IMUG Past Events Archive: 2009
2009 Events
- Dec: 9th Annual Holiday Bash & Potluck
- Nov: China Briefing: Sourcing and Manufacturing - What Everyone Needs To Know
- Oct: iPhone Localization is Easy: Ride Along with Carticipate
- Sep: iPhone International Market Update
- Aug: Mobile Multilingual OCR, Translation and Language Learning
- Jul: Helping the Little Guy Localize (or, Size Shouldn't Matter)
- Jun: Internationalizing an iPhone App: MobileAppLoader
- May: Facebook i18n & Translation
- Apr: Apple iPhone China Market Opportunities for Application Developers
- Mar: Globalization and Software Test Automation
- Feb: Emerging Localization Technologies: Crowdsourcing and Machine Translation
- Jan: Smartphones and Social Networking in the US and China
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2009 Event Announcements:
December 18, 2009, 7-9 PM
The 9th Annual IMUG Holiday Bash & Potluck
Our traditional holiday bash always features unusual food and good conversation, informal presentations of photos from recent travel to exotic locations around the world, plus recent projects members and guests have been involved in, discussion of multilingual software issues, useful websites and more.
IMUG supplies free pizza and drinks, you don't need to bring a thing, but we always look forward to the fantastic variety of ethnic dishes the less culinarily-challenged among us can muster up for this annual food-fest. That always takes things to a higher level. You needn't prepare more than 3 to 4 portions worth, and in fact you needn't prepare anything at all. Come as you are, with or without a potluck contribution, but do come prepared to eat!
November 19, 2009, 7-9 PM
China Briefing: Sourcing and Manufacturing - What Everyone Needs To Know
Speaker: Rosemary Coates, Blue Silk Consulting
Doing business in China is tougher than you think. Not only is the culture vastly different, but China’s experience in manufacturing is also still developing.
Through 20 extraordinary executive interviews, Rosemary Coates captured the essence of sourcing and manufacturing in China. These executives offer their personal experiences, going beyond simple cultural do’s and don’ts. Together with her own experiences throughout Asia, she has authored a new book, 42 Rules for Sourcing and Manufacturing in China, available at:
Happy About (publisher)
Amazon.com books
Amazon Kindle Editions
Rosemary Coates is the President of Blue Silk Consulting. She is a seasoned executive with an MBA, 20 years experience in Supply Chain Management, Project Management and Systems Consulting. Prior to BSC, she was a Senior Director at SAP, the Supply Chain Practice Leader at KPMG Peat Marwick and at Answerthink, and a Regional Manager at Hewlett-Packard.
Ms. Coates has consulted with global and domestic clients, VCs and PE firms on IT systems and business processes. She has considerable international experience and has worked for extended periods in Asia and Europe. Her experience spans a broad range of industries including High Technology, Software, Chemicals, Health Care, Consumer Products, Industrial Products, Food Distribution, Transportation, Publishing, Retail, Oil and Gas. She has extensive knowledge and experience in manufacturing and outsourcing in China.
Ms. Coates is a Licensed United States Customs Broker and an Area Response Designee, US Department of Transportation and Federal Emergency Management Agency. She is a Lifetime Credentialed Instructor, California Colleges and Universities. She taught Management, International Business and Importing and Exporting for 10 years.
October 15, 2009, 7-9 PM
iPhone Localization is Easy: Ride Along with Carticipate
Speaker: Steffen Frost, CEO, Carticipate
Carticipate is a social network for ride sharing on the iPhone. Ease of localization is one of the features of Apple's SDK for the iPhone which allowed Carticipate to translate its app into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian with some help from family and friends.
Carticipate is also available in English in all countries with an App Store, however the app is still localized for locale (time/date/number/letter formats) because this is handled by the iPhone's general settings.
That level of localization is normally not feasible for small companies, which makes the iPhone a unique platform for reaching a global market. In this presentation, Steffen Frost will show how the iPhone handles localization from a user perspective and demonstrate how Carticipate manages translation with a template file that is editable by a non-technical person. Also, Steffen will discuss the international address format and explain how it is germane to Carticipate.
Steffen Frost is Founder and CEO of Carticipate, Inc., where his responsibilities are in product marketing and business development. Prior to Carticipate, Steffen founded Cinegest in early 2006 with the goal of developing a high speed solid state storage technology, prior to which he co-founded Impulse Devices, a profitable company where he currently is a member of the Board. He previously worked in the semiconductor industry with 8 years of field sales & management, and 2 years of digital IC design. Steffen received his BSEE from CSU, Chico.
September 17, 2009, 6:30 - 9 PM
iPhone International Market Update
Panel: Dan Butterfield of iPhonAsia, David Cao of ExtendLogic and others.
Another joint production of IMUG and the iPhone for Business MeetUp group, this event will offer several short presentations on international business opportunities for iPhone developers around the world, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. Europe, China, Japan, and other areas will be covered by experts in each country market.
Dan Butterfield is the Managing Editor of iPhonAsia - a website covering iPhone with particular emphasis in China, Japan and Korea.
Over the course of his career, Dan has held senior management positions in the securities industry and was responsible for development of Web 2.0 applications sold through national sales channels. Dan is a subject matter expert on the mobile telecom industry in China and is familiar with political and cultural aspects of doing business in Asia. Dan has written numerous articles on mobile telecom in the Pacific Rim and developed friendships with expats, journalists, telecom analysts and app developers across Asia. You can follow Dan on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/idannyb
David Cao is the CEO of ExtendLogic, an enterprise mobile products and solutions company has businesses in US, China, and Singapore. David is the organizer of the iPhone for Business Meetup. He is also a smartphone advocate, travels to China frequently and organized a Mobile Innovation Forum in China. You can follow David on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/david_cao
Refreshments will be provided and admission will be free thanks to our corporate sponsors! Please arrive at 6:30 to take advantage of this generous offer and to meet members of IMUG and the visiting group. Many thanks to Access Growth and Tech CU for providing the food, and to Rhomobile for covering the IMUG non-member event fee. All IMUG events are free to members.
August 20, 2009, 7-9 PM
Mobile Multilingual OCR, Translation and Language Learning
Speaker: Rick Pierson, ABBYY
ABBYY is a leading provider of document conversion, data capture and linguistic software. The key areas of ABBYY's research and development include document recognition technologies and applied linguistics. In this presentation, we will get a chance to see ABBYY's latest mobile technology at work.
FotoTranslate takes a picture of a sentence or small paragraph, then allows you highlight a word and get a side-by-side dictionary definition in two languages. Currently English, German, French, Spanish and Russian are supported. FotoTranslate is not yet in public release, but was demonstrated at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year and will launch on the Symbian platform soon.
Lingvo x3 Mobile, a dictionary and language tutor application, offers offer a convenient way to learn a new languages. Whenever you have a few minutes of downtime, you can practice a new language! Lingvo x3 Mobile is available in multilingual versions offering various combinations of English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and other languages, within eight possible language interfaces: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. Lingvo x3 Mobile is currently available for Windows Mobile and Symbian handsets.
Snap & Translate was created by an ABBYY customer. Led by OCR pioneer, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, KNFB developed this application using ABBYY technology to take a picture of any printed text - such as menus, signs, placards, and even books - and translate it on your smartphone. Snap & Translate supports 20 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish and Russian, and currently works on Symbian handsets. The application is available for sale on the Nokia OVI store.
Rick Pierson is Director of Business Development for ABBYY's Mobility Group. Rick has more than 20 years of experience in establishing and maintaining top dollar accounts for leading communications technology companies. As director of business development for ABBYY, Rick helps create and further expand licensing deals for ABBYY development tools and mobile applications with mobile phone OEMs and application developers. Prior to ABBYY, Rick served as director of business development for mobility and gaming at Immersion Corp. While there, Rick facilitated business deals with industry leaders in the Global 1000 including Microsoft, Logitech, LG and Nokia. His extensive executive management background also includes positions with AT&T Labs (GeoSphere) and ipVerse.
July 16, 2009, 7-9 PM
Helping the Little Guy Localize (or, Size Shouldn't Matter)
Speakers: Bob Zoller and Phillip Bensaid, 16watts
16watts, creators of activeconference - a teleconferencing API for web applications - are tackling the technical and practical challenges developers face when localizing their applications and websites.
Please join Phillip Bensaid and Bob Zoller of 16watts to take a peek at Fluent.ly, their new beta platform for community-based localization and to participate in a discussion on engaging users and non-professionals in localization efforts. They will show Fluently and provide beta access to attendees who express an interest. Most importantly though, Philip and Bob hope to initiate a lively discussion with IMUG members about this recently controversial topic.
16watts (named after Edison's first widely marketed light bulb wattage) is a small collective of developers and designers focused on making tools to help developers create richer, more engaging applications. 16watts is Bob Zoller, Carl Yestrau, Phillip Bensaid and friends.
Bob Zoller has been developing web applications since 1996, back when they were called "shopping carts." After helping build a successful ISP (acquired by Highspeed), he spent four years growing a software development company in the aerospace industry (acquired by Mercer). Hungry to deploy web applications at scale, Bob joined Yahoo! where he worked on various social products (360, Groups, Open Strategy) for two and half years.
Phillip Bensaid, as a dual citizen of the US and Canada who is of Peruvian and North African descent, finds he has to localize himself several times a day. A user interface designer since 1997, Phillip has worked in Paris, Halifax, NS and San Francisco. He joined the global design firm Frog design in 2000 and for 7 years led numerous large-scale web and application design initiatives for companies like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Localization and globalization were often a major component of these projects. As an entrepreneur he been confronted with the challenges small development teams face when considering localization. Fluent.ly is a direct response to those learnings.
June 18, 2009, 7-9 PM
Internationalizing an iPhone App
Speaker: Zvika Ashkenazi, MobileAppLoader
Development of MobileAppLoader presented some interesting internationalization and localization challenges. Yet global accessibility was essential to achieve the developer's vision: that every business should have an iPhone app on the iTunes App Store to connect with customers. This required an application that would allow small businesses anywhere on the planet to create an iPhone application and help them submit it to the store. The question was, "How to get there?"
Launched last month, with 150 customer applications deployed so far and millions more to come, MobileAppLoader is an innovative marketplace where developers can post their application templates and where businesses can buy templates for upload of customized content. The result is customized applications posted on the App Store. MobileAppLoader provides developers an alternative revenue model. Instead of charging subscribers, developers sell their application templates to businesses. For any business this is the most cost-effective way to get customized applications without hiring a dedicated development team or source customized development.
Zvika Ashkenazi has been in the forefront of the mobile industry for the last decade. From launching mobile games in Europe as early as 2001 to bringing mobile e-mail to millions of users at Yahoo!, Zvika's life mission is to innovate and create. Having generated several patents in the mobile space, he has embarked on a new mission to change how mobile applications are built, traded, and deployed. His professional achievements in the fields of marketing and product management span three continents and involve planning, positioning, and writing specifications for the next generation of products and solutions, based on direct contact with customers and a strong understanding of market trends. Zvika has a M.Sc. degree from Tel-Aviv University in Biomedical Engineering. His Masters thesis was implemented to save lives during car crashes.
May 21, 2009, 7-9 PM
Facebook i18n & Translation
Speakers: David Ellis, Computational Linguist / Software Engineer (Internationalization) and Nico Vera, Software Engineer, Facebook.
A talk on Facebook's internationalization process, focusing on the social networking site's crowd-sourced translations (application and process; dynamic, social content) to provide native language services for over 200 million users.
David Ellis has drawn on his background in computational linguistics (research in academia and industry) to help build a community-driven translation tool. This technology allows Facebook to continue grow at an incredible pace worldwide, and is available to developers on Platform, including external sites via Connect. David had earlier worked on the News Feed team, and continues to dabble in natural language processing, engineering recruiting puzzles and a variety of other efforts. He holds a BA with honors in linguistics from Brown University, and has published often (in journals, conferences, book-chapters, along with a pending patent).
Nico Vera is an engineer at Facebook, where he works on the Internationalization team that developed an application to allow the Facebook community to translate the site from English to other languages. Nico has been a Facebook Engineer for over 3 years, and has made significant contributions in the areas of Privacy, SEO, and Internationalization. He holds a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, is passionate about using technology for social change, and is striving to make Facebook available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages.
April 16, 2009, 7-9 PM
Apple iPhone China Market Opportunities for Application Developers
Speakers: David Cao of ExtendLogic and Danica Brinton of LocLabs.
This panel was a joint production of IMUG and the iPhone for Business MeetUp group.
iPhone Opportunities in China
David Cao
Rumor has it the iPhone will launch in China within a month! Based on his close relationships with Chinese carriers and his experience localizing for the Chinese market, David Cao will offer an overview of the smartphone market in China, give us a high-level view of the overall smartphone market and introduce the major players in the carrier space.
David will then delve into specifics on the iPhone market in China, including China Unicom and the iPhone, Chinese consumer spending on downloads, the iPhone's potential in China, and possible business models for US iPhone app developers planning to enter the China market including licensing, downloading (contracting, agent), and joint ventures.
Localization for iPhone: the World of Possibilities!
Danica Brinton
For the past 2 years, Danica and her localization agency, LocLabs, have been involved in the localization of iPhone and production of iPhone-related marketing media into 18 languages.
Danica is also leading the production of 16 international versions of Second Life to ship on multiple platforms, including iPhone. Most recently, Danica and LocLabs have been localizing social networking applications and casual games for a number of traditional as well as emerging mobile markets.
In her presentation, Danica will share her recent experiences. She will also highlight some surprising discoveries around global adoption and new market opportunities for mobile applications and games. Finally, Danica will show new localization models and user-engagement strategies particularly suitable for these new territories and the iPhone platform.
About the speakers:
David Cao is the CEO of ExtendLogic, an IT consulting and outsourcing company dedicated to mobile industry solutions. Based on its close relationship with China Carriers, David Cao will talk about the iPhone opportunities in China, especially for localizing the popular apps for Chinese users.
Danica Brinton is a veteran of international product management and localization with an always avid interest in the latest technologies and trends. In addition to managing Linden Lab's international initiatives, Danica's agency, LocLabs, supports Apple's localization and international marketing efforts. Previously, Danica led internationalization and localization of Ask.com's search engine, launching the brand into 16 markets. Earlier, Danica managed localization of the first 4 generations of iPod, iTunes and iLife application suite. Danica started in the industry as a technical translator for HP, and Motorola. While still a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she was a foreign-language voice-over talent and cultural advisor on a number of video games (most prominently the Prince of Persia series)."
March 19, 2009, 7-9 PM
Globalization and Software Test Automation
Speaker: Dana Li, hiSoft Technology International
Software/application globalization is no longer a new concept today for most ISVs. Companies are always looking for a proper way to standardize globalization processes, from Unicode adoption, to translation management and quality assurance for localized software.
The speaker will discuss how to lead globalization development teams, particularly the leveraging of tools and industry practices for efficiency and process evolution. Among all the globalization tasks in SDLC, quality assurance is one of the key areas. This presentation will briefly illustrate how the testing of multilingual applications is automated, and how a centralized globalization center armed with automation makes a QA manager’s life easier.
Dana Li is Business Development Manager for hiSoft. With over 15 years of industry experience at EBay, Morgan Stanley Barra, Genentech and E*Trade, she focuses on localization and globalization business, managing major accounts including Google, VMware, Adobe and Yahoo.
February 19, 2009, 7-9 PM
Emerging Localization Technologies: Crowdsourcing and Machine Translation
Speaker: Anna Schlegel, Acclaro
Localization is adding to its more traditional ways. How can companies like Facebook, Google, Adobe, and Sun among others divulge information as fast as possible, to as many audiences as possible? Learn what these new technologies are: Crowdsourcing, and Machine Translation.
Anna Schlegel is Director, Localization at Acclaro. Anna brings more than fifteen years of experience in senior management specializing in globalization strategy, localization infrastructure and translation management. Anna has been Director of Globalization at VMware, VeriSign, and managed localization and web globalization teams at Xerox and Cisco.
Anna is currently working at Acclaro an international translation and localization firm that helps the world’s leading brands succeed across cultures. With its global headquarters in New York and offices in San Francisco, Boston, Buenos Aires and Paris, the agency translates websites, marketing campaigns, documents and software to give clients an authentic voice in key language markets. Since its founding in 2002 Acclaro has grown rapidly while maintaining a customized, personal approach. Acclaro’s global team of technical and linguistic experts has served as a trusted partner to industry leaders and global businesses.
January 15, 2009, 7-9 PM
Smartphones and Social Networking in the US and China
Speakers: Dave Weir and Brian Zhou of ExtendLogic
This interactive presentation will focus on the current trends of social networking and smartphone popularity in the U.S and China, and how they are being implemented on the iPhone, including the integration with iPhone GPS, Camera features. Audience members are encouraged to share their insight into social networking on the iPhone in these countries and beyond. In addition, there will be a social networking demo of an application created by ExtendLogic.
Dave Weir is Vice President of ExtendLogic. Dave has over 20 years of experience in Information Systems and Software Quality Assurance Management as well as Technical and Communications Training in the high tech industry, locally and internationally. Over the last ten years, this experience has enabled him to effectively build, re-engineer, and manage successful technical Software Quality Assurance teams in resource-constrained environments, both onshore and offshore. Furthermore, Weir has leveraged his skills in Software Quality and Communications to optimize the entire Software Development Lifecycle as well as other communication-intensive functions such as Marketing.
Before joining ExtendLogic, Weir maintained a consulting practice in Software Quality Assurance Management, with a particular focus on start-ups that engage offshore vendors. Prior to that, he held a variety of Director and Managerial positions in the software field in industries ranging from management consulting to computer hardware/software to telecommunications. In addition to his work in software, Weir has been an instructor of Public Speaking for adults in California and in Japan.Weir holds an M.B.A in Information Systems Management/International Business from New York University, Stern School of Business, and B.A.’s in Economics and Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Brian Zhou is the Business Development Manager of ExtendLogic. Brian previously worked in QA and pre-sales in mobile industry for almost 3 years in Extendlogic's Xi'an Office, and holds a Bachelor Degree of Computer Science from PLA Xi'an Telecommunication College.
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