ANC REVIEW: Tranya Nova Lite Wireless Buds

ANC

ANC is an acronym usually associated with South Africa and the name of the African National Congress, in turn associated with Nelson Mandela and the overthrow of apartheid. In this case, however, it applies to Active Noise Cancellation and the overthrow of annoying outside noise, a technology that has become increasingly attractive in a world of external chaos.

It’s no surprise that the people of today are happy to retreat into their headphones to experience a world of their making, not one out of control.

So step forward the Tranya Nova Lite ANC Wireless Buds, a cheaper alternative to Apple’s excessively overpriced Airpods and excellent value for those looking for a listening experience that is not based on brand, but on sound quality. Readers also get a 15% discount if they to to the official Tranya website and use code: Novalite15.

Tranya has been selling this type of product for a few years and have been previously reviewed on this website, usually with very good reviews. So, what of this particular iteration of its ANC wireless buds?

They’re good, very good and even if they are bit more fiddly to get going than Airpods, it’s worth the trouble. My ANC Wireless Buds came in an Apple shade of white, but there are other colors, most notably black.

There’s little to choose between AirPods, they look the same and easy to connect to a device through Bluetooth 5.3 and can be attached and switched to/with two devices at once through the three listening modes of ANC, normal and transparency mode.

The ANC is excellent with an emphasis on letting the noise in and increasing the efficiency of the sound/music. The transparency option not only blocked out annoying outside noise, it also cut out the sound of the wind when talking.

The Tranya Nova Lite ANC Wireless Buds come in the mandatory chargeable case via a USB-C connection or a wireless charging made. The company says that the battery life can last up to 36 hours, but a more realistic, although still excellent, nine hours is the norm.

I’m not an Apple fan and have rarely used Airpods, but I can’t imagine they’re much better than these wireless buds… and customers won’t have to pay the earth to receive great sounds, with fantastic ANC.

Recommended Christmas purchase.

REVIEW: Tranya Nova ANC Wireless Earbuds

Tranya Nova ANC wireless earbuds – exclusive 15% discount code – NOVA15US

nova 

Not everybody loves Apple and everything that Apple makes. Some prefer Android as a mobile operating system, some prefer a different type of laptop and some prefer earbuds that don’t cost the earth, but still supply great sound and a seamless listening experience.

So step forward, the Tranya Nova ANC wireless earbuds, a welcome alternative to other  expensive earbuds that are just as good, if not better, than their highly branded counterparts.

Retailing on Amazon at a reasonable $79.99 these earbuds come with all the necessary paraphrenalia and are easily connected through Bluetooth and especially Bluetooth 5.3, so two devices can be attached simultaneously and it’s easy to switch between them.

The case can be charged through a USB-C or wireless charging pad and the buds boast have a good nine hours of battery life. Using the case and it’s an   extra 27 hours, and the charge can be checked  at any time using the audio app.

There are three listening modes – ANC, transparency mode and norma and the ANC is especially effective in boosting the audio rather than blocking out any noise  while the transparency option lets noise in easily; call quality was also excellent.

The Novas are manipulated by touch controls; easy to use and dependable, something that isn’t always the case with budget wireless earbuds. This is a good product offering decent value for money. While they are not as ‘sexy’ as Apple’s EarPods, it depends on what the consumer is after.

In this case it is quality over branding and price over design. One for the pramatist rather than the slave to the brand.

The Tranya Nova earbuds are available at $79.99 (£62) from Amazon or the official site, with a discount of 15% off using the voucher code NOVA15US.

Startups in UK now have 60% failure rate

startups

As the UK economy continues to tighten, startups continue to face uncertainty providing a potential opportunity for VCs to pick up cheap deals.

According to data from advisory company Startup Genome, the failure rate of UK startups is currently 60%, with the primary reasons being running out of cash or failing to raise new capital.

While VC funding in the UK is also struggling, with a report from PitchBook detailing how the opening quarter of 2023 saw VC funding in the UK fall to £2.9 billion, this has put a strain on the declining value of startups as they continue to battle the consequences of the macroeconomic environment.

Claire Trachet, M&A expert and CEO of business advisory, Trachet, comments on how the fate of these UK startups could impact the M&A sector:

“With the Bank of England announcing an interest rate rise to 5.25% coupled with an inactive IPO market, scaling businesses will find it increasingly difficult to secure funding. As a result, this presents optimism for VCs and investors who will be able to capitalise on these startups.

“Acquirers know they will be getting a bargain from low valuations, potentially leading to a flurry of M&A deals, presenting a more positive outlook for M&A activity in the UK. Whilst these startups could sell out for less than what they are worth, it also presents a greater opportunity compared to failing as a whole.

This trend of startups selling parts of their business – or the entirety of it – could continue as various companies are suffering from having raised excessive funds and presenting unrealistic valuations.

According to a report from Innoven Capital, approximately 55% of early-stage investors feel that startups were overvalued in 2022. As a result, these companies are often left with business models that are unable to tackle the current market’s challenges.

EasyTranslate Q&A: Frederik R. Pedersen, CEO

easytranslate

Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, Frederik. Please tell us about EasyTranslate

Thanks for the invitation. We enable customers to create and translate quality content at half the price of any other service, by enabling generative AI and LLM technologies. As a result of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, the translation industry is about to change forever.

We believe that combining AI-GC with ‘humans in the loop’ will enable businesses to create company-specific language models in any language. We won’t translate anymore, we will do ground-up content creation in any language.

We make complicated AI/LLM technologies accessible to everyone, so that customers can utilise the latest AI-technology hassle-free in their content process without any need of prompt-engineers or machine learning engineers.

This enables the customers of any size to communicate engaging content in any language in a single infrastructure that is scalable and future proof.

Wow, that’s a big change, you sound like you’re ahead of the curve

ChatGPT and other AI-GC models are the biggest hype since the start of the internet. Already, 100s of start-ups are getting built, but what it takes to add real and unique value to the customers is still not 100% clear.

Current models are still general in its wording and would need training for each customer to learn their language and by then create real value.

We have created one flow for all of a customers’ content, so they can make engaging content that is optimised towards SEO and we train on the human edits so they can stand out in this content-overload world.

Moreover, we’ve recently reached the finals of the LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge, a highly prestigious competition that awards the most innovative companies in the localisation industry. The winner will be unveiled in Malmo next month.

You recently raised your first funding for Easy Translate?

We decided that we wouldn’t go through the normal investment cycles and bootstrapped the company for a decade. However, as the industry was being fundamentally changed by generative AI products, we raised more than $3 million in January this year.

The funding coincides with the launch of an innovative integration of LLMs that provides automated content generation and translation services. The new funds create room for further development of the new functionality and add to the ambition of accelerating EasyTranslate’s organic growth. In addition, this strategic partnership enables EasyTranslate to grow its market share by realising strategic acquisitions.

We believe that training customer specific LLMs by including copywriters in the loop in any language enables a better and more localised content output which will increase customer engagement and improve organic search ranking.

By challenging the current state of translating content we will see a major shift in the industry towards generating content with trained LLMs within the customers tone of voice and question the need of translation in many marketing content aspects.

From the fine-tuning of GPT-engines, EasyTranslate is planning to build out their own infrastructure of mini-LLMs trained on customer level to reach better levels of accuracy and less hallucination than using OpenAI’s GPT4 out of the box.

What about the early days of the company?

EasyTranslate was founded in 2010 as an online translation agency. We were recognised as one of the fastest-growing companies in our industry in our first 6 years and the youngest company to enter the list of 100 biggest Language Service Providers.

The industry was facing major pressure on pricing as all language service providers sell words and have a mark-up on the freelancers.

In 2020 we decided to do a full pivoting of our market positioning and decided to build our current platform solution where we give away our marketplace of verified freelancers and seamless training of AI enabled in a software that streamlines all those content processes across platforms.

How long have you been in business?

We are a small Danish startup in Copenhagen. We serve customers from 21 different countries across three continents and our tech team is located in Skopje, Macedonia. We have more than 10 years’ experience in running marketplaces with a mission to make custom language accessible for everyone for free.

We will do this by enabling AI-GC training on the fly from the edits human copywriters are doing. These trained models can be used cross-service, which means they will also do foundation for customer specific machine translation when needed. Two birds, one stone.

We have taken all our knowledge from creating a quality marketplace for localisation and content creations in combination with AI-technologies. We will be the first company to support ‘out of the box’ AI/LLM learning from edits that creates customer-specific models in any language.

These models will work cross functionally, so that customers have the ability to increase quality in both AI-GC and machine translation. The technology will be tailored to create SEO content as well.

We grew our SaaS business by 250% from 2021 to 2022 and we are expecting to reach the same level of growth in 2023. We are handling more than 11,000 projects and more than six million words per month.

What is the problem EasyTranslate is solving?

Quality multilingual content at scale. We are creating more content than ever before. From 2020 to 2022 the global online content grew by more than 50% (33 zettabytes

It’s the closest to an infinitive amount of content as 1 zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes. One terabyte is equal to 83 million pages. To stand out in the content overload, we have to create quality content that is worth engaging with and not ‘just content’.

Please walk us about the user experience

We have put our faith in a product-led growth strategy. This means, we are obsessed with the user experience from sign-up to creating the WOW moment. We provide our product as a Free/Freemium offering, so all users can expect to see value before they need to pay for our service.

We have around 300 company freemium signups monthly and they have the full self-service option to build their team of freelancers, integrate plug-ins to their CMS, PIM or directly to their Github repository to ensure the content flow runs smoothly and automatically without human interaction.

Customers can get started on a paid plan within our product without any interaction with sales reps. Starting price is 25 Euros per month for the annual subscription option.

We are educating customers about creating content in any language from ground up instead of translating content every time. One of the biggest challenges in the translation process is “garbage in, garbage out”.

The problem with low quality translation is often based on low quality source content. The end goal is to exit to an AI-GC or LSP, so we will need to make them aware and recognise that they need us to continue delivering value to their customers.

Why are you better than the other guys and who are your competitors? 

We are the only one combining the ‘Human in the loop seamlessly and at a cost price’ that enables the seamless build up of a custom AI that is future-sustainable and makes our product critical infrastructure for our customers.

Easytranslate is up against potential competitors for free/cheap Machine Translation such as Google Translate, DeepL, Microsoft translate or Language Service Providers including LanguageWire and TextMaster. Then there’s translation management software such as Lokalise, Crowdin and Phrase.

But more recently, our real competitors are major generative AI tools, such as  Jasper.ai.

Thanks, Frederik, it looks like great days are ahead for EasyTranslate. Prepare yourself for a trance of inbound from potential acquirers!

Thank you, Monty, a pleasure to have shared with your audience.

WEB3 BOOK REVIEW: The End of Business-As-Usual

web3

Web3 is the new old technology. While all the chat and the hype in yet another technology cycle is all about ChatGPT and its overlord   generative AI, there is another revolution that has been brewing even longer.

The Web3 buzzword is known by many, yet really understood by few. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It is the metaverse? Is it crypto?

In this book by G C Cooke (ignore Graham’s use of his initials, it’s worth it), this coming, and already here, wave is nicely interpreted for those who know and those who are yet to know.

Whether it’s FinTech, entertainment, social networks or plain disruption, Cooke lays it out for us in easy-to-read, yet never simplistic, terms. Using heavily the business book of The Innovator’s Dilemma as the template for his ideas, it shows how we will all be affected.

There will be those who will profit by spotting the Web3 wave and those who will proser immensely by riding the wave, while others will sink below the surface, terrified of change, as much as I’m terrified by my overuse of water metaphors.

It also lays out what’s going to happen in Web 4 after explaining how we’re going to get there via the first two iterations. First there are protocols and then there are apps that run on these protocols. Web1.0 and Web3 are the same as are Web2 and Web4. Protocols followed by applications. Same as it ever was.

As somebody who has previously been a lunchtime adopter instead of an early adopter, in this case, as I suggest other readers of this book will find out, I have become an early adopter.

Moreover, there is no use of the C-word here, only explanations of AI and how it has a role to play in Web3. Personally, I think generated AI is the work of the devil (the use of such a term mean the machines have marked me down as a enemy and my days are numbered).

In the interim, before out mutual assured destruction, even by machines or water metaphors, I recommend this book, one that will have you swimming to your next success, come hell or high water. Boom!