Amid the many spectacles at Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week—elbow-angling posers seeking Instagram stardom, walls of paparazzi hoping to shoot the next big thing, and oh, right, the clothes—one was harder to look away from than the rest: a television screen as large as a ping-pong table, smack dab in the center of the tents.
David Lucatch, founder and CEO of the real-time language translation service Yappn, stood in front of it on a balmy Friday in September, iPad in hand. On the screen behind him was what the company dubbed a “media wall.” Photos, tweets, and Facebook status updates in five languages appeared and fell on top of each other, knocking out the older posts: Tetris for the social media age. The display marked the debut of FotoYapp, a mobile application that allows users to share photos, videos, and comments on a host of social networks in 67 different languages. Lucatch calls it the “final frontier” of the Internet.
“Location is no longer an issue, device is no longer an issue, and connectivity generally isn’t an issue,” he says. “So the last barrier is really language.”
People with large public followings—say, fashion models—might find FotoYapp particularly useful. Through the app, they can post a status update and have it translated into a multitude of languages, so their fans in Japan need not know English to heart, like, or favorite their latest backstage dispatch. On the flip side, FotoYapp can translate what a public personality’s international fan base is posting about them into the star’s native language. For famous people seeking world domination, this kind of thing is crucial.
“If I’m in North America, I can start building a fan base in Greece, in South Korea, because now I’m effectively speaking their language,” Lucatch says. “I may be a big fish in a small ocean, now I can try to be a big fish in a big ocean.”
There are some growing pains. FotoYapp, which declined to release its number of users, runs on a proprietary translation algorithm that figures out what’s relevant to a star or subject based on hashtags. Earlier in the day, the actress Rosario Dawson uploaded a photo of herself leaning against the media wall—“I feel like I’ve suddenly figured out how to speak multiple world languages…!” she wrote—and tagged it #nyfw. Alongside her image, a collection of related posts from different social networks appeared, as did a photo of a plate of tomatoes.
“Now, somehow or another, that plate of tomatoes is tagged with the same information as that,” Lucatch says, pointing to Dawson’s original post. “Our systems learn as they go, what to filter, what not to filter.” He pauses and shrugs. “I mean, maybe that’s someone who went to Fashion Week and said they just had a great meal at Fashion Week.”
This was Lucatch’s first fashion week (from New York, he’d dive into his second, in London). He had purchased some new sports coats and dress shirts for the occasion, and if he appeared slightly staid amidst the many peacocks present at such an event, his product certainly did not. A woman in a bedazzled sweatsuit stopped before the media wall struck a pose while one of Lucatch’s associates took her picture. She had one request: “Can you hashtag ‘the royal obsession?’”
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