thebigword rises to 12th in world rankings

Leeds, England: 23 June 2010 – The translation, interpreting and language services company, thebigwordGroup, has risen to 12th in the world rankings and has become the largest private language service provider in Northern Europe.

thebigwordGroup, headquartered in Leeds, UK, has increased its world ranking by five places (from 17th) since last year, despite the impact of the global downturn and a highly competitive market.

The global market for language services will reach US$26 billion in 2010, according to market research firm Common Sense Advisory which carried out the study. In its report, ‘Language Services Market 2010’, the firm details the findings of its comprehensive, six-month study, which identified 23,380 unique suppliers of translation and interpreting services across 149 countries.

Globalisation, and the need for businesses to expand their markets during the economic downturn, has continued to fuel thebigwordGroup’s growth.  The company’s turnover has reached US$54.71 million, a 9.6 per cent increase on the previous financial year.

thebigword has invested heavily in staffing, infrastructure and technology to meet the increasing demand from both the public and private sectors.  The company has acquired a new 21,000 sq ft office building in Leeds to house 220 staff in its Global HQ, translation services, and its burgeoning technology business.

A further 45 staff are employed at its Interpreting Centre in London and a new 10,000 sq ft office building has been acquired on Broad Street in New York’s financial district, where staff numbers have increased from three to 40.  thebigword also has offices in Beijing, Tokyo, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Abu Dhabi.

According to Common Sense Advisory, the language services market is growing at an annual rate of 13.15 per cent and is expected to reach UK$38.14 billion over the coming five years.

A significant investment in technology, including the establishment of a separate business, Gould Tech Solutions, will enable thebigword to capitalise on the expected growth of the sector.

thebigword sees innovation as central to its success.  The company’s founder and CEO, Larry Gould, says:  “Innovation is not just the role of our technical staff but the responsibility of everyone from the project managers to our finance team, to make both thebigword and our industry stronger.”

“We’re looking across software and systems, electronic workflow systems, and innovative global telephony solutions to deliver continuous improvement in our services and efficiencies for our clients.

“We’ll be working with our staff, our customers and our community of linguists to provide companies with a high standard of cost-effective language services and technologies to drive their global business development.”

via http://www.thebigword.com

Sony joins e-reader price war

Sony has cut the price of its Reader devices, joining an electronic-reader price war between Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

On Sony’s website, the Daily Edition version of the Reader was listed at US$299.99 ($434.20), down from US$349.99.

The Touch Edition was priced at US$169.99 from US$249.99, and the basic Pocket Edition was discounted to US$149.99 from US$169.99.

Last week, Amazon cut the price on its most expensive Kindle electronic reader, the Kindle DX, to US$379 from US$489.

A week before, it had reduced the price of its cheaper version of the Kindle to US$189, just hours after bookstore chain Barnes & Noble lowered the price of its Nook to US$199.

The price war comes as makers of e-readers anticipate competition from Apple’s iPad tablet computer, which can also function as an e-reader.

It has a starting price of US$499, sports a color screen and has the ability to play video and browse the Web.

Sony could not be reached for comment.

Salesforce Chatterizes 10,000 Of Its Customers First Week After Public Launch

By: Leena Rao

Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said in a statement: “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before.” Chatter was made available to the public last week after four months in private beta. Announced last November, Chatter leverages what Benioff calls the Cloud 2, delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter.

Of course, there is no financial barrier for existing Salesforce customers to use Chatter. For Salesforce customers, Chatter is free all paying users of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter-only user licenses are available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user, per month. So it appears that these 10,000 customers aren’t paying for Chatter.

In contrast, Chatter competitor Yammer now has 70,000 corporate clients, and 800,000+ total seats (users), with over 1,000 paying customers. While 13 percent adoption is certainly impressive in the first week of availability, I think the real test will be to see the adoption of Chatter amongst paying clients.

via http://www.techcrunchit.com

A Day in the Life of a Translator

Remember that old adage, never work with animals or children? This most fundamental advice of old clearly eluded me when I decided to go freelance along with two children, a dog and two cats. Phrases involving plans, mice and men feature strongly in my working day, with organisation flying out of the window along with the computer on occasion.

My typical day begins with a walk through the woods to school. Besides being a very serene start to the day not least for the dog, and especially if I have been at my desk since 5 am it has the additional benefit of allowing me to contra off any chocolate consumed during a sedentary days translation and also to mull over any headlines or anything else requiring quiet contemplation. I often use this time to give translations or editing a final read-through manic multi-tasker that I am.

Once home, medicinal coffee in hand, I make my way to my desk, carefully blinkering out anything vaguely domestic in my path that might hamper my progress. This is somewhat impeded, however, when the dog has raided the larder and the cats are chasing a clearly terrified starling round the kitchen. Faced with feathers, muesli and myriad other items, I find myself having to make a ludicrous decision between rescuing my favourite china and meeting my deadline

Finally seated at my desk, I am immediately conscious of all that I have to get through, the few hours available and the speed with which time passes. Foreign language translation is not something that can be rushed, though the challenge of creating a piece of copy in a restricted timescale is both challenging and immensely satisfying. My advertising and marketing background means that practically everything I handle has a creative slant and I have worked on everything from the transcription of German TV commercials to the adaptation of a new version of Pinocchio.

My bête noire is not so much the pressure of deadlines but the stuff of life that tends to crop up with an almost ironic sense of timing. I have run out of fingers on which to count the number of times that I have just promised to squeeze in an extra six hundred words for a particular afternoon when the phone line crackles with the dulcet tones of the school nurse.

I quickly learned to value my laptop. Having once decided to delay taking my daughter to hospital as there were no obvious signs of bruising or swelling typical of a greenstick fracture I later discovered I now have no qualms about sitting in paediatric A&E with it perched on my knee.

It is also surely no coincidence that there appears to be a definite correlation between a looming deadline and gremlins in the works. I have been found sobbing uncontrollably into my keyboard on occasion and I often yell at the screen it doesnt achieve anything, of course, but I remain ever hopeful that a miracle will occur. I always sleep with a back-up disk under my pillow for good measure. Burglars may not be interested in how you can tell a Frolic dog but I cant take the risk!

I have worked through the night to complete a job and I have lain on the settee with my laptop nursing a fever but I would not swap this life. Come summer, I have been known to relocate my office under the apple tree in the garden. A project manager on the phone once asked, Is that birds I can hear twittering? That reminds me, I must go and vacuum up those feathers.

via http://www.translationdirectory.com

Nokia sells off wireless modem business

By Nancy Gohring

Nokia is selling off its wireless modem business to Renesas Electronics, a move that could help the mobile giant better focus on phone competition and get rid of a business that may have been struggling.

Renesas has agreed to buy the business for $US200 million and will get some Nokia patents as well as 1,100 research and development people. The workers are based in Finland, India, the U.K. and Denmark.

Renesas had been licensing Nokia’s modem technology since 2009 and the companies had already been working together on an HSPA+/LTE (High-Speed Packet Access Plus/Long Term Evolution) platform.

As part of the deal, the companies also plan to form a joint research initiative for future radio technologies.

The agreement effectively lets Nokia outsource a component required for its phones that has become increasingly commoditized, wrote Caroline Gabriel, an analyst with Rethink Research, in a note about the announcement.

In addition, while Nokia has been in the lead in coming out with new technology for standalone wireless modems like dongles, other companies have cornered the bulk of that market, she said. Huawei has 53 percent of the global market for standalone wireless modems and ZTE has 30 percent share, according to research from Berg Insight, Gabriel wrote.

The extent to which such companies have cornered the market is evidence in the complaint that Belgium modem maker Option filed last week at the European Commission. Option alleges that Chinese companies are dumping wireless modems into the European Union at unfairly cheap prices.

The agreement could help Renesas Electronics, a company formed earlier this year after the merger of NEC and Renesas Technology, improve its standing among mobile semiconductor makers, Gabriel said. The Nokia technology fills a gap in Renesas’ wireless portfolio, offering it the possibility of competing with giants like Qualcomm, she said.

Nokia expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter this year.

via http://www.cio.com.au

Back to the Future hoax

by MEGAN LEVY

True Back to the Future fans always knew someone was meddling with the space-time continuum.

But many were fooled this week when a Photoshopped image began circulating on the internet, claiming July 5, 2010 was “Future Day,” the date Marty McFly and Doctor Emmett Brown visit in their time-travelling DeLorean in the 1980s blockbuster.

The rumour spread like wildfire across the globe yesterday and generated a flurry of activity on social networking websites, with Back to the Future becoming a trending topic on Twitter and one of the most searched-for phrases on Google.

But Great Scott! The date was wrong.

In fact, any diehard fan knows the day that Doc and Marty visit in the second film of the trilogy is October 21, 2015.

It is a world of hoverboards and futuristic shoes with automated laces.

While Doc does express a wish to travel 25 years ahead in time in 1985, the date is never entered onto the DeLorean’s dashboard.

Which left many wondering – who was responsible for such a chronological cock-up?

UK-based film website Total Film has claimed responsibility, explaining it like this: “A casual office conversation brought up the ‘fact’ that 5th July 2010 is referenced in Back To The Future (though Doc and Marty never actually go there), so sensing a bit of fun for our Twitter feed (and without checking) we posted the Tweet. Then things got interesting,” the website reported.

The original tweet read: “Great Scott! It’s Future Day! In Back to the Future, Doc Brown sets the time circuits for 25 yrs in the future..that day is today!”.

It soon took off, with the website’s 30,000 followers eagerly re-tweeting the message.

When film buffs began questioning their claim, the website “for a bit of fun” Photoshopped an image of the digital time display from the dashboard of the DeLorean to say ’05 07 2010′ and loaded it onto twitpic.

Underneath the photograph, a caption read: “We got it wrong. Apparently 5th July isn’t mentioned in Back to the Future. So we went back and changed it”.

However, what was meant as a tongue-in-cheek apology just stoked the fire, with the image forwarded as proof that July 5, 2010 was the real date.

A second Photoshopped image is now circulating in cyberspace, with the date changed to July 6.

“So apologies, film fans. We were wrong,” Total Film says.

“It seems some lax research and average Photoshop skills go a long way on Twitter these days.”

via http://www.stuff.co.nz

How to Prepare to Write a Novel

1. Choose the genre that interests you most.
2. Decide who your characters will be.
3. Carefully review the book of baby names and pick names that best suits your characters.
4. Visualize the story’s setting and write a brief description.
5. Write a summary that focuses on the most important parts of the story.
6. Make an outline for each chapter.
7. Begin writing a rough draft.
8. Rewrite the story until you are satisfied that you have done your best.

via http://www.ehow.com

Google Apps For Education Wins Two More States, Rolls Out Training Tools For Teachers

By: Leena Rao

Google has made it fairly clear that adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges is vital to the growth of the productivity suite as a whole. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, Google is announcing that it has signed on two more states, Colorado and Iowa, to extend Google Apps for Education to the 3,000 schools across the two states.

The two states join Oregon, which was the first state to adopt Google Apps for Education in its schools. One of the advantages of “going” Google is the productivity suite’s attractive price point for public schools that are on a budget.

And Google is also rolling out a tool set for for teachers and educators to transition to the cloud-based productivity suite. Google is offering teachers and administrators a free online training center, a set of qualification exams for teachers, and a Certified Trainer and Partner program. The toolset is designed to offer a more self-service approach to adopting Google Apps, and includes in-depth resources on how to use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, as well as tests to certify proficiency in using the suite.

A month ago, Google announced that 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions around the world are using Google Apps. Of course, Microsoft has also recently touted the adoption of its newly launched cloud-based version of Office by Kentucky’s school districts. According to Microsoft, 700,000 students, teachers and staff are using Microsoft’s cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools.

One of the challenges for Google is convincing educational institutions of the security in the cloud. But Google is offering incentives to help mitigate this challenge. Google is providing Google Message Security (GMS) at no charge to schools who sign up with Apps through the end of this year. GMS’ real-time technology filters spam and viruses, reducing downtime and on-site complexity.

We know Google has significant ambitions for Apps as a revenue stream; statewide school deals will only help build out this channel and perhaps eat away at Microsoft’s market share.

via http://www.techcrunchit.com

Borders launches its own Kobo-powered e-book store

By Devin Coldewey

Borders has been rather marginalized in the e-book wars thus far, not having the primacy of Amazon nor the sexy Nookiness of B&N. I liked their official e-reader, the Kobo, but until my opinion counts for points in the market, that doesn’t really improve their position. As promised, Borders is at last rolling out their e-book store today; it’s “powered by Kobo,” which I believe translates to “is Kobo with a layer of paint on top.” The selection should be the same as the existing Kobobooks site, but Borders has their own look and is launching its own versions of the Kobo e-book app (now available for iPhone, Blackberry, and Android).

What will come of this? Well, competition is good, right? I say bring it on. John thinks the Kindle has already won, but Barnes & Noble is optimistic, and Borders isn’t looking for higher than 17% of the e-book market. Can’t they all just get along?

One thing to note: it’s Kobo-powered, but it’s not actually Kobo. If you have books you bought from Kobobooks, they won’t transfer to Borders. Query: if the selection is the same, and the apps are the same, why not just go to Kobo in the first place? I’m guessing Borders will have special pricing and promotions as well as some in-store promotions.

Here’s what it looks like — or you could just go to the site itself and see it live.

via http://www.crunchgear.com

Search engines turn to music

Internet search engines pride themselves as being neutral providers of information.

But as competition mounts to own the connection between fans and online content, tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google increasingly are turning to their search engines to help drive their entertainment content strategies.

In June, Microsoft launched a new entertainment vertical to its Bing search engine, which among other things aggregates full-track streaming from Zune, details on upcoming tours and buy links within the results for any artist, album or song search.

Google put together a similar package last year and is now building a music download service of its own that would be tied to its search engine and Android mobile operating system.

Given the high volume of entertainment-related queries that the search engines handle, it was only a matter of time before they took bold steps into the space.

According to Microsoft, 10 percent of all Internet search queries are entertainment-related, with music lyrics alone accounting for 70 percent of those searches.

With the Bing upgrades, Microsoft is trying to position itself as a better entertainment discovery tool than Google.

While both Google and Bing have links to stream full songs found in search results, Bing has the more complete package with additional details on tour dates, lyrics and buy links.

However, all that may change once Google gets its music act together. Sources confirm that later this year Google will launch a music download service that’s tied to its search engine.

Currently, music searches on Google link to full-song streams provided by MySpace Music, as well as Twitter feeds and other information, which it launched late last year.

Exactly what Google has planned is unclear, but a hint was given during a developers conference for the company’s Android mobile platform in May.

At the event, Google announced the acquisition of Simplify Media, a content-synching technology that the company demonstrated can be used to automatically synch and stream music purchased online to any Android phone containing the technology.

Whether this is an interim step toward an eventual streaming subscription service is unclear, and Billboard hasn’t confirmed any additional details on this point.

Potentially interfering with both plans is an increasingly aggressive effort by the recording industry to have search engines remove links to infringing material.

BPI, the trade group representing UK record labels, raised the stakes in June by issuing a takedown notice to Google, demanding it remove links to 17 songs from third-party websites it deems infringing, such as RapidShare and MegaUpload.

// Google hasn’t yet responded, but its next steps will be telling.

Should Google comply, it would set a precedent that will almost certainly result in a flood of additional takedown notices from every music label and publisher eager to eliminate pirate links on the world’s most popular search engine.

If it refuses, there could be another court fight coming as big if not bigger than the US$1 billion lawsuit Viacom brought against YouTube – which itself is heading to appeal after Google recently won a summary judgment to dismiss the case.

As for Bing, Microsoft senior VP of online services Yusuf Mehdi assures the music industry that it will comply with any takedown requests, but has no plans to alter the search algorithm that determines search results.

“We’re pretty true to the algorithmic ranking in the Web results,” Mehdi says.

“We’re obviously not going to surface that kind of stuff in the Bing box, but the algorithm that determines relevancy of search results we’ll stick with.”

While Bing’s moves are interesting, it’s Google that has the market-moving leverage. According to the most recent data from information services firm Experian Hitwise, Google’s search engine in May led the pack with 72 percent US market share, with Yahoo second (14.4 percent) and Bing third (9.2 percent).

But when it comes to music, all of them stand in the shadow of Apple, which still commands 70 percent of digital music download sales in the United States, according to NPD Group.

While Apple has no presence in online search (yet), both Microsoft and Google are competing with Apple on the rapidly growing mobile platform – Google with Android and Microsoft with the new Windows Series 7.

Successfully tying together a cloud-based music service with an online search and discovery system and a path to mobile phones – not to mention advertising around it all – is the digital content battlefield of the immediate future.

via http://www.stuff.co.nz