500 Startups Company Waygo Talks To Nibletz [video][500 startups]

Waygo, 500 startups,Rhode Island startup,startup,startups,everywhere elseEarlier this morning we brought you the interview with Spinnakr founder Michael Michael Mayernick who talked with us about laying their foundation in Washington DC which helped them prepare for and then graduate from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley.

Ryan Rogowski, the cofounder of translation startup WayGo, also talked with us about their experience in Rhode Island before being chosen for 500 Startups.

In the video below Rogowski talks to us about  the much lower cost of overhead in Rhode Island, and how it allowed them to speed up their development process. Waygo was able to catch the eye of 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who is a very frequent traveler, the kind that Waygo was designed for.

As for what they do?

Waygo is a mobile app that allows you to hover your smartphone camera over text or images and get a translation. For instance, if you want to order Chinese Food from a Chinese menu written in their native tongue, Waygo would allow you to scan the menu and get real time translations. The best part? Everything is done locally on the device side which makes the translations come extremely fast.

Waygo is designed with the tourist in mind. You can use Waygo to translate Chinese food menus, and signs on the road, bars and restaurants.

The idea came about over two years ago when Rogowski was living in China and realized how hard it was to translate things in real time.

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Meet Rhode Island 500 Startups Startup: Waigo Translate (Translate Abroad)

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Here at nibletz we’ve been fortunate enough to be chosen as the first test site for Markerly, our good friend Sarah Ware’s DC based publisher tools startup, and member of the just announced, 5th class at 500 startups. Through this great relationship we’ve got an awesome tool on the site, in Markerly, and exclusive early access to some of their cohorts.

Earlier this morning as the embargo lifted on this years 500 startups class, we brought you an interview with Australian startup Kickfolio. We also brought you an interview with Boston startup Privy.

Now we turn our sites again to the north east part of the country and Rhode Island startup Waigo Translate.

Waigo Translate is one of those uniquely cool startups that Dave McClure, Paul Singh and the entire 500 startups organization prides themselves on.

Waigo Translate is an app that turns your iPhone camera into a translation device. Waigo Translate current works with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with more languages on the way. Yes that means you could use your phone to translate the written lyrics to Gangnam Style.

We got a chance to talk with Waigo Translate’s Marketing Director, Rob Sanchez. Check out the interview below.

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Providence Startup: LoveGov, Politician Dating

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With the second Presidential debate behind us and the third and final debate just days away, politics is on the forefront of everyone’s minds. No one with a Twitter account or Facebook account can escape the political races this year.

A new startup in Providence Rhode Island, is looking to add its hat to the political ring. The new startup called Lovegov is applying an algorithmic like approach based on user entries to political questions and statements to formulate possible candidate choices for the user. In other words Lovegov is the match.com for citizens to find political candidates to possibly vote for.

Now of course this is a machine designed to make the process easier and no machine should dictate the way you vote, however Lovegov is providing extremely valuable information to its citizen users.

For instance, you may not know where a candidate stands on issues that may be of importance to you and not necessarily a whole lot of others. Lovegov is going to pair you up with candidates that have commonalities with you. You may be surprised to find another candidate aligns more with you than the one you planned on voting for. What Lovegov really does is empowers voters with information so they can make a more conscious decision.

“These matching mechanisms help people understand and identify causes and organizations to get involved with,” Lovegov founder Joschka Tryba told masshightech,com . “And we feel this matching mechanism is innovative because it enables users to get immediate intuition as to how they relate to another political entity, person or group.”

Lovegov has three employees in their Providence headquarters and is seeing sign ups rapidly increase. For now they’re focusing on politics in New England, but plan a nationwide roll out over time.

Linkage:

Here’s Lovegov

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