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Archive for: invest

My Gengo – Translation by People, Not Computers

mygengo_logo-215x76 One of the emerging trends in the online world is to have a translation service. Google Translate is probably the best well known with ad-ons and blog widgets to help people translate web pages, documents and the likes. However, the problem is that it’s often a little too ‘literal’ meaning some sentences don’t make sense when translated. They get ‘lost in translation’, if you will.

My Gengo allow users to upload a document, have it translated by a professional and then returned to them at a very low rate (normally 70% lower than freelance translators charge on sites like Elance). I think this is a great idea. A few times I have needed letters and documents translated for my business and have had to spend quite a lot of money to ensure they’re translated properly – especially when I’m sending them to a client or a potential one.

The site offers translation services between languages like English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. They recently received investment from tech entrepreneur Dave McClure so it looks like this start-up might just be a success in the near future.

Yelp Walks Away from Google’s Half a Billion Dollars

yelp logo Over the past week, Yelp and Google have been in heated debates concerning Google acquiring the service which was founded by two former PayPal employees and allows users to submit reviews of their local services. After days of deliberation both parties had agreed on a price – half a billion dollars. It seemed that everyone was quite happy with the deal until the CEO of Yelp Jeremy Stoppleman notified Google over the weekend that the deal was off.

What happened?

Well nobody knows for sure but it must have taken something big for Yelp to walk away from half a billion dollars and pressure from internet giant Google. My guess is that another offer has been tabled. Obviously, Yelp wan to keep their cards close to their chest should this deal fall through and need to go back to Google. Perhaps one of Google’s rivals such as Microsoft or Apple have decided they want Yelp?