TranscribeMe News & Updates Archives - TranscribeMe

TranscribeMe Gives Back: The Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund Partnership

Transcribe Me — Mon, 13 May 2019 15:03:47 +0000

With an estimated 5.6 million visitors each year, the Vietnam Veteran Memorial, also known as ‘The Wall’, is one of the most visited memorials in Washington D.C.. This commemorative landmark was built by the Virginia-based Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund (VVMF) in honor of the sacrifice, dedication and bravery of those who served in one of the most disruptive wars in American history. The names of more than 58,000 men and women who gave their lives or remain missing can be found inscribed on the black granite wall that was inaugurated on November 13, 1982.

People flock from all over the world to visit this timeless dedication and learn more about the Vietnam War and its veterans. At present, the information provided is only accurately available in English. VVMF initially reached out to TranscribeMe seeking assistance to improve their existing translated documents.

Given the noble nature of their work, we instead offered to translate and standardize their documents into all the languages we provide. We felt it was our moral obligation to support the non-profit organization and help as many visitors as possible to understand the importance of the veterans’ service. Thus, we established a partnership with the non-profit to translate their memorial site fact sheets into the following nine languages with our best-in-class transcription translation services:

Vietnamese
Chinese
Japanese
Korean
French
German
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese

We couldn’t be more proud of this partnership and are very pleased to have this opportunity to give back through the power of our global transcriber community. There is no contribution too small for such a cause, and so should you wish to show your solidarity with the VVMF, here are a few ways you can engage with them too:

1. Wall of Faces – Over the last 10 years, VVMF have been on a mission in search of photos of the veterans named on The Wall. They hope to source at least one photo to match each of the near 60,000 names and are down to needing the last 1,200 photos to complete the task.

While these remaining photos are likely to be the hardest to find, they do require volunteer support to source these final pictures. For more information on which ones are still needed, To view which photos are still missing by state, you can visit this page and submit a photo here.

2. In Memory – This branch of the program serves to honor Vietnam war veterans who, after returning home, later died of PTSD-linked suicide, Agent Orange-related illnesses or of other causes related to their service. Every year, the VVMF hosts a ceremony on the memorial site to induct new veterans into the In Memory Honor Roll.

They require help with spreading the word about this program so as to honor as many Vietnam veterans as possible. This can easily be done by talking to your local VVA chapter, visiting a VFW or American Legion hall, reaching out to local media or just sharing information through your social media channels.

3. The Wall That Heals – This refers to a mobile exhibit and education center that includes a scale replica of The Wall. Each year from March to November, VVMF travels to a new community almost every weekend. They are always in need of local volunteers to help out with setting up the exhibit and assist visitors as The Wall That Heals makes its way across the country. You can find this year’s tour schedule here.

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Big News – We’re Partnering Up with BNSF Railway

Transcribe Me — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 16:30:00 +0000

TranscribeMe is proud to announce a partnership with BNSF Logistics, LLC, a leading transport provider specializing in global freight and cargo movement. The company operates over 40 offices throughout North America, with 32,500 miles of railway across the country and over 120 FCPA certified Global Service Providers (GSPs) for import and export of general and project cargoes throughout the world.

A partnership with TranscribeMe simplifies this process for BNSF’s Operations, as representatives all over the country have access to fast, accurate, affordable transcriptions.

Our unique hybrid model combines best-in-class speech processing with trained crowd-sourced human transcribers to deliver a service that makes recorded audio content searchable and shareable. With our award-winning service and many audio/video collection options, BNSF representatives will be able to respond to and record any situation quickly, leading to accurate and valuable information to help their business thrive.

To learn more about how TranscribeMe can help streamline your company, visit our website for a free quote!

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TranscribeMe.com’s Whole New Look!

Transcribe Me — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 17:17:54 +0000

This month, we are proud to announce the launch of our redesigned Transcribeme.com website packed with a wealth of exciting, new features including:

Free Quote Calculator that estimates the cost of your transcription project in seconds!
Localized, seamless ordering process featuring five fully translated sites
The introduction of our closed captioning services
Interactive Blog that ties us back to our community

These new features streamline the entire process of getting your project completed as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

The Free Quote Calculator enables you to easily customize your order by utilizing filters such as recording length, language, accent, number of speakers, urgency, and final format. In addition, you can choose the style of transcription such as clean verbatim which removes filler words such as “uhm” or “ah”, fully edited text, or even full verbatim.

For high volume projects, we have the ability to work with you directly to get you the assistance you need. These requests go straight to the TranscribeMe team, and we will be able to service your requests within an hour.

It is now possible to navigate through TranscribeMe.com in other languages! Other than English, we now have a fully functional site in Spanish, Mandarin, German and Japanese. You can now communicate with our team in all of these languages!

And on the topic of languages…our translation division is growing and we have now expanded from Spanish (European and Latin American) to include Portuguese (European and Brazilian dialect, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, German, French and Italian. We can translate and transcribe your audio, video and text content between different languages quickly, accurately, and cost effectively.

Our new closed captioning service gives us the ability to take your video files and add closed captions fast! Whether you have a commercial, documentary or online video content, TranscribeMe’s fast and accurate Voice to Text abilities make Closed Captioning a reliable, convenient service.

Finally, our blog is brand new and expanded with amazing ways to learn even more about transcription, translation and closed captions. We will be sharing new content more regularly, whether it’s brand news, industry improvements or profiles of our employees.

We hope you like our new and improved look, and if there is anything you can recommend, please comment and let us know.

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Announcing Spanish Transcriptions by TranscribeMe!

Transcribe Me — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:55:23 +0000

In the last two years, we’ve done everything we can to become the best English voice-to-text transcription company in the market and now we’re proud to announce the launch of Spanish transcriptions. Many of our customers have asked for transcription of other languages and we’re slowly beginning to implement these other languages- starting with Spanish.

Why the wait? Well, we’ve made a business out of guaranteeing 98% accuracy, a 48-hour turnaround, and low prices for all of our transcriptions. This promise to you requires that we constantly monitor and evaluate the various pieces of our business to ensure excellence. While our computer software can easily process any language, our human transcribers must adhere to our rigorous standards to bring you the highest quality transcriptions.

So, we have searched the world to find the very best Spanish transcribers and welcomed them into our crowd. We now bring you audio to text Spanish transcriptions at the same low prices, supreme accuracy, and rapid turnaround that we have done for English transcriptions. You can still upload your files via our easy-to-use customer portal. Your transcripts will be accessible via e-mail and the customer portal.

In short, we want to become your one-stop shop for all your transcriptions, in any language. We make it easy for you to submit your audio files so that you can focus on what you do best. Please let us know if there’s any way for us to improve our service. We love to hear any and all feedback!

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TranscribeMe is Hiring!

Transcribe Me — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 06:36:34 +0000

Whether you’re a student, technologist, marketer, or corporate analyst – TranscribeMe has opportunities. We are hiring for corporate staff in our San Francisco offices. Check out our Careers page for more details at www.transcribeme.com/careers.

TranscribeMe is a fast growing start up with offices in New Zealand and San Francisco.

Note: Transcribers can always apply at workhub.transcribeme.com.

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TranscribeMe Featured on America’s Cup Showcase and NZ Export Awards

Transcribe Me — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:00:36 +0000

Lately, we’ve been very busy implementing many user-friendly changes to our customer portal, transcriber workhub, and mobile app at TranscribeMe, and it looks like all our hard work is paying off. Please excuse us for a minute as we take a moment to brag a little bit and keep you all posted on some of the latest TranscribeMe news.

The first piece of news is that we were chosen to participate in the America’s Cup Investment Showcase to represent New Zealand businesses via the NZTE. This opportunity means that TranscribeMe will have the chance to present our incredible product to some of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. The Showcase will occur on the Emirates Team New Zealand base in San Francisco, during the America’s Cup Race in September 2013 and it is limited to just 15 New Zealand companies. This means that should we generate additional funding, we can continue to roll out new developments on our product faster than we planned, your own user experience will improve, and we can continue to expand our business offerings to new multi-lingual crowds or industries.

The second piece of news is that we were chosen as participants in the New Zealand Export Awards! We will find out in May if we were chosen as finalists, but the fact that we were chosen to participate in this prestigious contest means that we must be doing something right!

As if this weren’t enough, stay tuned for news on our latest partnerships. As always, feel free to leave us a comment below with your feedback or suggestions. We love hearing from our customers!

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Announcing Version 2.0 of the TranscribeMe App!

Transcribe Me — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:00:20 +0000

Designed for more comprehensive use, our Version 2.0 TranscribeMe mobile app is here and better than ever! If you thought it was easy to get your audio transcribed before, you’re going to love the new features, including multi-file uploads, in-app payments, and a more intuitive interface. Check out our fill list of changes and new screenshots below:

What’s New In Version 2.0

Multi file uploads & live status updates – Your audio uploads as you record to limit processing time and audio loss
Upload your files via Wi-Fi or 3G
Basic & Premium Transcript Orders – Gives users more choices in customization of their transcripts depending on personal preference
Cleaner, more intuitive interface

Plus Our Standard Features

Simple 3 step process – Record, Pay, and Transcribe
Premium Accuracy – A combination of voice recognition software and real professional human transcribers deliver transcripts with 98-100% accuracy
Store and manage all audio recordings and transcripts from TranscribeMe’s Cloud
Email push notification updates on finished transcripts

The following images give you a sneak preview of the new app interface. The streamlined features make transcribing on-the-go easier than ever before.


Record Now: The new, simple interface allows you to automatically upload your audio to the cloud, via Wi-Fi or 3G, so you spend less time waiting for upload, and audio loss is minimized.	Transcript and Audio Library: The new library space enables you to manage and sort all your audio recordings and transcripts. It quickly displays the file’s status- whether it has been uploaded, transcribed, or in progress.

New Pricing Page: Our new pricing page allows you to pick between basic and premium levels of service, showing examples of each format. Some additions, like speaker identification and timestamps helps organize text for easier processing.	Transcript Review and Recording Playback: View and edit transcripts from within the app. Users will be able to make any necessary adjustments on the go. Share finished transcripts, as they are made available at your fingertips.

Stay tuned for a step-by-step breakdown of the new app’s capabilities in the next couple weeks or check out our mobile app page for the latest updates or to download the app from the Apple Store or Google Play.

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TranscribeMe Oversubscribes Angel Round With $900k Funding

Transcribe Me — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:24:48 +0000

Friends,

Quick update from TranscribeMe. We started the company in late 2011 with a mission to create a service that converts voice to text, accurately, quickly and confidentially, and a year later I’m glad to say that we now have delivered on this goal and are moving forward at an ever-accelerating pace.

I’m proud to announce that we have successfully closed our angel financing round! We set out to raise $750k from investors in Silicon Valley, New Zealand and Europe, and ended up exceeding this goal with over $900k in funding, bringing our investments to date to $1.5 million. Please check out our coverage in Bloomberg and VentureBeat and our press release below. Also (if you haven’t already) please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

We’re truly excited to make the vast amount of audio and video being created every day searchable and shareable. From the insights in focus groups to the ideas at conferences, we’re on a mission to make the value of the 17,000 words we say each day live longer.

Thanks for your help, ideas and support along the way! Here’s to the next year ahead.

Cheers,

Bethanie

VP Sales and Marketing, TranscribeMe

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Mark Zuckerberg’s first on-stage interview since the Facebook IPO [TRANSCRIPT]

Transcribe Me — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:24:36 +0000

Transcript

Mike 00:00	Did I mess up already?
Mark 00:05	You lost standing room when you do this.
Mike 00:07	Well yeah, it’s been like this… hasn’t really been like this all day. So there’s a few more people in here. I think they wanna hear what you have to say. So, first of all welcome to Tech Crunch Disrupt and thanks for coming.
Mark 00:18	Thanks for having me. It’s… it’s good to get a chance to be here.
Mike 00:22	This venue probably looks familiar just ’cause it’s where you do F8, and it’s how we originally found out about it. And that it’s such a great venue. So, you probably feel fairly comfortable in this venue.
Mark 00:32	Yeah although, you get a lot more people in here than we do.
Mike 00:36	Oh, okay. [laughter] Okay, so you ready? I have a… I have a few questions for you about the IPO to start. You went public on May 18th and the stock has lost roughly half its value since then.
Mark 00:50	Just get right into it. [laughter]
Mike 00:56	Is it… is it awkward? No? Okay. If you could have done anything differently with hindsight, would you have?
Mark 01:01	Well… you know… I mean, the performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing, right? We care about our shareholders and the commitment that we made is that we are going to execute this mission of making the world more open and connected. And that we’re going to do the things that we think are going to build value over the long term. And, you know over the next three to five years, I think the biggest question that is on everyone’s minds that… that will, that will determine, at least our performance over that period, is really gonna be how well we do with mobile.
	And you know, we’ve been in this quiet period for the last six months or so. You know, since right up to the time when we were getting started with the IPO, and a lot of stuff has changed since then. I mean, six months ago on mobile, you know, we hadn’t launched our new set of apps, right, so we were still in a pretty bad place there. Apple hadn’t announced the i OS integration. Literally six months ago we, we, we didn’t run a single ad on mobile.
	So, you know, I think it’s easy for a lot of folks, without us being out there talking about the stuff that we’re doing, to really underestimate how good, how fundamentally good mobile is for us. And that is one of the main things that… You know, this is the first time that I’ve really spoken since the IPO publicly, and it is one of the main things that I think is misunderstood right now, is how fundamentally good it is on a, on a bunch of different levels. So I mean the first is there, there are just, there are more users, right, obviously. The second is that per… per person who’s using- who’s using Facebook on mobile, there’s more engagement and they’re spending more time.

	And then the third is that, per amount of time that people spent in mobile, we think that we’re gonna make a lot more money than we do on, on, on, desktop, too. So, you know, you can kinda’ go through all three of these things and a number of users. That’s fairly obvious. There are a lot more people who have phones, then, then who have computers. Five billion people in the world who have phones. The number of smart phones growing really quickly. The number of Facebook mobile users growing really quickly. On engagement, we already see that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users of Facebook than desktop users. They are more than twice as likely to use Facebook six out of seven days of the week. So, there’s a lot that we can do there. Not… those stats are from before we even launched the most recent version of the i OS App, which has been a massive improvement. Since we launched that, the number of stores that people have consumed have doubled on that, so…
Mike 03:23	Just, just slow down.
Mark 03:25	Feel free to comment…
Mike 03:25	I want to unpack, like, everything you just said, but it’s going to take me awhile. I don’t wanna cut you off
Mark 03:32	we have… we have twenty-one minutes.
Mike 03:34	But you’ve just said so much. There’s so much to unpack in there, but just to… Let’s just jump back up on… I wanna get rid of the IPO questions first and then, you know… it’s interesting how much you talk about mobile, though. And then we are going to talk a lot more about that.
Mark 03:45	Go for it.
Mike 03:46	But you know, when you went public you said, “We don’t build services to make money, we make money to build great services.”
Mark 03:55	Yeah.
Mike 03:56	So my response is, “Wow, you really meant that.” Let’s talk a little bit about that.
Mark 04:04	You, you said I did mean that?
Mike 04:06	It seems like you really meant it.
Mark 04:08	Yeah. I, I, I, we really mean that. You know, the statement we build, we don’t make… we don’t build services to make money, we make money to build better services, really goes to the heart of the philosophy that we have been running the company in. There’s no doubt, we are a mission-driven company. I mean, we exist and we wake up in the morning and the thing that gets us excited is making the world more open and connected, and the things that we are doing to build that. But, you know, you can’t just focus on that, right? I mean, since the beginning of building Facebook, what… one of the core things that, that I’ve learned is that in order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to build a great team, you know, the best people want to work on a mission that they believe in, but they also want to make a bunch of money, right? In order to do that, you have to build a great business. We want to build a platform, right? In order to build a platform, we need to build tools that are going to make it so that developers can build the things that they want and make a bunch of money.
	And in order to do that, we need to have a business model that works for them and incentivises them to wanna work with us. Advertisers produce a lot of the content, right? I mean a lot of what people do on Facebook is around pages. That content is in the system because the advertisers get a good ROI working with Facebook. So, building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. And it is definitely true, that the primary thing that makes me excited about what we are doing is the mission. But, I also think that from the very beginning we have had this healthy understanding, which is that we need to do both. And we’re about doing both and that, that’s a key part of understanding the philosophy that we have.
Mike 05:37	Okay. With the, with the stock price fluctuations, is it… are you finding it, like, you have to be creative in incentivizing employees to stay, keeping morale up? Is there a morale problem? How are you dealing with that, in general?
Mark 05:51	Well, it doesn’t help. But look… but, I mean, I think that there are a few things that are important to keep in mind here. First is that Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company in the past, right? So it’s not like this is the first up and down that we’ve ever had, and I, I, I think that People on Facebook are fairly used to, at this point, the press and folks saying good things about us and saying bad things about us. And we have a pretty good compass and understanding, here’s what we need to build, we’re stay focused on that. I always make a point that when I think that people are being too nice to us or writing too nice of stuff about us, to get up in front of the company and say hey, we’re not as good as they say we are now. And when I think that people are being too critical, I am underestimating us. Saying, you know, I think, you know we’re not as bad as they say we are either, and I think it’s really important to keep that in mind, and I think people understand that.
	The second thing is just that, what really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of. And I don’t think that this is just Facebook, this is universal, right? I mean it’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around, okay, I’m building something that nine hundred fifty million people are gonna use. But what I think resonates with a lot of people is, you know, I’m building something that I’m gonna show to my friends and my family, and that I am going to be proud to do that. And one of the things that we’ve found is when we release apps, right, the, the new version of messenger, the new version of the i OS app, the i OS integration
	that’s coming out, the camera app, a-a-all these types of things. We – that, that’s not only the stuff that drives morale inside the company, but it also drives a lot of recruiting. Because a lot of people come to us and say, you know, I want to work at this place because you guys built that and because you guys are doing some of the most interesting stuff out there. So that’s the second thing.
	And then the third things is, you know, we haven’t really done anything on equity or anything like that in order to, incentivise people. I think that basically sticking to the normal path that we have there is good. But it’s important for people to understand, both new people who are coming to the company and people who are at the company, that the way that we do compensation is that we translate the amount of cash that we want to give you into shares. So, if the shares are undervalued or valued less than you think that they’re gonna be in the future, then you’re gonna get more shares with the amount of money that, that they we’re willing to compensate. So, and I think the, the real question, sure. You know, I mean, some people are going to look at this and maybe, you know, some people will leave. But I actually think it’s a great time for people to join, and it’s a great time for people to stay and double down. And, I think, we’re seeing that.
Mike 08:18	Can we talk product now? [applause] They like that answer. So I wanted to talk about product. And I’ve been rough on the company, as others have, over mobile in the past. I’ve said it was the Achilles heel. I’ve said it was – some of your mobile products are the worst product I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve said that…
Mark 08:42	We are very self critical too…
Mike 08:47	Is mobile a strength and opportunity for Facebook or is it, is it your weakness?
Mark 08:53	Well, it really gets back to what I was saying before, you know, so mobile is… you know there are going to be more users. Each user is going to spend more time, and per amount of time that they spend, we’re going to be making more money than we are on desktops. It’s, it’s pretty easy to paint the picture for all of those I mean, so more users, pretty clear. There are a lot more people who have phones in the world. More engagement. I think that could have gone either way, but we are already seeing the stats that mobile users more use on a daily basis. You know, since we did the new version of the i OS app, which makes what we’re doing competent. You know, we’ve already seen double the amount of feed stories that people have consumed per user on a daily basis. So, we’ve shown that in addition to all already being ahead on mobile engagement compared to desktop, there are huge things that we can do that can move the needle on that.
Mike 09:39	Yeah.
Mark 09:39	And then on monetization, I’m really optimistic because, you know, mobile’s a lot closer to TV than desktop where- on desktop we basically, for the past five or six years we’ve- we’ve had these right-hand columns… ads, right? So, we basically we’ve had this ads team that’s worked, largely in isolation, to build this service that any product team in Facebook can use. You’re building a product. You can put these ads on the side of your product, and it’s been great, you know. We-we’ve built a multi-billion dollar business by doing that. But on mobile, that’s clearly not gonna be the answer, right? We’re not gonna have ads on a separate column. There’s just no room, so the ads have to be more integrated.
	And what we are seeing now, you know, each of the product teams in Facebook are taking ownership over that. We are seeing some great mobile monetization products get developed. They have to be fundamentally integrated into the product. And what we’re seeing already, even with the early mobile ads that we have, is that they perform better than the right-hand column ads on desktop. So, I think we know that we’re gonna do well on that. There’s a huge opportunity. Now the question is getting there. And, you know, there’s no doubt that some of this stuff that… we’ve, we’ve had a bunch of missteps on this. You know, I think, I mean, part of the first question that you asked me that I didn’t quite get to answering, was what are some of the bisg mistakes that we’ve made?
	When I am introspective about the last few years, I think that the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. Because it just wasn’t there, right? And it’s not that HTML5 is bad. I’m actually, in long-term, really excited about it. And you know… and one of the things that’s interesting, is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile web Facebook, than we have using our i OS for Android apps combined, right? So mobile web is a big thing for us, but there’s no doubt that, you know, we went for this approach. We built this internal framework that we called Face-web, which was basically this-this idea that we can take the, the infrastructure that we built out from pushing code everyday. Not having just submit to an app store, building, building web code on the, on the web stack that we have, and then we can translate that into mobile development.
	We just were never able to get the quality we wanted. So we made this decision two years ago to go in that direction. So it took us six to eight months to build Face-web and get that approach going. Another four months or so, to decide that it wasn’t gonna do it after we kinda’ committed to doing that. And then, we had to start over and rewriting everything to be native, so that is kind of… It brings us to where we are now. We burnt two years. That’s really painful. I think probably we will look back on saying that that is one of the biggest mistakes, if not the biggest strategic mistake that we’ve made. But we are coming out of that now, the i OS app is in good shape and I hope the Android one will hopefully be soon.
Mike 12:20	Okay. I want to unpack that a little bit. You said that it was about, it was about two years ago. It was about twenty months that you actually decided native is the way to go. Is that right? Or was it less time?
Mark 12:31	No. So, two years ago is when we decided to basically bet completely on HTML5. Then that’s when we started building Face-web and we got into that framework and, you know, in the beginning, we launched a version and we were like all right, we know that this isn’t as good as we want. But, we believe that because it’s using the same desktop, same web methodology that we are used to, and really good at as a company, we are going to be able to improve on that really quickly. And, pretty… we worked at that for a few months and then came to a conclusion that, hey this isn’t going to get better, to the quality level that we want anytime soon. The level of mobile experiences that are out there are just so good that we need to – good enough is not good enough. We need to have something that’s of the highest quality level, and the only way we’re gonna get there is by doing native so we just have – alright, scrap this. Not completely, I mean. We’re still kinda of integrating it on the side, but we’re minimizing it. Native is going to be the approach that we go with for i OS and Android going forward.
Mike 13:21	And so you say that is probably the biggest strategic mistake you’ve made is…
Mark 13:25	I think so.
Mike 13:27	Is HTML too long?
Mark 13:28	Yeah. Or just betting completely on it. Like I said, we have more usage on our mobile website than we have on our i OS apps and our Android apps put together and that’s not like a… I mean, our i OS and Android apps are the biggest i OS and Androidd apps out there, right? So, I mean so, mobile web is huge, right. And, that is… well we just couldn’t bet completely on it. On i OS and Android, you can do so much better by doing on native work and we needed to just do that.
Mike 13:50	My reaction to the i OS app, I was, I was skeptical at first and then I tried it out and I wrote about it, it’s amazing. Did you feel the same way, was there a point before you launched the native app, where you were like, “Oh my god, this sucks.” On the iphone?
Mark 14:10	Yeah, yeah. I don’t think we… we’re very self critical. It was not… it was not where we wanted it to be before. But, you know, and, and, and to be honest even what we have now is not as good as it can be. I mean, we basically have… we spent the last period of time… we made this decision that we wanted to get this rewrite done as quickly as possible, so we knew that we wanted to add a bunch of features and there is a bunch of design things that we want to do that aren’t reflected in the current version. But, just to kind of execute on it well and simplify the project from an engineering perspective, we just decided to scope, and hey, let’s ship exactly the same features that we had before, which is now fast.
	And one of the things that I’m really excited about is that in parallel, other teams have been building other features and apps that we just didn’t launch with the last release, because we wanted the first release to just be this clean thing. You know, exactly the same feature set, just really fast now. And over the coming weeks and months, I think we can expect to see a lot of the cool stuff that people have been working over the past half-year or year, come out on this apps phone. So, that’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about that.
Mike 15:13	Will you be rewarding Android users with a better app soon, as well?
Mark 15:17	Yeah, I mean a lot of the same infrastructure that we built for i OS, in terms of the way that we do data fetching, that we kind of had to invent from scratch. It wasn’t just pushing down a website, like we did with faceweb and all of that stuff is going to apply to Android and we’re working on that and we hope to have that ready soon.
Mike 15:32	Soon, can you talk about it specifically or you are not…
Mark 15:35	I mean it will be ready when it is ready.
Mike 15:36	Okay.
Mark 15:38	Yeah.
Mike 15:39	Yeah, and not before.
Mark 15:41	And hopefully not before.
Mike 15:43	I want to spend a minute, so I-I… you’ve somehow… you’ve retooled the entire way you build products internally, you’ve separate- you have separate mobile group. You have a separate monetization group. What’s happened? How has that changed and when?
Mar 15:54	Well, one of the things that we did was… so, you know, we used to be really functionally organized, right? So, the management team, we used to have one head of engineering, one head of product. And then we made this change around the end of last year, where we set up these product groups, right? So now there’s a new speed in the information distribution product group. There’s an identity product group, a platform product group. We were just putting people in charge of these things. So before, the people running each of these big products for us, were kind of scattered across the organization. Some were in the engineering team, some were in the project team. Now there’s a person who owns each one of those.
	I basically said okay, in two years we want to be world class at each of these things. So build your road map to get us there. And you know, naturally what a lot of the folks did was… the first thing they did was they took a step back and say okay well, I don’t have the framework or the infrastructure in place now. But, I am gonna need to get there in two years, so, there was lot of rebuilding and retooling, as you say. I’ve got us on mobile side that was rebuilding the native infrastructure that we built out. And, you know, we have similar projects going on in a bunch of other areas, rethinking different areas of what we are doing. And you know, because of the cycle where we started all that around the beginning of this year, that’s why the first half of the year was a little bit slow on products, but for the next six months or nine months, I expect that a lot more interesting stuff is going to come, and I’m really excited about that.
	But, we’ve… on the mobile side for retooling specifically, we did go from having this mobile core team before. Where we have this graph that we track inside the company of a mobile check-ins part of committed code. And it went from, at the beginning of the year, ninety percent of the mobile code being committed being–from this mobile core team, to now educating everyone across the company. So now ninety percent of the check-ins and commits are coming from all the different product groups decentralized. And only ten percent of the kind of product infrastructure is getting built by the mobile core team. But that- that’s a much healthier balance, right? So, we’ve transitioned and now we are a mobile company, right? And the code that’s being written is mobile.
Mike 17:53	Do you still code? I know, even recently, you still occasionally would.
Mark 17:58	So, we have a rule at Facebook that if you check in code, you have to maintain your code so…
Mike 18:05	So, not so much.
Mark 18:09	So, the answer is I code for fun on the side, but out of respect for other folks and not wanting to be a jerk and make other people maintain my code when something breaks in a meeting. And I don’t want to have get pulled out of, like, a management team meeting or something, to go fix something. I don’t check in code to the main branch anymore.
Mike 18:29	Does Mark Zuckerberg’s code break?
Mark 18:32	Yes, everything I do breaks, but we fix it quickly. [applause]
Mike 18:40	So… you’ve closed the Instagram acquisition?
Mark 18:48	Yeah.
Mike 18:50	Can we talk about that now? Why did you do it and what are you going to do with it?
Mark 18:52	Oh. So Instagram is great, right? I mean, they’re a… they’re this super talented group of engineers building this amazing product, that just crossed a hundred million registered users and they’re killing it. And the history of how this thing came together
	is really interesting, right? So the way that I got to know Kevin is they started off building on top of our platform, but they had just a great open graphic version that made it to that… you can take pictures with Instagram and you can share them to Facebook. It’s really first class, right? So, sharing a picture from Instagram, it basically appears exactly the same as if you shared a photo on Facebook. So, it’s great. They did a really good job with that.
	And, one of the things that I like to do is, all of our big developers, I just like to
	reach out to them and get to know them personally. Partially because I’m just, I’m personally just really interested in entrepreneurship and helping other entrepreneurs, but also I just want to get to know people who are doing great stuff on top of our platform. So, I spent a lot of time with Kevin. And over the course of our discussions, we built this road map of all these things that we can together. But then there… this tension started which was, you know, they were starting to get a lot of distribution from Facebook. And from them there’s this question of, you know, how much do they want to bet on just one company providing a huge amount of their distribution, right, so that became the strategic question for them.
	And on the flip side for us, there’s this question of how much do we prioritize these things, right, so we had this list of cool things that we could do. But then there’s this question of, we could help them grow, but this might just be specific to them. But without the value occurring to us, we’ll probably get to these things more slowly than ideally we would have wanted to. So, eventually I just brought up the idea to Kevin, hey, maybe we should just join and become one company, and we can do a lot of these things really quickly, and we just have to do it. So, that’s basically the game plan, is we’re going to execute on the features that we decided earlier. Our mission around Instagram is we think Instagram is amazing, and we want to help it grow to hundreds of millions of users.
	We want to help them out with whatever we can, but we have no agenda in terms of making them go into our infrastructure or something. I know a lot of times companies force companies that they’re integrating, to do stuff like that. I think primarily it’s a waste of time. We’re not going to do any of that. We’re gonna just try to do the things that we would have done if they were an open graph partner, but now now we can prioritize them more highly. I mean they could do a lot of them directly, because they access to our code directory.
Mike 21:13	I clearly miss time drinking the water.
Mark 21:18	No, I just stopped awkwardly because I wanted to…
Mike 21:18	You did a purpose… I am not sure I am allowed to ask this question, but I’m going to anyway. I have been bugging you about a Facebook phone for years. You’ve dragged me to the office to say I’ll never…
Mark 21:33	Do you believe me yet?
Mike 21:35	No. [laughter] I believe that… that you have been… of course I believe you, except that I don’t. Maybe there is like a secret group inside of Facebook that is building, like, hardware phones and it is such a juicy story. I just hope that now you can come out and publicly say finally that we are definitely building a Facebook phone.
Mark 21:53	We’re definitely building it… No. See, that’s never – that’s always been the wrong strategy for us. I mean, it’s such a juicy thing to be able to say oh, they’re building this phone, right? And that’s what I think people have wanted to write that. But, it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us. We’re building this network, we have nine hundred, fifty million users soon. It’s growing quickly. You know, let’s say we built the phone, theoretically. We’re not.
	You know, maybe we could get, we could get ten million people to use it. Twenty million. It doesn’t move the needle right for us. The strategy we have that is different from every other major technology company
	which is building their own hardware and operating system, right? I mean… Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, like, everyone. I mean, we’re going in the opposite direction. We want to build a system which is as deeply as possible integrated into every major device and things, that people want to use. Right, so, there are three major platforms for us. I mean, there’s mobile web which, I said before, is huge for us and, you know, no one is more integrated than us on mobile web because there is kind of this limit on how far you can go.
	So we are good there.
	On i OS, the whole strategy was we want to build a great app. The last release that we did was the first step. It didn’t really innovate on design that much. It just got us to a good fundamental framework. We’re now in a good place where we can do a lot more interesting stuff. The i OS integration that Apple announced before and hopefully will be coming out soon, is a big piece of that. I’m really excited about that. It’s gonna make it so that i OS developers can integrate with Facebook a lot better, already beat out of the top ten i OS apps and something like half of the top five hundred i OS apps. And more than a hundred thousand mobile apps are already integrated with Facebook, but that’s with the current stuff we have, which I think is kind of clunky compared to what we’re doing with i OS. So that, that, that provides a really good opportunity for us to go deep on i OS. Android, we can go deep on our own, right? Because, there’s a lot of hooks in Android that you can just use as a developer and we can really just move stuff around, so that’s the strategy.
Mike 23:52	There’s really no question that you spend a lot of time thinking about mobile these days. I mean, it just clear that this is top of mind to you.
Mark 24:00	Yeah. I, I just basically live on my mobile device. You want to hear something pretty funny? You know the founders letter in S1?
Mike 24:08	Yes.
Mark 24:08	I wrote that on my phone.
Mike 24:10	Really?
Mark 24:12	Yeah.
Mike 24:12	You didn’t have like… did your lawyers do anything like… like read it?
Mark 24:18	No. I wrote that. Yeah, I do everything on my phone as a lot people do and… it’s… I mean, I still use our website right, and I mean I, a but you know I think it’s really clear that I mean that.. just the stats and my own personal intuition and experience just go towards it. You check in more with, with seeing what’s going on with the people around you, you can share more. I mean, you have the device with you when you want to do things. A lot of the development and the energy and the ecosystem is not going towards building desktop stuff anymore. It is going towards building mobile stuff. We’re able to integrate and we’re helping a lot of folks with great mobile experiences. That, we just think, that’s the future. We’re going to be doing killer stuff there and so is everyone else, so we want to help them do that.
Mike 25:03	So did you say you building a phone or no? [laughter] What about search? Do you ever think about search? I mean, Google Plus must have kind of pissed you off a little bit, right? It’s like, hey watch what we can do back? That’s the way I think of it.
Mark 25:20	You know, search is interesting. We do on the order of a billion queries a day already, and we’re basically not even trying. Right, so, I mean, today, search is… the vast majority of it is people trying to find people, but there are also a meaningful portion of queries which are people are also trying to find pages, brand pages, other business pages and apps, right? So, there’s a bunch of it actually does kinda link to commercial behavior. And I really know there’s a big opportunity there. At some point, we just need to go do that. You know, search is interesting. It’s going in this interesting direction.
	The legacy around the search is you got these search engines like a Google and Bing and what Yahoo is doing before. That basically, you type in keywords and the search engine tells you some kind of… runs some magic to tell you what it thinks the answer is that matches your keyword. But, I think that search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of answers, right? Not just like typing here and show me some relevant stuff… I have a specific question, answer these questions for me.
	When you think of it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of the questions that people have like – so what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York, in the past six months what and… and why? You know, what which of my friends, or friends of friends, work in a company that I am interested in working at, because I wanna talk to them about what it’s gonna be like to work there. I mean, these are queries that, that you can potentially do in Facebook if we built out the system, that you just couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point we will do it. [laughter]
Mike 26:55	Do you have a team working on it now?
Mark 26:57	We have a team working on search. But, a but I mean that stuff…
Mike 27:01	How many engineers do you have working on search?
Mark 27:04	I don’t even know off the top of my head… I mean, we are doing on the order of a billion queries a day. So, when I said we weren’t trying, I was being facetious. I mean, there is an ongoing effort to make sure that people can find friends and look people up efficiently. But, no, I mean, it’s – we’re- we’re doing a lot of stuff. I don’t have anything specific to announce, but I- I do think that, that’s one kind of obvious thing that would be interesting for us to do in the future, if we got to a stable place about it.
Mike 27:28	What are other obvious things that you might wanna do in the future? [laughter] Facebook phone?
Mike 27:40	See the phone just doesn’t make any sense. There is a lot of stuff around platform that I am really excited about.
Mark 27:51	Let’s talk about that for a second, since we’re a little over time. You know there’s Zynga, right?
Mike 27:54	Yes.
Mark 27:55	Not growing so much anymore. What else is going on there? Are there…?
Mike 27:58	Well, so platform is really these two things, primarily. Canvas has been the legacy, right? So, there’s obviously this big games business and, yeah, I mean Zynga’s had a rough few quarters. I think that they are fundamentally a strong company, but they’ve lost some share on our platform, and other companies like Kixeye and King. com are gaining, right? So, I mean, it’s not kind of all bad guys. We have more people playing games on Facebook platform. Now we have the passwords for two hundred million people playing games monthly.
	That’s real right? But that comes in canvas, but the thing that I’m actually spending most of my time on is… when you think about
	what Facebook platform should be, it shouldn’t be about people building apps inside of our environment. There’s a bit of that on desktop, and think that’s cool and it’s providing value, but I think the real value is about people being able to bring their information, their friends to apps. Being able to bring context from what they are doing in those apps back to Facebook, helping apps spread themselves, helping give people more social contacts in all the things that they’re doing.
	And you’re starting to see a lot of really interesting stuff. Spotify is killing it. They were a good early example. Airview Inv, I think is doing a lot of really interesting stuff, in their firm, quickly. I mean, you see examples of things in fitness. So, IQPlus is doing is doing interesting stuff, Run Keeper – I just- a lot of, a lot of interesting things that, that are going on. And, that’s one of the areas that I’m personally really excited about. You know, all developers want more distribution. One of the recent things we did that’s on the margin between platform and ads.
	I mean, this is an example of this kind of new way of thinking, where we have or integrating our monetization products into the product teams, is we launched this product recently mobile active installs, not particularly creative we we named but clear. And what it basically allows you to do as the developer, is you can put in, you can list out the different market segments or just like any kind of targeting that you want, and you can say how much you are willing to pay for an install. And then you just embed the Facebook SDK into your app, kind of figure out which apps that we should show.
	We have hundreds of millions of people who are using apps, who we can, we can put your apps in front of. We give social context so here your friends were using these apps. It has great ROI for the initial partners. I don’t think we’ve done a full public launch yet, but we’ve done a bunch of private testing and it’s worked really well. So, that’s something that I’m excited about that I think, almost every mobile developer can kinda get behind and be interested in it. It’s right on that, the intersection of the platform stuffs that we’re doing and a real good distribution tool that I think most developers are gonna wanna use.
Mike 30:24	All right. Last question.
Mark 30:27	All right.
Mike 30:29	It’s horrible. Are you still having fun? [Laughter]
Mark 30:33	Yeah. I mean, for me it’s not really about fun, though. It’s about mission, so you know people ask… we go through these waves, right? And, you know, there are times where everyone in the world thinks that what we’re doing is awesome and, you know, usually they are, they are too optimistic when they think that and they are writing stuff like we’re whatever. And then there’s times when people are super pessimistic and, you know, I personally… this may be a perverse thing personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people underestimate us because I just personally would rather be underestimated. And I think it gives us good latitude to, to go out and take some big bets, and do some things that really excite and amaze people, but…
Mike 31:19	Are people underestimating Facebook right now, do you think? Are you in that cycle?
Mark 31:19	I think a bunch of people are. It’s hard for me to say, overall, but over the long term, I think that there’s a huge amount of interesting stuff that we… that we’re working on. There are all these long term projects that I really can’t get into right now, but that we are retooling to work on, and we are about half way through that cycle. And that’s the stuff that keeps me going. I just want to build good stuff. You know, I, I, you know when we look back ten, twenty years from now, the legacy of this company should be that we’ve connected everyone in the world, and that everyone can share all the stuff that they want. And you know, that’s a lot. That’s a lot to get excited about, whether it is fun, exciting, whatever. I mean some days are hard, some days kick ass, but I think everyone is amped for what we are doing.
Mike 32:03	On the behalf of all of us, thanks very much for you time, Mark. Thanks!
Mark 32:09	Thanks.
	[APPLAUSE]

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Startup Weekend interviews Alexei Dunayev, CEO, TranscribeMe

Transcribe Me — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:45:38 +0000

Startup Weekend: How do you know when someone is the right fit for your team?

Alexei Dunayev: I absolutely believe that having the right team is the key to success in an early stage startup. There is a lot to be said for having positive energy in a company, and the makeup of the team needs to consider that. We know someone is the right fit for the team when they have a passion for the business, ideas on how to develop it, and believe that it has a great chance to succeed. At Startup Weekend, we were able to attract a top-tier team to gauge the customer demand and at the same time put together a profitable business model of how to solve it.

SW: As a tag-along question: what do you look for when building a team?

AD: At Startup Weekend we brought together the marketing and operations teams, and after winning the weekend, also expanded the technology side of the business. The structure of Startup Weekend is great, as it lets the people who are most interested in the idea to work on it, and also gives people an opportunity to stay on past the weekend, or not. We agreed amongst ourselves that we are there for 54 hours with a single goal to build a business and win the weekend, and then would decide on how to continue after the weekend was over

SW: You’ve been both an attendee and a mentor at Startup Weekend events,… In your experience, how are these roles complimentary?

AD: They are quite different roles. There is a lot less pressure when you are a mentor, and so you are able to step back and think about problems from a different viewpoint with the luxury of time. It’s interesting to be a participant also, mostly because of the energy of the team and the buzz of working something really special. These roles are indeed at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but nevertheless the spectrum itself is really the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the city where Startup Weekend is being held, so there is lots of opportunity for collaboration.

SW: How have you educated yourself (and your team) on the unforeseen challenges/questions you’ve had to deal with?

AD: By having passionate and dedicated people on the team, we were able to efficiently collaborate in this learning process and share the learnings throughout the team. We also found people with specific domain expertise outside the team to draw in as advisors and supporters.

About TranscribeMe

TranscribeMe converts voice to text. We offer the world’s best platform to connect professional and casual transcribers with customers in the publishing, medical, legal and business markets using a smartphone platform integrated with crowd-sourced human transcribers.

Our customers use the TranscribeMe application on their smartphone to record meetings, interviews and dictation. The app sends the results to our servers, which process the audio files and then forward them to a crowd of transcribers. These transcribers are working on our best-in-class transcription platform, allowing them to maximize their accuracy and productivity. As a result, we are able satisfy our customers’ demand for an easy-to-use service, with 98%+ accuracy and a fast turnaround time.

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