3 Reasons why every startup should have a launch party

1. Networking: You may meet someone who will change your life forever.

That's what happened to me.

My first launch party took place at Parisoma, a co-working space in the South of Market area of San Francisco. Stan Osborne, my first mentor, had been invited to the party by a crusty punk friend of mine. On the flyer it read that there would be good food and great wine. It was about dinner time.

Stan helped start Craigslist back in the day. Shortly after the party, he introduced me to his best friend, Gerard Cerchio, who used to work for NASA. Gerard was the needle in the hay stack, and now we're like family. That's how I built my team! Polyglotte currently has four products on the market and many more on the horizon!

2. Memories: ¡The birth of a new product is a moment to rejoice!

Looking back, you'll realize those were the happiest days of your life.

I hired a clown. We weren't supposed to make a lot of noise, and the clown began his act with a primal scream. At the end, he stood on his head and announced that I was going to turn the world upside-down with my invention. And I went on stage to unveil our patent pending upside-down shift key. Some people were mind-blown.

3. Speech! Speech! Speech!

As an entrepreneur, you're going to have to speak in public a LOT. Might as well start getting used to it!

That thought inspired me to hire the clown. I thought the he would lighten up the atmosphere and make it easier to do the speech, and it totally worked. Sometimes I go to piano bars and sing with the piano, or I go to a goth club and dance for a second in their cage like a gogo dancer. IMHO, making performance a part of your life will make you a better entrepreneur.

Go getem!

Daniela Semeco

CEO/inventor

Polyglotte Inc.

www.polykeyboards.com

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

"Learn a new language, and get a new soul."

-Czech proverb

That’s what it means to be a polyglot. Your soul is split into a multicolor prism. It changes you forever.

Learning a language means integrating it into one's life. When you're walking down the street, how much energy does it take to wave to a friend?

Not that much, right?

Automatic responses

One important trick is training automatic responses. As a teenager, I decided one day to only count to myself in French, especially during exercise sessions. I’ve been doing this for 16 years. We all talk to ourselves. Just like an actor enters character, you can train yourself to adopt a culture. Experiment! (e.g.: try setting your phone to a new language).

Look for that direct connection.

I've formed many funny habits along the way: rolling my 'r's in the bathtub, learning the national anthem* of every country I move to. Finding artistic and creative ways to integrate into a culture can be fun.

Training an automatic response is like playing a sport. Have you ever heard of a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey? It’s no wonder that many professors of music conservatories ask their students to read this book. Like music, language-learning is a small muscle sport. Training muscle memory consists in making clear impressions on the body and repeating them in a consistent way.

If you’ve recently moved to a country and would like for your speech to flow more, try to integrate one slang word into your vocabulary every week. You may feel kind of silly at first, but the more you say it, the more that new word will start to roll off your tongue like a local.

Just remember: It’s your daily bread, and you have to eat every day!

*Our CEO sings the French and German national anthems.

The Unicode Conference was a great success!

Polyglotte made it to the Unicode Conference this year! We made great contacts and learned a ton.

We were even featured on their Website!

¡Instructables!

We published our first Instructable four days ago and already have over 400 views. Our next Instructable will include a PolyKeyboard DIY kit, so you can try our keyboard at home!

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-beautiful-promotional-matchbooks/

"Phones have gotten smarter. Shouldn't keyboards be smart, too?"

Polyglotte was featured in Tech Page One!

Polyglotte's PolyKB 1.0 USB keyboard, which is available

for Windows operating systems.

PolyKeyboard: The app for polyglottes

Daniela Semeco’s PolyKeyboard app, which launched in October 2013, allows multilingual people to switch seamlessly between various keyboard formats.

By Megan Anderle - Tech Page One

The idea for PolyKeyboard, an app and keyboard for multilingual people to type using different keyboard formats, came to Daniela Semeco when she moved back to the United States in February 2011 after living in Berlin for a year and a half.

“The job market was pretty miserable, and when I was listing all my skills while applying to jobs, I thought about my language skills and realized I knew all these different keyboard layouts by heart,” Semeco told Tech Page One. “I couldn’t write that on my résumé as a skill, but it does take a lot of energy and memory to switch.”

A keyboard that could automatically switch to different language formats would solve that problem, she thought.

“I thought it was kind of silly that the keyboard hadn’t changed in 150 years,” said Semeco, who knows four languages fluently: English, Spanish, French and German. She’s learning Italian, Portuguese and Russian as well. “I was going to solve that problem. A light bulb went off.”

Semeco put her idea in motion

Semeco started by printing layouts of keyboards from different languages on computer paper, laid them on top of one another to see the commonalities. Fitting all the characters on a single, universal keyboard simply wasn’t feasible — each key would be overcrowded and difficult to read.

So she consulted her father, a computer scientist who lives in Atlanta, to find out how difficult it would be to build an app or device that would allow users to change to different keyboard formats.

Once they figured out a plan for what became PolyKeyboard, Semeco booked a one-way ticket to San Francisco in March 2011. She didn’t know anyone and had very little money.

Fast-forward to January 2013, Semeco founded Polyglotte as a benefit corporation. “Polyglotte” is derived from the word polyglotism, which means the ability to speak many languages.

That year, PolyKeyboard launched as an app that allows users to switch seamlessly between 17 different languages on their touch-screen keyboards. It became available for free on the App Store Oct. 31, 2013. The keyboard only works within the app for now, and Semeco is working on integrating it with various operating systems. Polyglotte also offers a 1.0 USB keyboard for Windows operating systems for $199.

Semeco has attended various networking events in San Francisco, including July 29’s Tech Cocktail, and is looking for opportunities to put the product on display. On July 31, the startup featured its prototype at Freespace in San Francisco, and on Aug. 7, the team showcased the keyboard app at the Women 2.0 City Meetup.

Given its large international community, San Francisco is the perfect place for her company to be based, Semeco said. According to a 2011 study by the U.S. Census Bureau, 44 percent of California’s inhabitants speak a language other than English in the home. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the state, but Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese are present as well.

Relaying the Polyglotte’s vision

Semeco has had success fundraising through crowdfunding websites such as Indiegogo. In the future, she’d like to hire a full-time marketing director to communicate her vision.

Polyglotte’s greatest challenge has been conveying the need for PolyKeyboard, according to Stanley Osborne, one of Semeco’s mentors who helped build Craigslist.

“An awful lot of people in the United States are culturally unaware of how multilingual computing needs to be improved,” Osborne said. “We’re still struggling to get that message across.”

The Europeans who Semeco has met understand the importance of PolyKeyboard right away, she said, given that they know many more languages than U.S. residents. About 19 percent of Europeans are bilingual; 25 percent are trilingual and 10 percent speak four or more languages, according to the 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages.”

Because the product is so unique — PolyKeyboard is the only keyboard app with more than a dozen language formats on it — it has been difficult to explain how it works.

“I’ve heard a lot of excitement from people about the product, but there’s a learning curve,” Semeco said. “When something is new, people compare it to things that already exist. It’s hard to explain because it’s not like anything they’re used to.”

Despite these challenges, Semeco is pushing forward with her product, as she realizes there’s a need for a keyboard for polyglottes like her.

“Daniela is very quick to get over things and move on,” Osborne said. “Along the way, [entrepreneurs] have to learn skills [they] didn’t have, and she has the resolve not to give up.”

Polyglotte Keyboard exhibit @Freespace

We're hosting a keyboard exhibit tomorrow @Freespace in San Francisco (1101 Market St). Join us from 4pm to 8pm for prototypes, keyboard art and live music! We'll also be serving vegan snacks & tea.

Polyglotte Launch Party video recap

For those of you who weren't able to make it to our launch party, you can watch our short video. Our new product, a multilanguage USB keyboard called the PolyKeyboard, is now available for sale at:

http://www.polykeyboards.com/#!buy/c6q2

P.S. The chameleon you see in our video is real. Special thanks to the East Bay Vivarium in Berkeley!