Total Recall

Total Recall represented at youngStartup New York Venture Summit

Erich — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:04:18 +0000

The youngStartup 2008 New York Venture Summit was held on June 24th and 25th, and Total Recall was there to show off Snowball and to network with other entrepreneurs and investors. It was a very busy schedule, with a very well-attended welcome reception on the evening of the 24th at the Microsoft offices on 6th Avenue, and with a very heavily attended round of panels and presentations on the 25th.

Representing Total Recall and Snowball at the event were both myself, Erich Hegenberger, and Sean Marriott, programmer and development/marketing avisor who flew in from England especially for this conference. We came prepared to be remembered, and certainly managed to make an impression of some sort with our Snowball shirts and ties.

We made a lot of great contacts already at the reception, including a brief chat with Steve Barsh, who gave us excellent advice straight from his blog.

The main event was held at the New Yorker Hotel, next to Penn Station and just a short walk from Macy’s and the Empire State Building. What a view from the top floor, especially at night!

After an early morning welcome by organizer Joe Benjamin, founder and CEO of youngStartup, we got underway with a panel of VCs discussing and answering questions on how to go the VC route. The panelists were all enthusiastic about investment growth with many capital-efficient startups moving to the New York area, and had a lot of good advice for entrepreneurs seeking funding at any stage. Steven Davis of New York Business Practice, the Venture Law Group and Heller Ehrman, reminded investors that VCs may look at 100 business plans for every investment they make. Andrew Clapp of Brook Venture Partners gave the very sound advice of engaging the listener in a dialog instead of just rattling off a memorized pitch, and Bart Stuck of Signal Lake spoke to my heart of the importance of getting investors’ interest through customer validation – a large cashier’s check stapled to the business plan would be a good attention-getter!

Organizer Joe Benjamin, founder/CEO of youngStartup

The VC panelists had good news and bad news for hopeful entrepreneurs

The first panel session was followed by three intense rounds of presentations by 49 selected startups, who delivered highly-polished pitches timed to the second. This was punctuated by equally intense networking around the 50-odd display tables, with a quick break for lunch sometime in between. The Snowball display was a bit of a last-minute arrangement, since all of the display tables had already been accounted for. But with some last-minute efforts by organizer Joe Benjamin, we were graciously led to an unclaimed table. We made a number of contacts, some of which we might not have gotten without this prominent spot, so thanks Joe, for taking the time from an obviously demanding schedule to help us out!

Later in the afternoon, there were two more panel sessions on exit strategies and term sheet negotiations, with lots more good advice on building a company to be a profitable, independent entity and not just a designer sales item. There were a lot of interesting discussions around how to valuate a company and the changing role of the entrepreneur in different stages of growth, with some lively exchanges on the fairness of owner dilution.

All in all, it was an intense day with lots of new information, and as we were reminded by Daniel Schultz of DFJ Gotham Ventures, running a startup is not a dash, it’s a marathon! Unfortunately some participants dropped out of the race a bit too early, and were not on hand to accept the iPods they would have one in the end-of session raffle!

Thanks again to the organizers and sponsers for helping to make this a highly successful event for all!

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Tutorial Videos

Erich — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:56:12 +0000

The long-awaited tutorial videos are finally starting to arrive! Is the manual too confusing? Want to see in a hurry how to work with Snowball? Check out these short videos explaining step-by-step how to get started saving time with Snowball - don’t miss the clip showing Snowball working completely in the backgrond - so user-friendly it’s invisible!

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Snowball presented and demonstrated at University of Copenhagen Language Technology Forum

Erich — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:15:42 +0000

Yesterday, May 15, Erich Hegenberger of Total Recall ApS presented “Snowball - no longer lost in translation” to an audience of roughly 100 language professionals at the Language Technology Forum held by the Centre for Language Technology at the University of Copenhagen. The presentation focused on some key features of Snowball, such as the user-definable popup translation window with its list of translations scrolling to track the words the user selects in the source, computer translation suggestions, and Snowball’s amazing ability to work completely in the background, invisibly storing translation memory segments as the user works and popping up to help only when it recognizes something it’s seen before.

During the coffee and lunch breaks, the Snowball table was heavily visited, with lots of researchers and translators interested in seeing Snowball work. It was hard to get a break away from the table, and most of the time we could have used a few extra people on hand to help demonstrate the program and answer questions.

The complete presentation can be viewed here.

Other forum presenters:

Also of special interest in TM developments, Eric Rhode, Sales Manager for WebWordSystem, explained his company’s unique vision for a globally networked system of private and public translation memory databases. This system can give language professionals access to a vast resource of knowledge and information.

Lisbeth Kjeldgaard Almsten of Inter-Set Translations discussed translation memory and other translation tools from a user perspective. Almsten cautioned that, although translation tools can be highly effective, they have to be used with care to ensure a high-quality result. From the Danish offices of Lionbridge, Administrative Director Angelique Espensen discussed Lionbridge’s development of in-house language tools such as Logoport and Freeway 2.0, along with the corporation’s many other services.

Other presenters were Dr. Eckhard Bick of GramTrans (machine translation) researcher Juergen Wedekind from the Centre for Language Technology (bilingual terminology extraction), Anne Jensen of the Journal of Danish Parliamentary Proceedings Folketingstidende (speech to text) and Jens Otto Kjaerum and Stefan Pal of the Prolog Development Center (text to speech).

In his closing presentation summarizing the day’s experiences, Dr. Steven Krauwer of the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics at Utrecht University in Holland praised Snowball for ‘making the computer invisible’. He also spoke fondly of his own past R&D work in machine translation, especially EUROTRA as well as other ongoing EC projects, and presented his outlook for the future of language technology.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lina Henriksen and Dorte Haltrup Hansen of the Centre for Language Technology for the kind invitation and for the last-minute help, and to all those who visited the Snowball table with their questions and feedback!

Final Snowball beta released!

Erich — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:16:03 +0000

We’re pleased to announce release of the final beta version of Snowball, the intuitive new interactive translation memory program. This latest version features more stable operation and a number of new features to save you even more time. Improvements since the last release include the following:

Background database analysis to find more terminology and phrases for future use.
An Undo key
User-definable attributes and filtering
Filtered export
Terminology export
TMX 1.4b import compatible
Database view and search
User-selectable fonts
User-placeable window
Speed/performance settings

Download your free trial and see for yourself how easy it is to work with Snowball!

Startups and Snowball - recorded sessions from O’Flaherty Live

Erich — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:44:57 +0000

Session 1: Starting up a company, what is Snowball?

Session 2: Startup mistakes to avoid - team building, seeking funding, publicity, sales.

Session 3: Startup strategy, planning and teamwork, online promotion.

New Snowball update available

Erich — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 08:10:26 +0000

The latest beta version of Snowball is ready for download.

Main changes:

Performance tab added to Options menu for better speed control.

Spacing issues resolved.

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