Thursday, October 22, 2009

Freemium in the Localization World

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, gave the keynote at Localization World today. He discussed "freemium" concepts described in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Off the top of my head, here are a few examples of "freemium" products and services in the localization industry:

  • News and information from various websites
  • Online services like Lingotek's TM which has a price only for major installations and support
  • Shareware like Catscradle that is free to try but priced to buy
  • Machine translation services like SDL's Free Translation which can then lead users to purchase human translation and/or enterprise machine translation systems
  • Almost every translation-related venture by Google
  • CSOFT recently came out with a free website (www.l10nworks.com) that includes some good information and free localization tools - many of the tools were developed by their own engineers, thus featuring their own expertise as a teaser to potential clients

Can you think of any categories of "freemium" models in the localization industry that are not yet in the above list?

1 comments:

Luigi Muzii said...

What about test translations? ;)

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