As part two of my series portraying translation businesses on the Internet I did a KWestions with Jani Penttinen of Xiha. You might remember this name from an EDUKWEST we did several months ago but this time it was all about his latest venture PremiumFanpage where he is also CEO.
The original idea of PremiumFanpage is to give businesses the opportunity to connect with their fans or also users in general in any language.
PremiumFanpage offers two different types of translation one machine automated and the other one is a real human translation that has sort of a crowd-sourced approach to allow a close to realtime translation of a tweet or document. That however varies depending on the target language and also where the translators are located; very similar to what Paul Sulzberger stated as a competitive advantage in his KWestions.
When Jani first introduced me to the idea and business model early this year, we both actually thought there would be quite some potential in the machine automated translation option due to its competitiveness when it come to pricing. What the team found out though was quite the opposite, the vast majority of businesses accept the higher price and largely prefer the human translation for both tweets or facebook messages and of course also the longer documents such as press releases.
PremiumFanpage comes with different options depending on what the company wants or needs. To get an impression what is possible you should have a look at the Angry Birds case-study on their website.
The more I look into the translation market on the Internet, the more I see it as a sweet spot! In our interview you’ll learn how this business came almost as a lucky coincidence to Jani and it how it quickly turned into some serious business.
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