A Visit from Team Vox Japan
As some of the Voxers may have already noticed, Vox is an international community. One of the goals of Vox is to be a place where you can meet your friends and family from all over the globe, but also feel at home through a user interface in the language you're comfortable with and with services that are local to where you are.
The Vox team is actually in a few locations around the globe. While most of the Vox team members are in San Francisco, team members in Japan and France contribute their ideas and hard work to help make Vox into a place that translates globally.
Over the past few weeks a few of the members of Team Vox from Japan (including myself) went to San Francisco to work alongside the SF members of Team Vox. When we're in Japan, members of the team communicate regularly via email, chat, video conferencing and of course, Vox! But, it really helps us gel as a team when we can get together to work and communicate at the same place and talk about Vox. And of course it's nice to talk about things besides work and to get to know each other.
Vox started their preview period in Japan in July a little bit after the preview period started in the US. The main difference between Vox in the US and Vox in Japan is that the user interface is in Japanese. However, the user interface of Vox is displayed in the language of the person logged in, so even if you don't read Japanese, you should be able to visit Japanese blogs and if you see something you like, please drop a [this is good] (which is of course the universal currency for Vox). Another key difference is that Vox for the Japanese audience connects to Amazon.jp instead of Amazon.com, in other words were trying to make Vox feel like home for Japanese users also. However, despite these differences, Vox is essentially the same in Japan or the US. New themes and features are released at the same time and Voxers can connect to each other regardless of the language that they see Vox in.
Our trip to San Francisco was a great trip, we got to be with the rest of the team for Release 10 and while I'm in Japan, the other two guys are in San Francisco working on Release 11, which should again be a great release!
- Dice
Comments
That sounds great! Can't wait to see what you've got in store for Release 11.
Whenever we get there...it would be neat to be at a point in technology where a user could read what was being shared in any language and have it display on screen for the end user in their native language. I am not sure it would be easy and I imagine something of that nature would be very complicated, but ultimately a cool tool indeed.
The online world is shrinking everyday but it would be better to see the perspective of different people from where they live in the world "first hand" instead of having to rely on the clarity of translation from other types of media.
The Japanese QOTD is the same as the English-language one. It's just written in Japanese. :)