MCLC: man behind Pleco

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Lawrence <kglnyc at gmail.com>
Subject: man behind Pleco
***********************************************************

Very envious of this younger generation studying Chinese now since they
have so many convenient web and app resources, and Pleco is probably the
best of the lot -- use it on an almost daily basis.

Kevin Lawrence

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Source: Tech in Asia (6/25/14):
http://www.techinasia.com/mike-love-pleco-interview-chinese-language-mandar
in-language-learning-iphone-dictionary-app/

Meet the man behind Pleco, the revolutionary Chinese language learning app
that’s older than the iPhone
By Josh Horwitz

Learning Chinese is not for the faint of heart. Not only does the
non-native Mandarin speaker have to master the language’s infamous tones,
he or she will must memorize hundreds of thousands of (practically
speaking) non-phonetic characters, get acquainted with a wide range of
accents, and grapple with a deceptively simple grammar system.

At the same time, even the most gifted linguist will admit that one of the
biggest challenges posed by Mandarin isn’t the mechanics of the actual
language, but the grunt work required to learn it well. Looking up
characters in a paper-bound Chinese dictionary is a multi-step process
that can take tens of minutes if you’re not careful. Also, relying on a
single Chinese-English dictionary for reference is a surefire way to
commit language suicide. For such a long-lasting, quickly-evolving
language, you’ll need at least three dictionaries handy in order to get a
rough idea of what a specific character, word, or phrase means – and even
then you’ll usually have to apply some brainpower to figure out how it’s
used properly.

Enter Pleco – the best Chinese dictionary app on the planet. To some of
our readers, a dictionary app might not seem like the most exciting of
subjects, but those who know and use Pleco understand how crucial it is to
one’s language learning regimen. It’s one of those rare brand names (if
you can call it a brand) that will elicit sheer glee from its users upon
the very mention of its name. A Swiss Army knife app featuring 25
dictionaries, almost anyone that’s used it can recall a moment when Pleco
“saved their life.”

While the app has won legions of fans, few are aware just how
revolutionary it was and continues to be. Pleco was first launched as an
app for Palm in 2001 – before the big boom in Chinese language learning
and the world’s mass adoption of mobile handsets. It pioneered the notion
of a Chinese dictionary as a powerful, always-on tool for a wide range of
learners, and was the first cross-platform Chinese dictionary to merge
handwriting input with character searches across multiple dictionaries.
Want to know what 熊貓 means but don’t know how to pronounce the characters?
Just trace them in the input field and you’ll find the word next to
“panda,” its definition, alongside “xiongmao,” its romanized phonetic
pronunciation.

Now the app features optical character recognition (“hover-to-translate”),
mixed character-pinyin search (trust us, that’s a big deal), voice input,
flashcards, and many other bells and whistles that make learning Chinese
that much easier for hardcore students.

When you consider that for centuries, the only way to look up the word for
“panda” was to count the number of strokes for the radical component of 熊,
consult a series of charts, and then hope that the suggested definition
remotely made sense, the convenience of Pleco marks a major turning point
in the history of Chinese language learning.

Moreover, more than ten years after it first appeared on Palm, Pleco
remains a mostly one-man operation. For 32-year-old Mike Love, a
programmer based in New York, Pleco is a full-time hobby that doubles as a
business. While many of the apps that dominate our smartphones were
created by Silicon Valley dreamers with pipe-dream ambitions and
half-baked business plans, Love has added tremendous value to language
learners around the world simply by building a better dictionary. Think of
him as the pastor overseeing the long-awaited wedding between the Chinese
language and mobile electronic devices.

In an effort to learn more about his role as the unsung hero of Chinese
Learning 2.0, Tech in Asia sat down with Love to talk about the genesis of
Pleco, the evolution of mobile technology, and the perks of solo
entrepreneurship.

Q. Let’s start from the beginning. What are the origins of Pleco?

In my senior year of high school I was studying abroad in China in 1999. I
saw these neat little portable electronic dictionaries that every Chinese
person was using to learn English. I wanted my own version of one of those
dictionaries, but for Mandarin. I didn’t have a factory in Shenzhen to
churn out my own portable Chinese dictionary, so I needed an
already-available device to put it on. At the time, that device was the
Palm.

My parents gave me a Palm IIIx for Christmas in 1999. I put something
together using some off-the-shelf Palm apps – a handwriting app, a Chinese
enabler app (since Palm wasn’t Chinese enabled), and CEDICT – a
predecessor of CC-CEDICT – which was a simple Chinese dictionary that had
about 20,000 entries. I built a prototype using those, and then some of my
friends started buying Palm Pilots because they wanted to use it.

Around March 2000 I wrote to Oxford University Press, which had a really
awesome Chinese dictionary at the time, and asked, ‘Is there any way I can
get an electronic copy of your dictionary?” Back then, I wasn’t planning
on building a business out of Pleco, I just thought that if I could put
Oxford’s Chinese dictionary on my friends’ Palms, it would be a nice thing
for them. They said “Sure, we’d love to license you our dictionary!” I had
no idea it would be that easy. So we negotiated some terms and then we had
an exclusive copyright license to the Oxford Chinese dictionary for Palm
Pilot. Pleco was founded two weeks after my 18th birthday in May of that
Year.

Q. After you put the Oxford dictionary on Palm, you went off to Harvard to
get your Bachelor’s in Computer Science. During your time there, did Palm
remain an ongoing project for you? Or did it shift to the backburner?

I kept working on it. I had to, because it was successful. We officially
launched in October of 2001, and it was doing okay, making me enough money
to keep my social life in good standing. Then That’s Beijing did a piece
on us in April of 2002, and our sales doubled that month and basically
stayed at that level moving forward. I started making more serious amounts
of money and got to thinking, ‘Gee, this could actually be my job after
I’m done here.’ My dad was a high school principal, and my mother was a
university admissions officer, so I was never going to be allowed to drop
out of school, however tempting that might have been! But I was doing well
enough that I saw Pleco as an option I could pursue if I didn’t see
anything that I liked more. So I kept it going.

I graduated, and did not in fact find a job that I liked better than
Pleco. I completed a summer internship at Microsoft, but I didn’t really
enjoy myself much there. So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just work for myself.’

Q. Why didn’t you stick around at Microsoft or work at another large firm?
You would probably make a great candidate for a job at Palm!

The stuff that the high-level gurus at those places do is math-y
theoretical computer science that I don’t really find much fun, quite
frankly. I did reasonably well at it in school, but I never really enjoyed
it. I don’t really like spending a lot of time thinking about Big O
notation and so forth. And at the lower-rung levels, it wasn’t very
interesting either. You could work on a tiny sliver of Windows, and maybe
if you try really hard in 20 years you might get to be some sort of
development lead. And even then you’d still be managing a little piece of
someone else’s ecosystem. Even if you’re working at a big company with
career security and free soda, you are really just a tiny little piece of
something. I wanted to run the whole thing, even if it was just a small
thing.

Q. Pleco is probably one of the few mobile apps in existence that’s
continued 
to thrive since the Palm era. Can you walk us through the product’s
evolution as smartphones have grown more commonplace and more powerful?

Our first killer feature for v1.0 was handwriting input, which we launched
just as touchscreens were coming out. Most people didn’t even know that
touchscreens were a thing at that point. I had seen a few on some of the
high-end electronic dictionaries that were popular in Japan and Korea, and
I knew it was something we had to have. I saw it as the first step in
making something significantly better than a paper dictionary.

Building the handwriting input was a case of good fortune. Motorola had a
really good Chinese handwriting engine, so I spoke to them about licensing
it. Most copyright licenses involve some sort of royalty advance, or at
least a commitment to buy X number of units minimum over the term of the
contract. Motorola initially offered us a license with a much larger
commitment than we could afford, so we countered with double their
per-unit price but no up-front commitment. Surprisingly, they agreed to
that. I don’t think anyone was expecting anything out of Palm Pilots at
that time, so they were willing to take whatever money they could get.

Back then, it seemed to me that Motorola and Oxford were very generous
about licensing terms – more willing to accommodate a bootstrapped startup
of very limited financial means than copyright licensors tend to be with
mobile app developers now. Both Motorola’s and Oxford’s licensing regimens
back then were mainly tailored towards OEMs. Both were working with
companies that made the sorts of standalone electronic dictionaries Pleco
was inspired by. I don’t think they expected downloadable third-party
software to make much money. But for that same reason, they also didn’t
see it as a threat to their OEM customers. They could license to us and
make a little extra money without giving up any of the money they were
getting from OEMs.

Q. How did the spread of the mobile web affect Pleco as a business?

The mobile web wasn’t even a consideration in the pre-iPhone days – people
might have had access to it, but it was always too slow or too expensive
to make OTA distribution feasible. Pre-iPhone devices also generally
didn’t ship with Chinese fonts so web-based competitors weren’t really a
concern either.

Post-iPhone, it’s certainly been a boon for distribution – an awful lot of
our business comes from word-of-mouth, so the fact that somebody can hear
about Pleco, pull up the App Store and download it instantly is
tremendously useful. The promise of that was a big part of what motivated
us to adopt the free-with-in-app-purchases business model so early – Apple
initially restricted in-app-purchases to paid apps, and our plan at that
point had been to offer a ‘basic’ version of Pleco for US$10 or US$20 and
sell various additional dictionaries as in-app purchases. But in
mid-October of 2009 Apple opened in-app purchases to free apps, and we
quickly restructured everything around that so that when our app launched
in mid-December, we were able to make the initial download free.

And of course, in-app purchases themselves have also been a huge boost –
for our Palm and Windows Mobile apps you not only had to visit a website
to buy our software, but once you’d bought it, you had to copy a “keyfile”
from your computer to your phone in order to activate your purchase. So
the first part of that cost us a lot of sales and the second half of that
left a lot of our users frustrated spending hours trying to get their
newly purchased software working.

Q. It seems like if Pleco were in the hands of anyone else but you, it
would 
have died. Here’s a guy in his early twenties who launched a DIY Chinese
dictionary app for mobile. One would think that demand for a talented
mobile developer, even in the early 00’s, would be high, while demand for
a mobile Chinese dictionary in that era would be relatively low.

Well, you’d be surprised. I try not to discuss numbers in too much detail,
but I think the profits were in the six-figure range by 2005-2006. So I
was certainly making something competitive with a senior developer salary
just on Palm and Windows Mobile. It’s not like I could have gotten a job
that paid me more.

Pleco was niche, yes, but we had something that was unique enough that
people were basically going out and buying Palm devices just for Pleco.
The second-most popular page on our website, after our homepage, was our
“What Palm do I buy to run Pleco?” page. So even though we had no
hardware, people were buying hardware just for our app.

Q. One might also assume that the most obvious path to growth for Pleco
would 
be to venture out into other languages. Have you ever at any point
considered launching a like-minded app for Japanese? Or Spanish?

I once tried to to develop a phrasebook product for a few different
languages, which flopped spectacularly for reasons that should be obvious.
A phrasebook is about the size of a Palm Pilot, it costs about US$8, you
can get it dirty, you can throw it away after a trip… Why would you want a
marginally easier to browse Palm version of this? You still don’t see a
lot of successful phrasebook apps, even on the iPhone. Phrasebooks are
great – they’re durable, and it’s one case where paper is probably
superior. So that was my one attempt to branch out into other languages.

But even then, I wouldn’t say that the failure of that attempt led me to
stick to Chinese. The reality is that I just found Chinese much more
interesting. I never run out of stuff to do with Chinese, it’s such a rich
and incredibly complicated language. So I never really saw the point of
expanding horizontally into different languages.

Q. What do you mean when you say you “never run out of stuff to do with
Chinese?” What are some of the qualities unique to the Chinese language
that keep you busy?

Well, character reading for one thing. You’ve got a language where really,
really experienced Chinese learners still can’t read all of it. So
characters present all of these problems – how do you teach them
correctly? What are some better ways of indexing them? Moreover, the fact
that Chinese learners fundamentally can’t read the characters that they
need to look up in a dictionary means that there are problems you have to
solve regarding input methods – how do you search a character that you
don’t know? With Chinese, unlike other languages, there’s an ongoing need
to work with the actual text.

In Spanish, if you don’t know a word that’s in a book you’re reading, you
can type that word into a dictionary very efficiently. With Chinese,
you’ll have to go through some hoops to look up that word. It’s the only
language where you’ll never be able to read all of it – there will always
be a gap between what you can read and your knowledge of vocabulary.

Q. A few weeks ago on Twitter you said that you weren’t interested in
pouring resources into Pleco’s OCR technology, which has long been hot
topic in the Chinese language learning community. If not OCR, what
elements of mobile app-enabled language learning excite you?

I’m interested in the gamification of everything. I love Foursquare, and I
think there’s a lot of potential for language learning to provide a
quantified, reward-based way to keep you motivated. I like the idea of
integrating Chinese language learning into your daily life. I’m also open
to adding a social element like Stack Overflow to encourage each other in
your Chinese learning. So you’re creating communities that encourage each
other in language learning. I’ve seen a quite a few few startups working
on that, but I don’t think anyone’s quite mastered it yet. Except for
maybe Skritter, but those guys already left and are working on another
Startup.

Q. How many people do you employ full time?

It varies. We work mostly with contractors, and we don’t have an office.
Pleco has zero statutory employees at the moment. The number of people
working full-time is probably three or four.

Q. Is Pleco a full-time job for you?

It’s most definitely a full-time job for me. An additional benefit that I
get, which I recognized early on as I started Pleco, was I knew that I
would be a father someday and I knew that it would be nice to have my own
business at that point. I could always be available and set whatever hours
I wanted. The work from home thing is really a dream if you’re a parent,
especially of young children. So now I work when I don’t have something
else I need to do. It’s certainly 40 hours a week most of the time,
sometimes 50 or 60 hours a week.

Q. Is it hard to work on Pleco since you’re based in New York, where you
can’t really ‘live the language?’

Not really. There probably are a few things I’m missing out on. My
knowledge of Chinese slang is probably not as good as it could be, but
I’ve got some people doing that for me. I guess I’d say that it’s helpful
to be a part of the Chinese language learning community in China, but at
the same time, it’s good to have a little distance from it. It helps me
look at some of the problems with more of a critical eye. I feel like with
software, you get enough usage data from emails – users give you feedback
and complaints and compliments. Frankly, we have more customers that are
students in the US or outside of China than customers who are from China.
The stereotypical user of Pleco is the Westerner who’s living in China
studying Chinese.

Q. Some people say Chinese has become easier to learn thanks to the web
and 
mobile tech. Do you agree or disagree?

I very much agree. It’s gotten easier because you can spend less time on
grunt work. It’s much easier to find language learning materials, and it’s
much easier to find language learning buddies. Of course, you can’t change
much about human memory. For all the creative tools we try to engineer,
learning Chinese is still hard work and you have to memorize a lot. No
one’s really come up with a better way to learn grammar as far as i know,
or make your tone pronunciation better. The only way to learn some of that
stuff is to spend a lot of time around native speakers. So an awful lot of
the problems are as hard as they ever were – the only thing is that we’ve
gotten rid of some annoyances.