Team: NUS Technology
Project Name: 1language (One Language)
Selected Theme: Challenges associated with real time communication and translation (Star Trek universal translation anyone?)
Idea: A marketplace for real time communication and translation
Nowadays, the world becomes flat and everyone can connect together through a variety of real-time conversation tools. But the gap of language difference is still there. Several tools support auto translation but it is very general and most of them are done automatically by the machine. Each day, hundreds of millions of people around the world are trying to learn new languages because they are afraid of not being able to communicate with other people speaking different language. We are afraid of using a direct communication tool such as Skype, Yahoo, Viper because we might not understand what other people are saying. What if we need to make friends with people in Russia or Spain but we have not even learned a little bit of Russian or Spanish? What if we have an urgent business discussion needs to be done right away but we could not find a suitable translator nearby?
1language at first can be considered as a real-time communication tool. However, unlike other traditional tools, it is built with the goal that it would become a marketplace where we can easily hire a translator to help us communicate with other people speaking a different language. By integrating real-time communication tool with translation service, we hope to make people understand each other easily and there is nothing to prevent them to sharing or learning from other people around the world.
PubNub (Ruby + JS SDK), Google API, Facebook API