Loved.by - Monetarize your product recomendations

Here we go with a new web service called Loved.by, created by two young German entrepreneurs, Oliver Krohne and Thorsten Singhofen.

Imagine you find a fantastic gadget on eBay and you want to share your finding with your friends on Facebook or Twitter. With Loved.by this can be done with just a click.

Loved.by is not only a great tool to share things, but a very nice way to get rewarded. If a friend of yours follows your recommendation and buys the product you "loved", you can obtain up to 10-15% of the sales generated by your recommendation. So, it's not a bad deal at all!

You can sign up with your Twitter or Facebook account, get the Loved.by bookmarklet into your browser and start loving products in the online shops you visit. More than 10.000 shops are already partnering with Loved.by. From clothes to toys and gadgets to books you can love almost everything.

On your Loved.by account dashboard you'll find the products you have recommended and rewards you gained through this system. Once you have reached the minimum payment amount (EUR 30.00 / USD 30.00 / GBP 30.00), you can redeem your rewards. Loved.by offers you basically two options now: donate your rewards to NGOs like Wikipedia, the Red Cross or Unicef, or cash in through Paypal or Moneybookers.

Our Beluga team took care of the internationalization of this great new service. It's now available in English, German, Spanish and French.

Check out their partner list and start loving... http://loved.by/partner

Zara, search engines and SEO

Google search for "Zara" on September 2. 2010

Ok, this is really nice. I have just stumbled upon a Tweet about Zara, one of the worlds leading clothing companies, asking the followers to google for the company's name "Zara".
The first search entry reads:

"Aquí hay que poner una descripción que indexarán los buscadores y que se mostrará en sus resultados de búsqueda." (see screenshot)

(translation: A description is needed here that search engines can index and show in their search results)

No doubt, those guys understand about SEO... :)

Web Translate It - Perfect fit for Web 2.0 translations

www.webtranslateit.com

This is the name of a cool web 2.0 service made by Édouard Brière and his company Atelier Convivialité. Here comes a introductory review of the tool.

"Web Translate It is a web-based computer-aided translation tool to collaboratively translate software."

...and that's what we  do with it on a daily basis. WTI (the abbreviation we internally use for it) is an online editor created to bring together all parts of a software translation process: translators, proofreaders, project managers and programmers. This service offers nice communication tools and a handy interface for translators and project managers to get things done fast and with high quality.

We know Édouard since the Last.fm project where he was our technical counter part to deal with updates and interface requirements for a 14-language translation process. After he left Last.fm we contacted Édouard to ask him if he would be able to build an editor for iBotanika and then he offered an editor as an independent web service. Well, no need to say that we loved his idea ;-). This was less than one year ago and today we have a fully functional web service, which by far has exceeded our expectations.

So how does it work?

Jianjun Zhang

Jianjun is a web/software localization professional based in Tianjin, China. He's been working with Beluga Linguistics since 2006 and involved in English to Chinese localization projects such as last.fm, Swatch, XING and a number of other projects. Besides localization and translation, he also offers cultural consultation services and is an Aperian in-country specialist.

Jianjun has been following the latest web trends and developments. His personal blog is a fantastic source for local insights into the Chinese market. His blog can be found here:

Web Localization, i18n, Web 2.0, Culture, Translation 2.0, New Media and New Tech….

It's a great pleasure working with him. Professional and always helpful.

Quick Tips for Web Internationalization

In many of our projects we stumble over a series of technical issues in the source text/code we try to fix before the first words get translated in order to avoid re-adjustments later on once translation teams are on board and the project is running.

This part is commonly called internationalization (or i18n which stands for the 18 letters between the first and the last of this word). I18n of software is the way a software should be prepared in order to enable its translation in different languages and the successful localization (=L10n) to local target audiences.

Internationalization is nothing new and fortunately there is already a lot of written information about this topic out there in the web. One of the best places to get started is the W3C website about Internationalization and Localization.

Ricardo Matsushima

Ricardo is an Electrical Engineer from Brazil who's been involved in web development and programming since he was a kid and with technical documentation and translation since before the turn of the millennium.

At Beluga, Ricardo is responsible for the quality assurance of Brazilian Portuguese on the Last.fm project and he also has participated in other projects such as XING and MOO.

Outside of work he hits the road running for competition.

Starting the trip…

Every whale has to explore new oceans. The Beluga team starts this expected trip and we dive into the warm waters of our new BLOG.

Ties will take us up and down, and at the bottom of the sea, we will discover the treasures related to the i10n and the i18n .

These pages will become our voice and the way for discovering some secrets of our "Beluga World".

Would you join us? Let’s swim together!