jyonkov
Neven Boyanov
Bertrand
Daniel Radev
Stefan Stefanov
Apostol Apostolov
ihayes2000
Jean
Something about our company Interlecta
Hi guys,
As you already know from my post on Facebook our BlackBerry product was promoted on RIM’s App World as a featured application last Friday. We are now getting thousands of downloads and activations, about 400 per hour. That is good.
We get quite good exposure not only trough App World but also from other mobile portals. Although, we need to develop our business and move the company to the next stage.
It’s been couple of months already since we started looking for new funding sources. Our company Interlecta has been privately held for almost 3 years, self funded as well, but it seems it is time for a change.
Right now we are talking to several potential investors (Corp, AI’s & VC’s) that are current or potential customers of our products, but not all opportunities look that promising or suitable for us.
So, if you think that you know someone or have friend of a friend who may know someone … any ideas are welcome.
And of course, the standard finders fee will be applied to everyone that refers an investor that turns to a deal.
According to quite few specialists that I’m talking to recently next several months will be the best time to invest in start-up’s simply because there are not that many left and those that survived are expected to have a good value.
Apostol Apostolov, and 
Nikolay 8:58 pm on October 4, 2009 Permalink |
Great news! Wish you luck! I’ll talk to our CEO about your company.
Apostol Apostolov 11:43 am on October 5, 2009 Permalink |
Neven,
Congratulations and good luck to your company. Being an alien to the RIM ecosphere, I am very curious about how your application approaches multi-language conversation, especially from User Experience side. Please can you post some screenshot URLs and answer few questions about your app? Thanks in advance.
Neven Boyanov 2:44 pm on October 6, 2009 Permalink |
Here are some screenshots: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/screenshots/2009
Also, a flash demo here: http://media.interlecta.com/blackberry/winks/email/Email%20Translator%20-%20demo%20-%2020070725.htm
Apostol Apostolov 3:15 pm on October 6, 2009 Permalink |
BlackBerry always strikes me as the platform that could be a great OS if it wasn’t constrained by this horrible interface meant for tiny tiny TINY screens. It’s so unfriendly to the modern age user I don’t understand how business users deal with that fact. Just my pet peeve with BB.
Thanks for all the info. I thought your app auto-sent the translated message but the manual approach works too. Having to choose menu to send as SMS, eMail, etc is a bit clunky though. I would have put context buttons under or next to the translared result to the user could tap or choose using keyboard the choice he wants rather than open menu and choose from there – that’s one click more for every translated phrase, adds up to quite many additional clicks over time. Example:
> Do you like my documents?
Translated: Vind je mijn documenten? [S]ms [E]mail [D]efault (per User)
Neven Boyanov 8:09 pm on October 6, 2009 Permalink |
The screens are not that small:
Only the Pearl has 260×240 but it’s not widely used anyways.
The Interlecta UI is consistent with the OS UI, i.e. most of the operations are through a context menu, navigated in most cases by pushing the roller.
So, you compose new email, but instead of choosing the [Send] from the menu you choose [Translate] and then, if you like what you see, choose [Send].
You should get a BB toy, it’s addictive.
Neven Boyanov 9:36 pm on October 14, 2009 Permalink |
I forgot to mention that we thought about the idea to keep the “target language” for certain people, those that are in your address book, so the default target language would be set conveniently before each translation, but in no way we will do automatic translate&send based on predefine criteria. It could be an option for advanced user but it could often lead to mistakes.
Technically, it’s doable since RIM OS APIs allow one’s application to add custom field to the address book entries, very good feature which I don’t know how many other mobile platforms support. For example all my contacts that have Facebook now have pictures in my address book (from FB) after I installed the Facebook for BlackBerry application.