Friday, January 23, 2009

Asia Online Wins Red Herring Global 100 Award for "Most Promising Technology Startups"

"Asia Online's ambition goes far beyond offering world-leading translation technology through its unique online technologies that learn from humans and its crowd-sourcing business model. Its true aim is to make all of the world's knowledge available to every citizen, no matter which language they speak. Called, "the World's largest literacy project," Asia Online is translating tens-of-millions of pages of educational, scientific and historic English-language content into Asian languages.


This content comes from highly valued open sources, such as Wikipedia (the world's seventh most popular online destination), the World Fact Book and tens-of-thousands of published books and essays, and open courseware. Asia Online is also working with publishers of popular English language magazines and publications to translate their materials into Asian languages. This project will effectively eliminate information poverty and provide the same knowledge to every person, regardless of cultural background. On top of this, Asia Online is set to deploy social network services that have proven popular in the West, but have been inaccessible to Asian consumers due to language barriers."


Asia Online's lists as its Chief Scientist Philipp Koehn from the SMT group at the University of Edinburgh.