Jianjun's Blog

Wanna know how much a kilo of beef costs in New York or where to change your damaged windshield wipers? Just visit ChaCha and text your question to them via the web page, you are promised to receive the answer (to your cell phone if it’s a US number) in minutes! I tried the first question on twitter as I’m in China and got the answer as follows:

Question
how much does a kilo of beef cost in new york

Answer
At Rube’s, New York Strip would be $$ 66.00 for 1 kilo of premium meat. Thank you for asking Chacha!

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View info about your guide Jimmy V.

Isn’t this cool?

As stated on their web site, the service is assisted by human guides who will search the information for you in case their system doesn’t have the information. They have rules about what questions are acceptable. So use it wisely . By the way, if you are on twitter, simply follow them here: http://twitter.com/242242 and DM them the question and get answered!

Multimedia content creation tool Sprout begins to offer templates to users.

Starting from scratch in Sprout has been a headache for many newbies who are not familiar with the beta system. Help is not always available and in some cases you have to search the Internet for tips. By using these templates, even a kid can quickly create a multimedia flash mini site in minutes.

All templates come with a fixed size of 300 x 250. Currently, there are two personal Sprout themes and two political themes – men, women; democrat, republican. I don’t really care about the political themes, so let me tell you what you can do with a personal Sprout:

Basically it’s a mini flash site with five preset pages – Home, Gallery, About, Video and Blog. These page titles are quite self-explanatory. With them, you can create a slide show, introduce yourself, add a video and a blog feed – not so impressive for an advanced user – but for new guys, these things can help them get started as soon as they signed up!

However, to get the most out of them, users need to spend some time dissecting the templates. This way you learn basic techniques quickly and soon you’ll be able to create your own desired effects from a blank template.

Enjoy!

Referred by a friend on Seesmic, the other day I tried out ooVoo (http://ooVoo.com) on my desktop. It’s an application similar to Skype, but features a lot more video functions. Besides one-on-one video chats and calls, you may also hold group video conversations with up to 6 ooVoo participants and 6 phone participants.

Have you ever been craving for a function on Skype to record phone calls? With ooVoo, not only can you do that, but also with the videos of both parties! It’s something like you see on a TV interview, with both the host and the distant party video windows showing up on the screen.

Another step forward beyond Skype is the ability to record video clips, which you can post to your blog, embed on your web site or send to your friends as an E-mail attachment. If you want something fancy, there are also hundreds of effects from Webcammax included to enhance your video. Use distorting mirror effects to surprise your friend, or put on a mask to fake Harry Potter.

The beta release promised free phone calls to any landline or mobile numbers in the US and Canada through March 1st, 2008. I made a few calls and the sound quality is quite satisfactory.

ooVoo web site is currently partially localized into several languages, including Simplified Chinese. The client software is available in these languages too. I evaluated its Chinese translation in the software, while the general translation is good – much better than Skype’s, there’s still room to improve.

For example: “Click Record to Start” is translated into 单击“录制”以开始录制, the character 以 is redundant and the repetition of 录制 sounds stiff. It could be rendered as 单击“录制”键开始 (Click Record button to Start) – I added “button” because there’s only a Red button on that screen instead of text “Record”. This small change could make Chinese users “feel” easier when using the software – or if you really want to emphasize Start Recording: 单击“录制”键开始录像 (Click Record button to start recording), this way a repetition can still be avoided.

Of course, you can’t expect ooVoo beta to be perfect. For example, it lacks some useful features Skype has. The public chat function on Skype is something I can’t dispense with. In my daily job, localization team members use it to facilitate communication on issues during i18n. A temporary group chat is not as convenient when such work lasts for a long time or on a regular basis. ooVoo could also interfere with other video recording software. When it is running in the background, you could lose your voice in another video recording process.

Feel free to add me on ooVoo: zjjtrans