Spanish Language Technology Hub
David Begor Lancashire, Ignacio Henderson · 2011
At Language Systems we develop platforms for online language learning. We operate platforms that give away learning materials free-of-charge and earn revenue through the sale of premium content. We also develop related mobile and desktop software for students and translators. Our flagship business is Popup Chinese (http://popupchinese.com).We are more than an education company. Although we produce and sell educational media we also develop natural language processing (NLP) tools and lexicons that help students parse and translate foreign language texts and give computers a better grasp of how to analyse and manipulate them. These tools form a key part of our backend systems and give us a major competitive advantage over all of our competitors. Partly as a result our costs are an order of magnitude lower than our closest competitor while we are able to produce higher quality materials.So why Chile? We are already bootstrapping English and Chinese products. Spanish is the obvious next step given the size of the number of Spanish speakers worldwide. Having a Spanish team will make it possible for us to create a triangular network of products connecting the world's three top languages. We are interested specifically in launching a product for Spanish speakers learning Chinese and for Chinese speakers learning Spanish. And we believe the Start-Up Chile program will help us accomplish this faster and better than we'd be able to do bootstrapping similar products from Beijing and are prepared to invest our own funds to make this possible. The major benefits of the program are:1) Immersion Experience in Chile. 2) Business Support. 3) Reduced Financial RiskIf we are able to participate in this program we will have our first product up-and-running in two to three months and our second several months after that.