Pleco Software was founded in May of 2000 by Michael Love. Michael had spent most of the year living and studying in China, and having a rather poor memory he found it extremely difficult to expand his vocabulary in Chinese, particularly since every time he forgot a word it would take him several minutes to look it up in a traditional paper-based Chinese dictionary. Inspired by a device he saw in a market in Zhongguancun, he threw together a makeshift Chinese-English dictionary on his Palm IIIx, using an off-the-shelf Chinese OS and handwriting recognizer and the free CEDICT dictionary. When some of his fellow students started buying their own Palms just to run this little hack of his, he realized there might be a good business move here, and thanks to some forward-thinking people at Oxford and Motorola he soon managed to secure the necessary licenses for Pleco's first product, Oxford™ Concise English & Chinese Dictionary for Palm OS®.
Originally intended only as a part-time college business, by the time Michael was ready to graduate Pleco was generating enough revenue to be a full-time job, and after a summer internship at Microsoft convinced him that weekend puzzle contests and unlimited free soft drinks can't compare to the satisfaction of being your own boss, he turned Pleco into a full-fledged company and hired himself as its first employee. Five years later, we're still making Chinese dictionaries, but now we've accumulated many more licenses (including the excellent ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary and the brilliant new Hanwang handwriting recognition engine), and every day tens of thousands of people in over 70 countries and all 50 US states use our software to help them study and communicate in Chinese.
We pronounce it with a long E, like plee-co, which means we should probably type it with a macron (but that just looks silly). It's the nickname of a type of aquarium catfish (scientific name Hypostomus plecostomus) that Michael had several of when he was a kid, a stylized example of which graces our company logo. We think it's actually supposed to be pronounced pleck-o but he's been saying it the other way since he was 10 and he's not changing it now.
We're not hiring right now, but check back here in mid-2009 and we might be recruiting some new people then.
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