

Blog comment correcting startup gets $25m funding - gregjor
http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=68
In a little-noticed deal that closed yesterday the Silicon Valley startup apostrophree secured a $25 million first round with Bolus Venture Capital of Palo Alto. apostrophree received seed money from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator earlier this year.
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tobyo
I like this bit: "It also looks at articles that contain flags like (sp?),
which is the author telling us that he or she failed high school English."

The poor spelling found on the Internet creates a positive feedback loop that
makes it increasingly difficult to spell words properly.

Before wide acceptance of the Web, most written words appeared in magazines,
books, newspapers, and other sources which were, hopefully, reviewed by
professionals with more knowledge of spelling than the average person. If you
were unsure of a spelling you could write out the word and easily recognize if
the word matched the ordering of letters that you had seen so many times
before.

Now, for some words, you've probably seen the improper spelling more often
than the correct spelling. That makes it more difficult to recall or recognize
the proper spelling. For children subjected to this misspelling onslaught at
an early age, it must be worse. I suppose many of these spelling problems
would not even exist if English were a more intuitive written language.
However, I expect this all to go away as grammar checkers are embedded into
web browsers.

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axod
"In a typical company a small but significant number of employees read blogs
and comment threads every day, sometimes several times in a work day. I say a
significant number because the people who read comment threads and post
comments of their own are very often among the most highly-paid people in the
organization. The time apostrophree saves goes right to the bottom line.

Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a
misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and
there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their
superior English skills online."

\---

So the target customer is someone who wants to not be so hung up about
spelling mistakes and grammar, and wants to save time? This just seems a
ridiculous answer to me. I can see it being very useful, and a great feature
in something else...

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immad
For those that have not got it. This is a Joke

apostrophree is not a YC startup. Presumably its completely made up (its or
it's??).

~~~
softbuilder
Don't bait people! Think of the time lost.

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ivank
That had me going for a while.

~~~
car
Me too. Well done, and not a bad idea. The spelling Nazi in me was already
rejoicing.

Loved this line: "We observed that non-technical staff with Internet access
are more likely to use their computers to view and collect pornography than to
post spelling corrections."

The "clue gate" in the last paragraph is the final giveaway.

~~~
gregjor
I'm an apostrophree beta tester. When I read your comment I saw "The spelling
Nazi in me was already rejoicing." It really works!

~~~
car
This thread is great, it proves the fundamental premise of apostrophee correct
;-)

P.S. If you could, please send me an invite for the beta. Thx!

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imgabe
Ok, I totally fell for that. I came to this thread hoping to celebrate an end
to useless spelling/grammar flamewars. Oh well.

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globalrev
My first reaction was "how the f--- did they raise 25 million dollars ?",
after reading I see their use but still, why 25 million dollars? Do they need
that kind of money to expand? How many are they? Do founders ever get a large
sum of such money as their own money or is it always purely investment money?

I guess YCombinator make money when their companies receive funding?

Anyway, congrats and good luck!

~~~
timr
It's _expensive_ to build the necessary infrastructure -- the conjunction
junctions alone can cost millions.

~~~
henning
As Steve Yegge wrote about earlier, determining the function of a conjunction
junction can be difficult.

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jonknee
Is the name 'apostrophree' a typo itself? There are no hits on Google besides
this article.

It seems way more efficient to have something like this running server side by
whoever is hosting the content. This is something like charging for a
spelling/grammar checker to read documents. As long as the publisher had a
good editor I shouldn't have to pay for one.

~~~
henning
I think the post is a joke. That would explain a lot.

~~~
jonknee
That does make more sense, but there are so many stupid ideas that get funding
it makes it tough to spot.

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bullseye
> ... a Russian company that is working on what they call a "clue gate." The
> idea is to identify and filter out postings from newbies...

This has got to be an April fools joke that is just 231 days early.

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froo
If only something like this was real... or there was some other way of
correcting the general butchering of the English language that occurs.

Maybe there should be some sort of law that requires everyone where some sort
of modified electric dog collar so that every time someone types in "lol, wut
r u sayin" - they get 10,000 volts.

This kind of technology should probably also apply to trolls, spammers and
politicians.

~~~
listic
Don't be cruel; 50 volts should be enough

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fbailey
ok people I just corrected my estimate of the average intelligence of HN
users...

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hooande
That wasn't even close to being funny. And why drag YC into it?

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siculars
this would probably work as an ajax plugin to blogging/commenting platforms,
which probably already exists.

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gojomo
This joke should only be read through an edit-for-length proxy.

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qqq
> Programmers seem to divide into two groups when it comes to writing: nearly
> illiterate on the one hand, and pedantic on the other.

They shouldn't say it _seems_ that way, they should say it is or it isn't.
This is weak writing.

