Published in : ...www...Written by Ana Galarraga on 2010-04-23 12:18
Just imagine you want to go to the 2016 Olympics and you want to stay there for free and so you want to be a close friend of that young guy from Rio de Janeiro you will meet next summer. What? Have we gone too far? Well, imagine you have a Catalan friend or a Galician one or a French one or an English one and you want to communicate with them in writing. In that case the Internet can offer you an interesting tool: Opentrad .
Opentrad is a free machine translator; it has an open code and can translate between over 20 pairs of languages. Including Basque? Well, to be honest the Basque translations are not yet as good as we’d like them to be, because of the unusual features of the language, but Opentrad does really good translations in all the rest. Apart from short texts, it can translate websites, blogs and complete documents and is specially designed to be adapted to the needs of each user.
Google Translator, which is the machine translator most used on the Internet right now, handles even more languages. In fact, at the time of writing it can do translations of 52 languages, but tomorrow there could be more. But it does not yet translate to and from Basque and doesn’t look as if it will be doing so soon.
Google seems to have other priorities: right now it is fine tuning the technologies to translate YouTube videos. No, it won’t get as far as dubbing them, but it will add translated subtitles. In other words, first it uses voice recognition tools to turn what the characters say into text, and then it translates the text.
What do you think the next step will be? Just think about it...
Published in : ...www...Written by Lorea Arakistain on 2010-02-08 12:00
E-mail has had its 40th birthday. And Google, instead of organising a birthday party, has decided to get rid of it. To do this, it has come up with a giant wave to swallow it up: Google Wave. Got your surfboard?
What would an e-message be like if it had been invented today? That’s something we’ll never know, but Google thinks it could be like a wave. A wave is half conversation, half document; and the message turns into a wiki. The person who sends the wave or message first sets up the conversation and interacts with many people. Only one copy of the wave is kept by the server and those who are part of the wave make up the conversation on the basis of that copy.
The Wave text can be modified in order to produce an agreed text together, like in a wiki. Answers or comments can be added to any point on the wave. What is more, documents (photos, texts) can be attached, and it can also run a spell check and do translations. All in real time.
Google Wave is not the first to offer itself as an alternative to e-mail, but this could be the real thing. So far, closed services have been offered: those in Facebook can’t see a photo of a Tuenti friend, and those with Messenger can’t say hello to people who use Google Talk. Nothing like that has ever happened with e-mail. It doesn’t matter whether you belong to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Euskaltel or Telefonica. Anyone can send an e-message to anyone else, wherever you may have your account.
Google Wave has been created out at sea, not in a private swimming pool. They have made an open protocol, which also has communication among servers. That means that if other companies create waves, no matter who uses them, people will be able to communicate with each other. Ready to take the wave?
Published in : ...www...Written by Ana Galarraga on 2009-09-24 11:46
Fancy travelling with your eyes closed? Through sounds, for example? Or do you prefer to keep your eyes wide open and travel seeing absolutely everything and experiencing everything as if you lived on the spot? You decide: go to Soundtransit or else click on Trourist.
Football fans singing and chanting "oe-oe" and "Donde está, no se ve, la afición del San Mamés" [Bilbao Athletic football club supporters' chant and song] and an argument in French at a motorway toll booth. Anyone who decides to visit our country with Soundtransit will come across this in the Basque Country.
Further afield there are songs, city noises, sirens, the barking of a dog, domestic sounds... Sounds, voices and music, you can find everything in any corner of the world. And Soundtransit gives you the chance to listen to all these things. What is more, enter where you want to travel from and to, and you will be able to travel in these places through the sounds.
It has a Creative Commons licence and anyone can take part, artists as well as wannabe artists. That's right, anyone can add a sound. That way the virtual traveller will visit another place on his or her sound trip.
Jokin Bereziartu, Mikel Cortés, Xabier Albeniz and Imanol Abad were mates at university. Now they have set up Trourist, and are colleagues. And they're still friends.
Trourist offers the chance to travel for real. When people travel, these guys want them "to experience places rather than just visit them". At the end of the day, the aim is that when people go somewhere, they don't feel like tourists, but feel as if they have gone there invited by someone who lives there. To achieve this, Trourist users make recommendations. For example, a girl talks about the experience she had in the mountains close to Anso, a boy recommends a restaurant in London, another one directs us to a bar in Berlin...
The creators of Trourist have a philosophy for travel based on experiences and emotions, which they are keen to spread. So before launching Trourist they set up the Experienceless initiative. If this philosophy appeals to you, go to www.experienceless.org
Published in : ...www...Written by Nerea Korta on 2009-04-20 10:12
VoIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol. In other words, calls can be made over the Internet through VoIP companies. International calls are very cheap: about € 0.02 per minute to landline phones and about €0.16 for ones to mobile phones. Otherwise, you can pay € 10 and make calls to some countries over a period of three months. What is more, calls can be made between one computer and another. So forget about the crisis, grab your headset and microphone and start speaking.
It is the most well-known European VoIP programme. It works like instant message programmes and you can call anywhere in the world free of charge. But the call has to be from one computer to another, and the person called has to be another Skype user. Apart from that, you can make calls to landline phones and mobile phones very reasonably. And send SMS texts.
It works in a similar way to Skype: the computer-to-computer calls are free and you can call any phone number anywhere in the world very cheaply. Besides that, newcomers get 60 minutes’ worth of free calls to landline phones; they can call many countries, too. And every time you buy credit, you can call for free over a period of 120 days.
Without installing any programs, calls between two landline phones can be made. You enter your phone number and that of the person you want to speak to, and hey presto! You get a three-minute trial period, but if you want to speak for longer, you have to register.
This is a similar company to Webcalldirect and can be used for making cheap calls from one telephone to another without any software. It works with landline phones as well as with mobile phones.
Yahoo Voice is a service offered by the Yahoo instant messaging application. You can make calls to computers, mobile phones or landline phones. Google Talk is a similar programme, but it is only possible to call from one computer to another.
Now MSN Messenger can also be used to call ordinary phones. To do this, you have to download the new Live Messenger, and register with the Verizon Web Calling global network.
Published in : ...www...Written by Lorea Arakistain on 2009-03-02 10:56
Who's brought that player along? Please! He has to play right back, not midfield. That trainer is useless: 4-1-4-1 formation? He must be nuts.
Show your manager instinct.
Just imagine you want to go to the 2016 Olympics and you want to stay there for free and so you want to be a close friend of that young guy from Rio de Janeiro you will meet next summer. What? Have we gone too far? Well, imagine you have a Catalan friend or a Galician one or a French one or an English one and you want to communicate with them in writing. In that case the Internet can offer you an interesting tool: 
Fancy travelling with your eyes closed? Through sounds, for example? Or do you prefer to keep your eyes wide open and travel seeing absolutely everything and experiencing everything as if you lived on the spot? You decide: go to Soundtransit or else click on Trourist.
VoIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol. In other words, calls can be made over the Internet through VoIP companies. International calls are very cheap: about € 0.02 per minute to landline phones and about €0.16 for ones to mobile phones. Otherwise, you can pay € 10 and make calls to some countries over a period of three months. What is more, calls can be made between one computer and another. So forget about the crisis, grab your headset and microphone and start speaking.