you hear more Spanish spoken than English, and there are Americans, whose English is not so good. A company -say a store for example - who can offer its services also in Spanish will definitely be more competitive than a company who uses only English. People love to be served in their mother tongue! Nowadays many client services work much better and faster through the twitter than the phone. No store or company wants to see complaints about their services in twitter, too many thousands of people will find out about it (not like on the phone where everything stays between the caller and the receiver of the call). So Transfluent works fantastically with client services that function through twitter. Actually, Transfluent translates President Obama's twitter into Spanish. Impressive!
What comes to the Chinese community in the USA it is not as big as the Hispanic but still important. In the census of 2010 it numbered approximately 3.8 million people. And well, the commerce the US does with China is huge and in China English is not much spoken so all communication needs to be done in Chinese. The use of this mysteriously beautiful language is a must.
So here we are stretching the limits, blowing away barriers imposed by language differences and helping enterprises and rock stars to be more client and fan-friendly. Not bad at all!
I have to admit that it is not only Mother Nature who surprises me, but the Internet-universe seems to have a lot of interesting and impressive surprises too, even for skeptics like me!