My all-time favorite rock band growing up was Boston. I liked them so much that I went to see them in concert twice in one week in Alpine Valley Wisconsin in 1987.
The only problem with Boston is that they took forever to come out with a new album. More than a Feeling came out in 1976. Their next album Don’t Look Back came out in 1978. It took them another 8 years to come out with their third album Third Stage. They released their fourth and last album Corporate America in 2002 but by then I had lost interest in the group.
Why did it take this group so long to release an album? Most people say that it is because Tom Scholtz, Boston’s creator and leader, was a perfectionist and did not want to release an album until it was perfect.
What does this have to do with Word Lens? In today’s high-tech world, time-to-market is a key factor. A year is an eternity when you’re talking about mobile phone apps. Yet since Quest Visual first released Word Lens one year ago with only Spanish language support, it took them a whole year to release the second language, French.
But is it just a matter of perfectionism? Or was this product release timed for the holiday season to capitalize on indiscriminate Christmas shopping (just like the first product which was also released days before Christmas). Since I wanted to check out the product myself, I bought the French-to-English language pack on my iPhone.
Well the product is NOT perfect, but works well nonetheless. It renders comprehensible translations of simple signs that one would find in public areas. However, it does not do as well with more extensive texts. Some people may complain about the $10 price tag per language pair, but once you get over that and install the product, it is definitely nice to have. I will surely use it on future travels to French-speaking countries.
But why did it take so long to release another language? One of the reasons may be just lack of time. It seems that the creator of Word Lens Otavio Good was busy working on other things, including a project for DARPA which yielded a prize of $50,000 (read more here). Another reason may have been to release the new product in time for the holiday season. Will we need to wait for next Christmas for Italian or German? Let’s wait and see.
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