Alum’s startup wins first place at appAttack contest in GMIC-SV conference
In October 2011, Huan-Yu Wu (MS, ECE’10) joined Translate Abroad, a small startup company that makes a very interesting product: Waygo an i-phone app that translates the text in the image captured by the phone’s camera from Chinese, Japanese, or Korean into English in real time and under real-world conditions. Waigo does not need an internet connection to work its magic.
One year later, Tanslate Abroad has won first place in the highly competitive appAttack contest in the GMIC-SV conference beating hundreds of competing teams. Huan-Yu has been instrumental in the development of the image capture and analysis parts of Waigo.
“Yes, this is really exciting to win in such a big conference. We actually didn’t expect too much before the contest, but it just happened” said Huan-Yu. Looking to the future he adds “So now we are in an accelerator program called 500 Startups. It’s a lot of learning and interacting with teammates, other companies, and mentors, and of course a lot of programming and reading. Working in this environment keeps us moving in a fast pace. The competition is encouraging, and we know we still need to keep up the work.”
The company and its app have been recently covered in TechCrunch that included a funny video too.