Live Coverage: Techcrunch50 – Language and Communication Tools

Below is our live coverage of the Tuesday afternoon startup presentations at the Techcrunch50 conference in San Francisco. Keep refreshing this page to view the newest coverage – we will note once the coverage has concluded. And check our main DEMO and TechCrunch50 conference section for our video event coverage as well.

AlfaBetic

– Monetizing across languages
– 70% of global web users do not speak english
– they believe this is the biggest opportunity on the web today
– a translation engine, a computer can learn how to translate by learning from what people translate
– shows a demo using spanish and basically picks on (i think) google and how it doesn’t understand the difference between spoken and typed words
– they show a demo of techcrunch in 10 languages
– posts are inside of AlfaBetic’s WordPress install
– they assign a proofreader to review
– comments can be translated in real time to other languages
– creates a world community for a blog across any language
– actually pretty freaking sweet tool
– can translate into the 10 most popular languages on the web

PostBox

– new desktop email application
– helps you manage your email so you can get more stuff done
– built on mozilla
– founder is one of the builders of thunderbird
– postbox gives instant access to any document in your email
– can perform actions on the files
– can search images inside the email accounts
– has an image viewer
– can upload directly to a photo sharing site from within PostBox
– uses topics instead of folders – says this is better because replies automatically get the topic assigned whereas with folders you need to move the replies into the folders as well

post concluded – I apologize that I wasn’t able to cover the other startups – I had to step out of the conference room – will try to cover tonight/this week.