Girls In Tech

Adriana Gascoigne and I embarked on a 10-day tour of Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this week as part of the Geeks on a Plane Tour Organized by Web2Asia, The Founders Fund and Dave McClure.   I’ll be chronicling our adventures regularly and adding the posts here!

After stumbling off our 12-hour flight from SFO to Tokyo, the Geeks spent our first evening at Tokyo2.0, a hub for Tokyo’s web community that meets monthly. We joined over two hundred techies in a dimly lit, underground bar in Tokyo’s hip Roppongi Hills neighborhood to hear about new developments in natural language on the web.

The two demos that stuck out as having the greatest potential to impact the way we interact with the Web were from Mozilla and Knowledge Creation. Mozilla demoed Ubiquity, an experiment into connecting the Web with language. Imagine that you are inviting a friend to a new restaurant and you want to include a map and restaurant review. In today’s world you would need to have one window open for your web email service, another for a mapping site, and yet another for reviews of the restaurant. You would then include several relevant links into the email that your friend would have to browse to. Enter Ubiquity, a new user interface that would simplify this process by allowing users to easily include the map, review, and any other relevant information, right into the email message itself with simple language-based instructions.

Knowledge Creation demoed Voice Delivery System, a web API for synthetic speech generation. The Voice Delivery system adds a “reading out” function to websites and is available in thirty languages without the need to download any software. Specifically created for the elderly and people with disabilities, VDS makes the web immensely more user-friendly and has the potential to be applied in a number of powerful ways. One application that comes to mind is to use VDS as a tool to aid literacy. Another is to use VDS to turn web pages into podcasts. Imagine driving, and being able to access a web page on your mobile device that is then read out to you – essentially turning your web device into a talking Kindle!

If day one is an indicator of what the Geeks will experience on this trip – there’s going to be a lot of learning with equal amounts of professional connections and friendships formed on the inaugural Geeks on a Plane tour. Go Geeks!

Adriana Gascoigne, Markus Fuhrmann, Jon Yongfook Cockle, Larry Chiang, Tina Tran