Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support
One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today, this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release. Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work.
In addition, Google is making its recently introduced phrasebook feature available in that app. The phrasebook, Google said at the time, allows “you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them,” and revisiting them regularly should help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge.”
The phrasebook is now available in Translate’s app menu, where it replaces the app’s ‘favorite’ feature. The service will automatically sync with your Google Account (assuming you are signed in), so any changes you make on your phone will also be reflected on the Google Translate desktop site.
“With your favorite phrases synced across devices,” Google writes, “we hope you’ll never be at a loss for words again.”
It’s worth noting that the iOS version of the app does not currently support translate by camera.
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DealAngel’s new Trends feature helps you book a hotel at the right time to get a good price
DealAngel is a hotel search and booking site that looks to separate itself from the competition in a busy sector by offering price comparisons based on long-term trends to work out if you really are getting a good deal. Now it’s launched a new feature to help you book at the right time too, by advising you on whether you should act now or wait.
Say you’re planning a trip to Amsterdam. The DealAngel Trends service monitors trends in pricing across hotels in the city. If prices have generally been rising lately, DealAngel may advise you to book right away. However, if prices have started to fall, you can sign up for an email alert when they start to go up again. This way, you can hopefully take advantage of a cut-price bargain just before a more widespread price rise in the city.
As someone who finds himself booking hotel rooms regularly, I find that there’s generally not much variation in what the price comparison sites offer, and you can often get just as good a deal by booking directly with a hotel anyway. Backed by Foresight Ventures and having completed TechStars Boulder last year, DealAngel is trying some interesting innovations to make the whole process more worthwhile.
In addition to DealAngel Trends, the startup recently launched an API to allow other sites to take advantage of its service. Expected to launch fully next month, the first partner to take advantage of it was Gogobot, in a partnership announced late last year.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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How to use Foursquare to market your business & reach a new audience
When we think of social media and business, the first few things to come to mind are Facebook and Twitter. Yet, there is one mobile app that tends to get overlooked by businesses: Foursquare. True, it doesn’t have the same numbers that the likes of Facebook and Twitter can boast, but what it does have is a dedicated audience which has made over three billion check-ins.
Regardless of whether you’re a retailer or not, any business can use Foursquare and getting yourself set up is easy. The only thing it needs is you to get involved.
Why Foursquare?
While it has a web presence, Foursquare has been growing quite steadily over the last few years, and offers some unique opportunities for businesses and brands. With over 25 million users globally and 31% of mobile users active on social networks using Foursquare, it has an engaged community and a passionate user base.
Foursquare’s main strength comes from its users, the power of personal recommendation and sharing on different social media sites. By seeing where their friends are going and the places they regularly frequent, they would be more likely to visit if the recommendation is positive. Foursquare doesn’t get the same attention as Facebook or Twitter, but this presents you with a better opportunity to develop customer loyalty through deals. While Facebook has released its new ‘nearby’ function for its app, Foursquare is still the king of check-in and location.
With over 40 million venues and one million businesses to check-in to, there’s a lot of potential to make Foursquare work for you.
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Employers Banned From Asking For Social Media Passwords In California
A newly signed California law forbids employers and universities from asking employees and applicants for their social media passwords. The law was hastily developed in response to a string of reports last spring of employers coercing applicants to “voluntarily” allow businesses to snoop through their Facebook accounts as part of the interviewing process. The United States House of Representatives failed in an attempt to ratify a Federal ban, paving the way for states to take up the responsibility.
Universities and scholarships were also found with sophisticated procedures around monitoring current athletes and student applicants. The University of North Carolina handbook for sports explained, “Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings.”
Facebook responded to the media frenzy by reminding schools, governments, and businesses that giving away passwords was expressly forbidden by their security rules.
Hoping to help Facebook end the practice, the bill will go into effect January 1.
[Via Reuters]
Original post: Employers Banned From Asking For Social Media Passwords In California
Fotopedia Launches Its New Ad Model For iPad, Partners With Flipboard, Jetsetter & National Geographic
Fotopedia, the company best known for it’s travel-focused iOS photo apps, launched its new ad model for the iPad today that will allow advertisers to buy highly targeted ads to its over 12 million users in more than 120 countries. The company, which recently updated many of its apps for the new iPad’s Retina display, says that it’s regularly seeing 10% click-through rates for the ads its featuring in its apps. Fotopedia launched and tested this new model with Flipboard, Jetsetter and National Geographic as its first advertisers.
Advertisers will be able to target users based on geography, their interests, device (iPhone or iPad) and language (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish and French). Jean-Marie Hullot, Fotopedia’s CEO and a former Apple executive who worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT and Apple until 2005, notes that 60% of the company’s traffic is now generated on the iPad. The company’s apps, he also stressed, are very popular in China, Japan, the U.S. and many European countries. Last month, the company also announced that it now gets over 250,000 visits per day and 200 million image views per month.
As for how successful these new ads are, National Geographic Traveler’s editor-in-chief Keith Belows says the company’s Fotopedia campaign results in “tens of thousands of downloads” in just three days.
The ads themselves feature the kind of high-end photography that Fotopedia has become known for and are generally nonintrusive. Fotopedia suggests that advertisers set a budget around $10,000 to $20,000 per week for their campaigns.
Since its launch, Fotopedia has made a slight pivot away from the coffee table book-like large apps it used to produce to smaller and more focused magazine-like apps that are regularly updated with new content. This more focused approach to the apps is likely also helping the company to reach more targeted audiences and the regular free in-app updates are getting users to look at the apps 4.5 times per month.
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