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Gaia GPS

Creating a New Translation Paradigm – Part 2

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about making a game-like translation site, similar to 99Designs, Crowdspring, and StackOverflow. Recently, I have been using Mechanical Turk to get translations done for Gaia GPS and our other iPhone apps, and that process made me start dreaming about a better way translate text.

There was a great conversation about this on Hacker News, and I learned a lot about the space. People told me they would in fact use this site, they told me how they would use the site, and I also got a bunch of great research on the subject, including a business plan from a very intelligent and thorough Sloan grad. So, now I’m doubly excited, and I am going to do this idea after all. This may actually be the first business idea I have had that truly doesn’t seem to exist, which is another reason I’m interested in the project.

I am going to try and get a prototype done this week, with the aid of my two co-founders. It won’t be pretty, but it will aim for simple and functional from the start. To get started, I have sketched out the core features I think should be in this website, as well as some potential names, because that’s the fun part. If anyone out there has more ideas on this site, or feedback on this sketch, please post your thoughts on the Hacker News forum. Also, if you think this is a great project too, feel free to steal any of these ideas and try to implement it yourself. We’ll race you to the finish line 🙂

After I firm up the base functionality, I’ll wireframe the site and create a data model to share and discuss.

Translator Features

  • submit translations
  • edit translations
  • revert edits of lower ranked translators
  • profile shows points earned in each language
  • enter name, description of skills, and picture in profile

Requester Features

  • submit text to be translated
  • offer a $ bounty on translations (put bounty into Escrow, and can accept a given translation or the community’s votes decide who gets it)
  • view versioned history of translations, with ability to revert edits
  • enter name, description in profile

Scoring (per language and overall)

  • +1 point for voting
  • +3 points for submitting a translation
  • +10 points for having the accepted translation
  • +/-1 point per vote gotten on a translation
  • +2 points for editing a translation
  • -4 points for having an edit reverted and flagged by the owner or a high level translator (reverter chooses whether to dock points)

Other Notes

  • Login in via OpenAuth (same as StackOverflow)
  • what should I use for payments? maybe start with Amazon and PayPal or something?
  • threaded comments on translations (use my AJAX comment widget or Disqus?)
  • requires a simple interface to request a translation in multiple languages
  • translators can revert the edits of anyone lower ranked, and they must leave a comment
  • moderators will police the site, originally will just be the founders, until the game and community can keep things balanced

Infrastructure

  • Python/Django/Postrgres
  • EC2
  • Javascript

Other Good Ideas, but not for Version 1

  • confidential translations
  • use Google Translate API to detect similarities and reject machine translations
  • badges and titles to honor achievements in a given language
  • probably better than the straight numeric score
  • recommend/review translators and requesters
  • use the Facebook social graph to help create trust
  • increasing need to combat fraud – prevent people from getting good translations and then diverting money to their friends
  • some sort of mark-up language to use within translations

Name Ideas

  • unbabel.com
  • crowdbabel.com
  • tonguewars.com
  • multivox.com
  • wonderwords.com
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Gaia GPS

Crowd-Sourcing Translations

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Recently, I have been using Mechanical Turk to get translations done for our iPhone apps(Gaia GPS and Car Park!). The first time I did this for Gaia, I recruited some friendly Hackers from Hacker News, but I figured it would be rude to ask twice 🙂

At first, MTurk sucked because everyone would try and submit machine translations, but by being very specific in my ad, and requesting people email to get the text, I have gotten wonderful translations in all sorts of languages for $5. I then pay another $5 to have someone else edit the text. From what I gather from sites offering translations, this is about 10-20% of the cost of a professional, even after two people look it over.

Internationalizing the App Store text has been incredibly effective – we used to do over 90% of our business in the US, but now it’s more like 65%, and we are making beachheads in markets where we weren’t even ranked before.

Going through this, it occurred to me that it would be really great to have a site like 99designs.com or crowdspring.com where people could compete to translate things, and the crowd could judge the quality. And now that I know translators of a bunch of different languages that I trust, I figured I might be able to get this thing rolling.

So, who out there would use this site, and what would you use it for?

What could you imagine paying for translations, and what ideas do you have for features to keep quality high?

And what competing sites should I look at?

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Gaia GPS

Apple Speeds Up Approval Process

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

It seems like Apple is really working hard to get the App Store approval process straightened out.

I’m happy to say that Apple approved our most recent releases of Gaia GPS and Gaia GPS Lite in under 24 hours, and they approved our new app, Car Park!, in just 4 days.

These approval times are a vast improvement. It used to take us 10-14 days to get anything through the process. With this speed up, it makes it a lot easier for us to roll out new features quickly and address bugs that crop up in production.

So, thanks Apple! This is going to be good for everyone.

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Gaia GPS

Upgrade Bug in v2.4

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

When upgrading to Gaia GPS v2.4 from an earlier version, the app may crash at start-up and delete all of your Gaia GPS data. At this point, you will also need to delete the app from your iPhone and reinstall, or you won’t be able to download maps and create other data.

The reason for this problem is we added a Notes field to the database in the app. When you change the database of an iPhone app, it can be tricky to get users’ phones to migrate data properly. It appears that migration for users with large maps saved is failing because the data doesn’t migrate fast enough.

We apologize if you experience this problem. Anyone who has not yet upgraded may wish to back up any important data saved in the app before updating.

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Gaia GPS

CarPark! – Dead Simple iPhone Parking App

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Today, our CarPark app went live on the App Store. CarPark may be the easiest way to remember where you parked. This app was developed almost entirely by my co-founder Tim, and he did a spectacular job on it. The Apple approval process was also really fast – just four days this time.

I thought I would blog about this app because the decision-making behind building it was strategic and interesting to me from a start-up/business perspective. Here’s why we decided to build CarPark:

  • First and foremost, there is a large market for these kinds of apps on the App Store. When we started building this, 4 of the top 20 navigation apps were simple car parking apps. While we have been successful with Gaia GPS, the market for an outdoor GPS app is somewhat limited, and we are hoping this one is more mainstream. We saw an opportunity to play to a bigger crowd, using the skills we developed on Gaia.
  • Second, we would like to add Google Maps to Gaia GPS. CarPark gave us the chance to work with MapKit (which you need to use to deliver Google Maps on the iPhone). We use the Route-Me framework for mapping in Gaia GPS, and we would need to use both APIs if we want to add Google Maps, so this was a good way to tinker with MapKit and see how much work the addition would be.
  • Finally, CarPark was fairly straightforward to build given our experience, and we thought we could do a good job. We have spent a lot of time on similar functionality – marking places on maps, giving guidance to waypoints, etc. So, it seemed like an easy win for us.

There are a lot of parking apps out there, but we aimed to make this one simple, fast, and usable. One thing folks may notice in comparing this to all the other CarPark type apps is we don’t have a screen with two big buttons on it to start the app. That design crops up a lot of the iPhone, and it’s just for lack of imagination I think.

So, CarPark! is live in the App Store now for .99. If you have a car (or if you just want to help us get some visibility on launch day), go get it!

Download CarPark from the App Store.

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Gaia GPS

Is this good Chinese

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Hacker News is like a deity sometimes – ye ask and ye shall receive.

A couple of days ago, I had a phone call that convinced me I needed to internationalize my App Store description. To do this, I used the magic of the internet and social networks, most notably Hacker News.

From this post, some wonderful hackers created and even double-checked versions in Dutch, German, French, and Swedish. I also got a version in Spanish from my friend, which the users on HN found a small mistake in.

While it was a lot of hassle getting passed all the scamsters on Mechanical Turk, I also got some useful translations from that service (for $7 each), including Italian and Chinese. However, I am just a little suspicious of the Chinese.

Do you think this document is real Chinese? There is significant variation with the Google auto-generator and it’s way different than Babelfish. I’m a little suspicious because there are chunks that are exactly the same as Google Translate: http://translate.google.com

Can anyone out there confirm this Chinese is good? Here is the document with the translation inline.

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Gaia GPS

Help Translate Gaia GPS to Other Languages

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

EDIT: Thanks to tons of help from Gaia GPS users and folks on Hacker News, we have most of the European languages done now! See the updated list below.

Would anyone out there be willing to translate a small bit of text about Gaia GPS into their language(s)?

By way of compensation, we would offer first and foremost our earnest gratitude. We also have a few TrailBehind t-shirts, or if you are a poor college student or something, we could give you some small amount of money. You’ll also always get a free copy of all of our future iPhone apps.

If you can help us out, please send email to andrew@gaiagps.com so people don’t end up doing the same translation twice.

Here is the text we need to translate: gaia.txt

The languages we could use are:

  • Japanese
  • Russian
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Portuguese
  • Korean
  • Italian
  • Swedish
  • Canadian French
  • Spanish
  • Mexican Spanish
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Canadian English
  • UK English
  • Australian English
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Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS, for Haitian Disaster Relief

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I was sitting around yesterday working on the v2.2 release of Gaia GPS, when a friend and user of Gaia contacted me. Jeff Johnson, who works on digital mapping professionally (and in his spare time with OpenStreetMap), had been contributing to a project to provide up-to-date maps and satellite imagery of the Haitian Earthquake.

Jeff asked if Anna, Tim, and I would be willing to make a free version of Gaia GPS so disaster workers could download and use these maps. Well, we hadn’t done anything for this cause to date, and this seemed like a good endeavor, so we spent the last day and half putting together the app. Hopefully Apple will approve it quickly and make these maps a bit more accessible to relief workers in Haiti.

Here’s a couple screenshots:

It only took us a small amount of work to make “Gaia GPS (for Haitian Disaster Relief)” but a ton of work went into creating the maps, both from the OpenStreetMap community and mapping companies GeoEye and Digital Globe, not to mention the computing power contributed by the New York Public Library and Oxillion.

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