robert_mygengo

Developer-centric opinions are for Hacker News.

Sorry man. We all worked hard on this and were excited to get it out; it's been well-received by our users and I wanted to post it. Did not mean to offend.

My full blog post:

Today we have some great news.

It’s been more than three years since we started our company—just a couple of friends in an apartment. There are now over 40 of us, in Japan, the USA, Germany, the UK and China.

We offer translation into 24 languages. Several million words are translated every month. We have over 5,000 truly tested translators in all timezones. 95 percent of jobs began in less than 28 minutes after the order was placed. And 99.996 percent of jobs are successfully approved by our customers, who number in the thousands.

We’re proud to now provide both a simple translation tool for individuals, as well as a platform and API for others to build a multi-language web. Among our customers who go global by using our API are international apparel companies, car manufacturers, a vast number of E-commerce websites, CMS solutions, localization solutions, well-known tech blogs and many more.

In addition, we’ve seen a number of new companies built from the ground up on our API.

So now, back to the news. As you might know, the name myGengo was based on the Japanese word "Gengo" 言語 (with a hard "g") which means "language.” We added “my” to make the language more personal.

But today we simply become “Gengo.”

It’s shorter, handier and easier to remember. It represents the simplicity and power that we want to offer to all our users.

Gengo reflects the global aspirations and perspective of our users. And if you like to think of a future where cross-language communication is simple (we do!), it’s now a verb.

So Gengo your blog to Japanese. Gengo an email to Spanish. Just Gengo it!

Have fun,

Robert Laing & Matthew Romaine Founders, Gengo

P.S. Oh, and we also made some changes to our website. Hope you like them. Over the next few months you’ll see even more improvements. Don’t forget to check out what’s going on right now on Facebook, where we are celebrating the name change :)

There will be some Gengo people there for sure :)

This is not necessarily bad advice. However it's kind of arrogant.

While "the point of an internship is [...] to learn what kind of work or industry you want to be in once you graduate, to try things out and live in cool places." is partly true (especially in the current economy) it's a pretty naive way of looking at yourself.

If you're doing an internship, you're probably not a fully-fledged and employable person yet. You probably aren't ready to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The internship is there to teach you some of the other aspects of working with others in a real company (not a college project) that you simply can't get from college. Most 25 year olds don't have those skills. Don't forget that.

It's a lovely job market right now in Silicon Valley, but it won't be forever. The individuals that have a bit of humility respect the fact they need to learn throughout their career, and in the long run will do better.

I don't really understand why this is on the front page, or what the point of the article is (apart from a grumble). Not saying it ain't so, but struggling to care...

Reading this makes me feel treated like a kid. As if Asana staff will be leaning over my shoulder the whole day like creepy startup Jesuses.

Plus Donnie and Kim, peeking round the door, desperately fishing for compliments on their cooking :)

I get it, you're all lovely. But this is too much.

Best part of this for me is that I can now actually pay to watch something outside of the US from an artist I like. If you don't live outside the US or UK you probably don't realize how rare that is.

I don't want to in any way refute the referenced article or the findings of the air crash investigators, because clearly the pilots here behaved incorrectly and I am just an outsider.

However I think it's worth at least mentioning that both airlines and aircraft manufacturers have a vested interest and significantly more resources to put behind demonstrating that pilot error is the primary cause of any accident.

For instance in this case you have... • poor training (pilots unprepared for alternate law) • possibly poor UI (de-coupling of controls, insufficient communication that aircraft had lapsed to alternate law) • small-scale systems failure (pitots)

vs • incorrect response and continued failure to understand aircraft attitude (in turbulence, with no visual cues, in a situation which 'fooled' three pilots)

...which makes it an interesting one for manufacturer and airline to definitively defend, but I would guess that they can and will absolve themselves from liability.

Bad names are good for SEO. Good names have no intrinsic SEO value.

e.g. Twitter, Skype, Foursquare are all pretty good names. But have no SEO benefit.

e.g. local-activities.com is good for SEO, but I've already forgotten it, it's so generic.

So do you want to build a big business, or just a nice tickover organic traffic-based business. That's the decision. If it's the former, go for a great name. If it's the latter, go with SEO.

I think the name is one of the factors, but probably not the primary factor. But the point of the article is not really about search engine business models.

I generally agree with this. I think it's just a suggestion that it's worth thinking about if you're at all considering Chinese market entry, instead of assuming your name will just "work".