Word Lens Mobile App – Real Time Language Translation

In our last post we touched on OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) it appears this technology is quickly becoming the rage. Check out this mobile app for instance – Word Lens



Word Lens performs language translation into real-time. The user simply points the camera towards the text and the app does an OCR transform in real time. From the demo the technology seems highly impressive and a must have app when travelling to foreign countries (it performs translations both ways so you can translate from English too). Interestingly you don’t even a network/internet connection to use it. Seems like it’ll only be a matter of time before innovative use cases of this app go viral.

How to Network With Only One Business Card

Picture this: You’ve just made it into your conference or networking event and started mingling with a small group of three next to the bar. You’ve broken the ice and get to the customary details exchange so you reach into your wallet only to find you have just one measly business card left. Not only do you have three potential leads in front of you you’ve still got the whole day or night of networking to go.

Sound familiar? Well in this day and age there might finally be a viable escape route for this situation – Evernote. Evernote is popular notetaking and archiving application available on smart phones and iPad devices. Although Evernote sports a host of features the one most pertinent to this situation is its ability to recognize and extract text within an image which is done using OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition).

So back to your predicament, instead of letting part with your one last business card, with their smart phones they can snap a picture of your business card Evernote will timestamp it, capture your GPS location thus recording where and when they met you and extract your name, title and contact details from your card. This is a much better value proposition on both sides as now you’re sure they have indeed recorded your details, which avoids your business card getting lost within in their mountain of business cards and you’ve just saved a small fortune on buying more business cards and avoided a night of awkward moments.

Of course you have to assume they already have the Evernote app installed. However, with 5 million users and 18000 new users a day, luck may be on your side. And if not you can look super savvy by turning it around and instead snap their business cards and give a smart spiel of Evernote and OCR.

So there you have it - how to network at a conference or networking event with only one business card. Unfortunately we cannot take credit for this solution as the use case came from Tyler Crowley on a discussion with Phil Libin the founder of Evernote – on This Week in Startups. We have included the video below starting at the discussion although we highly recommend you check out the whole video especially if you’re a tech entrepreneur or want to learn more about Evernote.

Startup Numbers - Lean Analytics for Startups

Behind all the hyped media coverage and press releases, product launches and marketing stunts its all about the raw numbers when growing a web startup. So its always refreshing to see a presentation about real facts and figures of a web startup. Alistair Croll of BitCurrent's recent presentation at Le Web 10 does just that. Alistair's presentation entitled 'Lean Analytics for Startups: what every founder (and VC) needs to watch' follows the Lean Statup methodology and looks at a range of metrics behind a web startup from measuring virality, site performance, user retention as well as cost and revenue measures. Of particular valuable is the metrics which Alistair highlights that are of significant interest to investors.

Check out the presentation below. The slide deck is available on the BitCurrent Blog