Google Translate gains support for its 66th language: Cambodia’s Khmer
Google has announced Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, as the 66th language supported by Google Translate.
There are an estimated 16 million native speakers of Khmer, mainly concentrated in Cambodia. Apple added Khmer support to OS X Lion back in 2011.
Google Translate now comes with its own Khmer virtual keyboard and support for phonetic text. The company said that adding the language had proved difficult because of a lack of Khmer resources on the Web and the fact that words aren’t usually separated by spaces.
The new language support follows on the addition of Lao as Google Translate’s 65th language last September.
Google promised that it continues to work on additional languages. If you’re language isn’t supported yet, the company recommends that you use it on publicly available websites and upload translations to its translator toolkit.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Google says this is the Khmer translation for “The Next Web”: បណ្តាញនេះបន្ទាប់.
Image credit: iStockphoto
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Digg announces plan to build an RSS reader with ‘the best of Google Reader’s features,’ including its API
Following Google’s announcement to kill off Google Reader on July 1st, Digg on Thursday revealed it is building an RSS reader. The company is planning to reproduce many of the features from Google’s soon-to-be-defunct service, and throw in some new ones as well.
“We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting,” the company promises. “Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we can cook up a worthy successor.”
Digg says its team consists of “daily (hourly) users of Google Reader” and so it is “convinced that it’s a product worth saving.” In fact, the company claims it had been planning to build “a reader” in the second half of 2013, but Google’s announcement yesterday has accelerated the process and moved the project “to the top of our priority list.”
It’s worth noting that Reuters columnist Anthony de Rosa, first posted about the news last night on Facebook. He kicked off the rumor with these words: “Exclusive: Digg will release a new reader with all the features of Google Reader plus some additional ones. More details tomorrow.” Now Digg has confirmed the plans.
Most importantly, Digg is asking the community for help. The company wants its fans to explain what they want to see in a Google Reader replacement over at Digg.com/Reader and for anyone looking to help directly to apply at Digg.com/Jobs.
Personally, I’d be happy with a complete port ready three months from now. Additional features can come later.
See also – As Google Reader is killed off, Flipboard, Feedly and others step up with RSS alternatives and Former Google Reader product manager confirms our suspicions: Its demise is all about Google+
Image credit: Jan Willem Geertsma
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Evolution: Microsoft moving past the Patch Tuesday update cycle for its Windows 8 apps
Today Microsoft noted a change in the security update policy for several applications that it built and has deployed as part of its Windows 8 operating system. For its first-party apps that ship with Windows 8, Microsoft won’t update them in keeping with its normal, monthly pattern of security fixes.
Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month, is a ritual moment in which Microsoft releases a slew of updates across its product lines; Windows, Windows Server, Office, and other applications are given patches in a single push, helping IT bosses handle the update process with some order.
Most folks simply have Windows Update turned on, allowing for patches to flow without delay.
However, with Windows 8, Microsoft delivers a number of applications through its new Windows Store. Given that, how should it manage their security updates? The company has decided to follow what I call the pedestrian path, by simply releasing updates as they are ready, just as any third-party developer might.
Your Mail app, therefore, might pick up a security fix on a Thursday. Progressive. Here’s Microsoft today on the decision:
App security updates can be delivered on days other than the second Tuesday of the month.
App security updates will be documented in a standing security advisory that:
- Provides additional information and notifies customers that an update is available for them to install.
- Is accompanied by a unique Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article number for reference to details about the changes.
There is an exception to this, in that if a security bug affects software that would normally be fixed during Patch Tuesday, the update will go out to both at the same time. This limits the ability for hackers to note a fix in one piece of code, and exploit the same weakness in other software.
Microsoft’s decision to update these apps in a dynamic fashion is a sea shift from its old policies. It’s also the right choice.
Top Image Credit: Amit Chattopadhyay
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DealAngel Launching API To Let Other Sites Build Hotel Pricing Intelligence Into Their Wares
DealAngel, the site that lets you search for hotels and compare prices based on their historic and broader market value to ensure you really are getting a good deal, has launched a private beta of its API — essentially adding a B2B element to its otherwise consumer-facing offering. It’s a move that makes quite a bit of sense, too, potentially opening up DealAngel’s data to additional use-cases and giving the startup an alternative revenue stream. The API should go fully public by April, while Social trip planner Gogobot is the first to add such integration.
It also comes at a time when the San Francisco/Prague-based company is ramping up its European expansion: DealAngel is now able to apply its hotel pricing intelligence to hotels in the UK, Germany, and over two dozen “strategic” cities elsewhere in Europe such as Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, and Prague, in addition to major cities in Russia and Israel. It also targets much of North America.
DealAngel’s proposition is based on the idea that the cheapest offer for a hotel in a particular class or location may not be the best deal in terms of its true market value. Hotel prices online often claim to offer significant savings but very often mask the true value when compared to similar hotels and what you could normally expect to pay. The company tackles this problem with technology that looks at “millions” of data points across the Web to determine a hotel’s real market value, taking into account things like location, star-rating, comparable offers, and most crucially, how that hotel’s pricing has changed over time. In this respect it’s akin to how a stock broker tracks the stock market. Or, perhaps more accurately, given some of the dirty tricks employed by the travel industry, like playing a slot machine but with the slot machine’s maker standing over your shoulder giving you tips.
The newly-released API, which will be offered on a tiered pricing model based on usage, lets other sites build DealAngel’s technology into their own wares. It doesn’t, however, provide real-time pricing — it’s presumed that travel sites and other prospective users of the API will already have this type of data via their own suppliers — but focuses purely on the additional market intelligence aspect so that they can easily spot a good deal from a rip-off.
So, who might use the DealAngel API? The most obvious use-case is an Online Travel Agent (OTA) who could rank its real-time offers according to how good each deal really is, similar to DealAngel’s own consumer-facing site. Another example given by the company is a hotel wholesaler or a corporation negotiating special bulk rates for a particular hotel who could use the API to compare quotes. Likewise, says DealAngel, a daily deals site could use the API to check whether a 50% off “super deal” is actually that good before publishing it, helping to combat “deal fatigue”.
Interestingly, in some respects the new API sees DealAngel come full circle. It originally considered offering market intelligence to the hotel industry, before deciding that it would be better (and I suspect, more exciting) to offer a consumer play directly. That’s a tough and incredibly saturated market to crack, however, so a B2B bet of some sorts is almost certainly worth making.
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Anne Frank for iPad and Nook reimagines The Diary of a Young Girl for the digital age
The story of Anne Frank is one of the most well-known first-hand accounts to emerge from the Second World War, one telling in intimate detail the persecution suffered by Jewish people in Europe.
The Diary of a Young Girl has been the basis of numerous plays and movies, documenting Anne Frank’s experiences holed-up and hidden in German-occupied Amsterdam.
And now, the story of Anne Frank has been brought well and truly into the 21st century digital age, with an interactive, multimedia-centric book for iPad and Nook, available in the UK only for now, with the US to follow shortly.
Anne Frank has three main components – the diary itself, Story Trails and Timeline.
The diary itself is exactly as you know it (if you’ve read it before), except it includes a series of links to illustrative content, such as photos, videos, maps and additional background information.
For example, you can see a full 3D model of Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam, which helps to bring the story to life.
The Story Trails section lets you delve into key aspects of the story, linking directly to excerpts of the diary with additional notes and narration on the highlighted segments. This is particularly useful for those wishing to get a good overview of the story, without actually reading the full book – though I don’t think that’s the intention of this specific section.
Similarly, Timeline takes you through an easy-to-follow calendar of key events in the Anne Frank story. There are actually dual timelines, featuring family images from Anne’s life before the war, as well as historic wartime images from international archives accompanied by commentary on key events.
Anne Frank for iPad is everything you’d expect from such an offering – it doesn’t just take the diary and convert it into an iOS app – it uses the full features available for Apple’s omnipresent tablet, and makes it an engaging experience for the modern student or history buff.
That said, some may argue that all the bells and whistles actually distract from the already-compelling story, written by Anne Frank herself.
Indeed, the app may be of particular appeal to children, but adults looking to revisit the story or pick up on it for the first time, should still find value in this app. And this is indicative of the direction many books are going, as we saw recently with the John Lennon Letters app, which also re-imagined the original book version.
Penguin released the app with digital producers Beyond the Story, and charitable foundation Anne Frank Fonds, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday. It’s available in the UK only, and costs £6.99.
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