Yesterday we received the Best Web 2.0 prize at diariovasco.com annual competition.

There are two reasons that make this prize really special. First, Forvo is a global website, with little relevance locally, so getting this prize in our hometown it’s just great. And second, it’s the first prize we’ve ever won.

We wanted to share the prize with you that make Forvo so great. Thanks to everyone for voting us and keep on pronouncing!

We have received great feedback about our recently released iPhone App, but there are also some user with doubts about it.

First, I would like to thank to all the people who are downloading the app because it’s a big support for keeping Forvo alive (thanks!) But also, I understand that paying for something make people more demanding about the product.

So I would like to answer some of your questions:

• The app allows you to access to the unique content Forvo with your help has collected. If this is not good enough for you, please don’t download the app.
• We have plans to develop apps for other mobile platforms. (read Android)
• We have plans to develop apps for individual languages at a very reduced price. (Spanish pronunciations, French pronunciations, etc.)
• We have plans to add new browsing features and even translations.
• The app does not pretend to be the website. It’s a faster way of searching and listening to the pronunciations. Listening in the website through the standard iPhone player is a real pain. Furthermore, it has some useful features that doesn’t exist in the website as remembering your previous searches and activity.

And now to share a little of Forvo love, we have decided to give away 10 codes to download the app for free for the first 10 valid comments in this post(*). A good review in the iTunes Store would be appreciated ;)

* Only available for the U.S. iTunes Store. Please leave valid contact information.

Last weeks have been very interesting for Forvo. During our travel to San Francisco and the Bay Area we have been lucky to meet great friends, colleagues and entrepreneurs. We also enjoy the standard tourist highlights :) We would like to thank to many people that has help us there: Raffaello, Eduardo, Antonio, Fernando, José, Juan Pablo.

We could also meet some companies very related to Forvo that I would like to recommend to you all:

- Wordnik: Thanks Erin for arranging the meeting. Wordnik is a huge English dictionary, but that’s not all. They want to know everything about those words, how to use them, relationships and… pronunciations.

- The Rosetta project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. Laura Welcher is a passionate linguist leading this project at The Long Now Foundation.

We hope that more collaborations keep emerging from those great days.

It was weeks ago but we didn´t mention here. Greek, Japanese, Ukrainian, Finnish and Hungarian translations of Forvo are completed.

We are working on 10 more languages to release before the end of 2010, including Persian, Catalan, Romanian, Korean, Bulgarian, Turkish or Norwegian. If you feel you can help a bit on that you will be very welcome to the translation family.

Thanks to our good friends at Lasai for these great t-shirts. We are making plans so you can get one too.

This summer part of the Forvo team will be visiting Los Angeles and San Francisco to establish partnerships with other tech companies, entrepreneurs and geeks ;)

We have also planned the first Forvo users meetup in the area. If you want to know more about these events planned for August and September just leave your comment, we´ll be giving more information soon in this blog and in our Facebook group.

Three new languages available to browse Forvo, Danish, Hungarian and Hindi. The editors who have made this possible are Olfine, Detheltsort, Frankie, Komal_K, so thanks to them.

Maybe you think that we are only releasing new languages these days. Not at all!! :) We are almost done for the API final release. There are more than 40 developers pre-registered and we can´t wait to see what they have in mind to create with Forvo pronunciations.

And we are also readying a special tool that we hope you are going to love as much as we do. Prepared to be surprised.

New languages come in pairs. We mentioned German in our latest post but also Dutch was released. It was an awesome work from more than 20 people that joined their effors to complete these translations. Thanks!

These are the other languages currently been translated: Finnish, Polish, Romanian, Hindi, Japanese, Danish and Hungarian. So we hope to have Forvo translated into your language soon!

Maximum speed at Forvo HQ. After ending the beta stage, now we are happy to announce the first steps of our long-waited API. We have opened a new site to give you more information about it and also to start receiving your pre-inscriptions. If you plan to make your site much interesing using Forvo pronunciations don´t wait to ask for your free API key.

We are quite excited about the news projects and posibilities that the API is giving to you. Pronunciations for your dictionary? A better Google Translate with real human pronunciations? Whatever you want.

Last week also saw the light the German translation of Forvo. We have translated, with your help, Forvo into 11 languages and 5 more are under development. Thanks!

It has been almost two years online collecting the greatest pronunciation database in the world so we decided last week to close the Beta stage of Forvo.

The last improvements were related to the recorder. Now it´s more accurate and sensitive. We would like to thank to the great people at avchat who help us a lot with it. For the people who felt the recorder a little buggy these are great news :)

The end of the Beta is not the end of our project! We keep working hard in new translations, features and of course the “really coming soon” API.