Downtime!
We had a short period of downtime last night, this is now fixed and Mloovi is back up and running. Apologies if this caused anyone any problems.
Thu, December 10 2009 » Mloovi » 2 Comments
Journalists! Use Mloovi to make your research more inclusive.
According to many sources, notably PR Newswire, journalists are not only increasingly turning to the internet to research news, they’re more than likely to use the internet as their sole source for many stories. Potentially a dangerous situation?
We can imagine the scenario where a local news journo may still use traditional methods of research, simply because it’s so much easier to contact and interview local people; visit local sites; and maintain long term ‘tabs’ on local issues.
However, consider for a moment the journalist who needs to report on events at the other end of the country, or on the opposite side of the globe. Those ‘traditional’ methods soon become unwieldy, expensive and just not do-able in a given timescale. Clearly, the leading vehicles for news – national TV stations, national press etc. – have got the budgets to pay more than lip-service to ‘phone calls, travel, surveillance, and shoe shuffling groundwork. What about other journalists – the freelancers in particular?
There’s a danger that just using the internet for news research will lead to simple regurgitation of source material, thus dimishing the value of each subsequent news item, and devolving the journalist to nothing but an echo box.
One way to inject freshness, other viewpoints and perhaps more facts, is to procure news from non-native language sources. For example, relying on English-language websites and blogs to get any kind of perspective on the unfolding Iranian story is a sure-fire way to Get The Wrong Slant.
This is where Mloovi comes in. ( Come on, don’t be surprised: this is why I’m here! )
By using Mloovi to search for foreign language blogs, newssites, bulletins, and then by subscribing to translated RSS feeds, it’s possible to get quite specific information piped right at you.
Here’s an example, using the Iranian election debacle.
Over time it’s possible to build up suites of translated feeds to cover not only topical events but also to monitor the most obscure activity. Want to know how a Vietnamese blogger manages his vegetable plot for your parish magazine? Well, if our green-fingered buddy is blogging about it, you can now understand it!
Wed, June 24 2009 » Mloovi » No Comments
Mloovi translates your RSS feed using 43 languages!
Thanks to recent developments over at Planet Google, we now offer 43 languages. The revised list is…
Albanian
Arabic
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Farsi (Persian, ‘Iranian’)
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Maltese
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Mon, June 22 2009 » Mloovi » No Comments
Mloovi now supports Farsi – Iran’s ‘Persian’ language
On 18th June, Farsi was added to the list offered by the Google Translate API, and hence our service.
By using Mloovi it’s now possible for Iranian bloggers to reach a much wider audience. It’s also possible for the rest of the world to ‘opt in’ to information coming from Iran. Simply enter the URL of an Iranian blogsite you’d like to understand, and Mloovi will do the rest.
I think we would all agree that the translation of Farsi, the most widely spoken and understood language across Iran and Afghanistan, is especially appropriate considering the democratic crisis ocurring right now. Not for the first time the internet is being used as the means to spread the opinions of a unhappy population – and it would seem that the development team at Google worked very hard to speed up the release of this facility.
According to Franz Och, principal scientist at Google…
We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. (This) is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa – increasing everyone’s access to information.
As with all machine translation, it’s not perfect yet. And we’re launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We’ll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we’ll restore service as quickly as we can.
It’s acknowledged that the Farsi translation isn’t as good as, for example, the Spanish one – but it’s early days. As time goes on the translation becomes more accurate as it is honed according to a growing database of results. Users can influence this, via the Google Translate website, by offering better translations as they see fit.
For far more information than I’d care to ’steal’ just pop over to here!
Mon, June 22 2009 » Languages » 2 Comments
next09 conference – Mike explains all by video
Mike Robinson, our esteemed CEO, visited the next09 conference in Hamburg recently. Mloovi was one of a few companies selected to deliver a presentation that underlines our support of the Share Economy – see here.
Trying to explain Mloovi succinctly in just words on a screen is one thing, but you just can’t beat getting the full story from a walking, talking human being 
Cue along to 11.40min, and have a look…
Mon, June 1 2009 » Mloovi, People » No Comments
Bug Fix: Feeds just got quicker!
We found a bug today which was causing the RSS feeds to take longer than they should to generate. We have just rolled out a fix and accessing RSS feeds should be much quicker now.
If you come across any other bugs/errors please let us know.
Thu, April 23 2009 » Development » 3 Comments
