Alright, we know we say this every few days, but we’re extremely excited about this release. The funny thing is, until just a couple of days ago, this feature was following our normal course of product development and was slated for release some time end of Q4, or early Q1. At least, until something wild happened.
We experienced a huge spike in sales calls last week that specifically mentioned the need for multi-language support for their event technology platforms of choice. Seems reasonable enough. In fact, we thought every platform offered this, some better than others. However, when we dug a bit deeper and asked some more questions, it turned out that these prospects had already looked at dozens of platforms on the market, and the only real way any platform offers this functionality is by creating multiple instances of the exact same event, and event planners are often charged multiple times for each event! Not to mention how disjointed the experience is for all attendees, and how much extra effort is required by event planners.
Wait ... say what!?
We knew we had to be mistaken, there was simply no way this could be true. We’re hoping there are platforms out there that may offer better multi-language support and we just haven’t found them yet, but they sure are hard to find at an affordable level - so we discovered that our prospects and customers were right! What a miss by event technology companies (ours included, until now).
For those of you who know, PheedLoop is based in Canada and bilingualism is crucial. We’ve offered ways for people to enter manual translations for simple navigational elements of the system. Today, we're proud to introduce a 100% toggle-able multi-language system that fully supports not just static, but also dynamic text. This includes everything from pop-ups and small labels, to text fields, buttons, error messages, and more on the static side. On the dynamic side, full support for the dynamic content you populate into the system, from session titles and speaker bios to announcements and beyond.
We put the brakes on other development for a few days given how urgent we found this industry-wide issue to be, and are proud to have released the first fully functioning version of multi-language support for PheedLoop’s virtual and hybrid event system. Best of all, it’s free! We strongly believe that charging customers for a more accessible platform is wrong. Charging customers to create multiple instances of their events to support additional languages takes the cake, in an industry where event technology is infamous for burning a hole in your wallet pretty fast. We have countless updates in the works as well, and some very exciting partnerships to be announced in a few weeks.
The languages PheedLoop currently supports as of November 24th are: Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
But wait, there’s more!
You can use PheedLoop’s powerful custom translations module in addition to our new multi-language support system. This means you can override our built-in translations, replace text with custom HTML, and create multiple options for dynamic content you insert into your PheedLoop events!
Over the course of the coming days and weeks, you can expect improved translations and new languages to be added, and a huge announcement about captions and simultaneous interpretation built-in to Meet & Stream.