Last week Jani Penttinen, Founder and CEO made a big announcement on the Xiha blog about a new product called Premium Fan Page. Today, on his way back from Las Vegas, he posted a follow up of his experiences on the CES.
The product is based on Xiha’s technology that enables you to instantly translate Tweets and Facebook updates of your friends when they are writing in a language you don’t understand. In a globalized world with personal networks reaching around the globe a common case.
Premium Fan Page goes a step further or, as Jani wrote in the post, it attacks the holy grail of translation services. Besides machine translation based on Google Translator in real time, Premium Fan Page will add human translation in nearly real time.
Now what is Premium Fan Page you might ask. It aims at solving a list of different problems that companies and personal brands have when acting on the global marketplace.
Quoting Jani in his last blog post:
[...] Typically, when you reach outside of the English speaking world, you’re looking at quite a lot of extra work. First, you need to find a way to produce content in another language. You can either find a native speaker to join your team, or have the content translated from English and assign someone from your team coordinate the process. If you translate the content, you’ll have more issues down the road when someone from that language group attempts to contact you in their native language. And of course, you’re looking at rinse and repeat every time you decide to update the content.
The second problem is, where are you going to publish the content? Are you going to create a dozen different Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts? A number of blogs? Are you going to be able to update all of those regularly? Even if you do manage to do all of that, you’re going to end up with a number of smaller communities while what you really should have is a single place where all your fans are coming to. [...]
I think, everyone who is in this situation, and more and more companies are, can understand the pain points and what a system like PFP can do. The tagline of the product says it: “Connect with your fans. In any language.”
On the CES the service launched with a sneak peak of the new fan page of Angry Birds which will actually become the official website of the game at the end of this month. The secret sauce of PFP is the mix of human and machine translation which generates a high quality website for the users. Official texts like blog posts will be translated by human translators to make sure that the message is consistent in any language whereas comments by users will be most likely translated using translation applications. The website owners will have the choice how much they actually want to have automated and below you can watch a short demo Jani was doing for TechCrunch / CrunchGear.
So how did it come all about? Jani noticed over the years that the posts about Xiha on TechCrunch or Wired did not really had an impact on the growth of the community as it seems that those readers are not the target audience for the platform. If you are not familiar with Xiha, it’s the first social network for multi lingual people. I did an EDUKWEST with Jani, the link is below this article.
Coming back to the problem Xiha had, the posts actually had an effect in another direction. Jani always got emails from companies which asked if they could use the technology behind Xiha for their own websites. And that’s when the idea of Premium Fan Pages was born.
Apparently Jani received great feedback on the CES and I am happy to have him back on EDUKWEST for a follow up on Xiha and his newest venture Premium Fan Page.
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