when i say, i believe in something, i mean:

based upon my experiences and gut feelings, i put a truckload of trust into something.

so much trust, that i can pursue a goal in spite of all contrary forces. i go on, even when everybody – or most people – tries to distract or talk me off doing it, and every – or most – reaction in my environment is unnerving.

i always keep up a specific place for doubt. i don’t give too much time and energy to it, but it has a place. i do not take it for impossible to be convinced out of my belief. it is an option, that i can handle. if it happens, it would strike me hard, but it would not destroy my personality.
belief = focusing energy

doubt = reality check

Richard Greenspan on Mancur Olson’s book

Rich and long established societies grow a feature, that inevitably slows their growth of wealth and creativity and kills them at the end.

This feature is the established special interest group.

Special interest groups need time to form, but once there, and well established, they are hard to get rid of them, and they burden the economy and the society in every step they make.

Special interest groups bring about:

• legislation, that favor few, and destroy society in general
• complexity in regulation, in the procedures of public administration, and in the extensive use of professional languages that deprives ordinary citizens to have an understanding of the decisions affecting all of their lives
• lack of motivation in ordinary citizens to try to influence common causes
• shrinking competition by raising high the entrance barrier in front of disruptors to enter both the economic and political markets
• [this is also true for memes - in this case, innovative policies that could grow welfare, or insure sustainable economy, more security, less dependency on critical foreign resources, that could produce more happiness or eventually save the world on the long run]
• ‘reduced the rate at which resources are reallocated from one activity or industry to another in response to new technologies or conditions’ – wanna see examples? one word: bail-outs.

Enough of the recounting of harm for today.

Just found in Laurent Haug’s blog, and see, how large the price-tag of the bailout really is. When something of this size is done, the question is, what does the society get back? The delay of an imminent breakdown? And an agonizing period in the coming years?

As shown above, with this amount of money, you can change the history. You can introduce a New Deal, and put the whole American economy on a steady growing track. You can introduce a Marshall Plan, and help Western Europe recover after a world war and be a strong business partner (and buyer of American goods), and military ally in the coming decades. You can save South Korea, and screw things up in South Vietnam. And you can reach the Moon.

What goal do we have with today’s bailouts? Putting the financial system on an accountable, sustainable, secure growing track? Really? What have we done as yet to secure all these? Fancying new government agencies? When the existing ones have failed so blatantly? Why do you believe, following the same old practices, hiring the same old companies would do it?

Forget about centralized solutions, freezing regulations. Re-engineer the scene, introduce the policy of radical openness, empower disruptive companies to rise and serve the clients better than the incumbent ones.

(This is a follow-up to the original post: How to fix the financial system? Introduce radical openness.)

Why radical openness is needed so badly?

Take the Madoff case, and the latest news about SEC.

If the community is given all the information government agencies have (and even more),

- according to the behavior of the agency - 

the community can

a) – if an agency open to innovation and to the wisdom of the crowds -

HELP the agency deliver a better job

e.g. crunching data in innovative ways that is not part of the agencie’s daily routine or in territories, where the agency has a sort of night blindness

 

b) – if the agency is reluctant to listen to the outer world -

PUSH agencies work better

same as above, but not only complementing in scope the work of the agency, but also competing with it in its core business

c) – if the agency is denying any outside influence or help -

DO THE JOB INSTEAD of a failing agency

covering the whole spectrum of the work of the agency. In this case, it is then rightful to ask, why is the named agency paid for from taxpayers’ money

What do you think, had the policy of radical openness been in vigor, what behavior would SEC show?

We know now, that the SEC has consistently neglected the warning signs

One whistleblower, a former exec at a rival firm, wrote the SEC as early as 1999 to warn that Madoff was running the “world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” He repeated his warnings to the SEC through this past April. There were other critics and naysayers, including a 2001 article in Barron’s questioning Madoff’s unrealistically consistent returns. (Paul Kiel in ProPublica)

And we also heard, that – in spite the fact, that Madoff controlled 17.1 billion USD in assets with five employees – SEC has never inspected him, because the lack of resources. Fine, but if we, the community had all the data that SEC gets in raw form, real-time, there would have been quite a few biz data geeks, who would load them into a database, and run some not-too-complicated algorithms, and shoot up the red signal seeing one person handling 3.6 billion USD on the average.

The auto industry can not survive in its present form, that’s clear. Wanna torture yourself with the recollection of its main features: the quality (poor), effectiveness (low), competitiveness (weak), brand preception (no comment), or frugality (don’t even mention it)? Rather not.

Aggravated with the chronic disease called deteriorating dependency ratio, and you have a deadly cocktail. When taxpayers’ money is about to pour in, it is high time to have a look, what is that value that should be safeguarded, and what features can be cut down under the terms of cost control. We don’t have to look for dissillusioned voices with headlight, economics pundits overwhelmingly say: it’s been screwed for good, stop building cars. To come up with history and pride? Come on, this movie is screened in another theatre. Forget about all those “oh, but we have so many more ideas about how to fix this” – profits will not come back. There is one single value that is worth keeping: the jobs. But keeping up a loss-making industry to keep jobs is the habit of the communist systems, you will not want to go this way. And in mass production, the U.S. will not be in the black ever again. Period.

Not until workers actually work in the factories, and are not substituted in 100% by robots. Then again, what about the jobs?

So, is there a way to keep a big part of the jobs in or around this industry AND not making massive losses?

How do you like this: re-engineer the whole scene. Forget the old wisdoms of car making, and build an ecosystem open for innovation that is worthy to the 21st century, and try to keep jobs in a flexible, competitive industry.

And here is a step-by-step guide how this can happen:

Act fast

1.) Don’t do bailout. Invest in the future.

How much is it worth to keep 1+ million workplaces AND build a cleaner future (you know, less health expenses, …) AND diminish dependence on foreign oil? Put THAT money together, and consider as an investment into the future. You don’t do this to give kool-aid to a hopless industry. It doesn’t deserve it.

(Nor the financial institutions deserve the bailout – but it was the theme of an older post about bringing radical openness into the financial sector.)

2.) Win some time

Bail-out for keeping jobs in the short run and get enough time for thorough reorganisation.

3.) Cut losses

Skip the majority of car production, keep only the best performing few. Don’t make cars that do not bring profit instantly. Do not produce to feed the assembly lines, it just adds to the losses.

4.) Cut dead-end R&D

Skip all running development, except some directed at electric engines, safety and the like. Do not plan any single new car in the old system. Consider keeping Chevy Volt? The Chinese are already there. With half the price-tag.

Build the future …

5.) Empower innovators – create a module system for plug-and-play car making [EMPOWERING 1]

Use the free laboratories and factories for developing a standard system of interchangeable car parts. The system should be as simple to use as the cooperation of plug-and-play devices in the computer industry.

Do not lock-in any research team or institution: announce a true competition, time-share research facilities and workforce among the winners (there is workforce in tons – jobs kept temporarily with the bailout, yet not much else to do). 

Use facilities in a 24/7 base, apply agile development methods, since there is not much time: the transitory situation can not be upheld for long.

6.) Outsource mass production

When standards are set up, outsource ALL mass production. Mass production of parts, not whole cars: chassis, suspension, drivetrain, electric motors, batteries, etc. (I am serious here, so no engines, gas-fuel tanks, and other ridiculous ideas about running cars on the juice of dead animals, please.)

7.) “The 10.000 DELLs of auto industry”

[EMPOWERING 2]

Give small teams and entrepreneurs a go: Let them purchase the parts and put custom tailored cars together. Since parts are really unexpensive now, those few hours of manpower dedicated to putting together these huge LEGO vehicles keeps the whole business in the black.

Let them hire the facilities remaining from the big 3 and from the major parts makers, if they wish, or help them set up boutique manufacturies. How to deal the rest infrastructure? Goto point 8.

What about the car body, side panels, the roof? Model it from paper or plastic. Sans blague. Use 3D printers, or whatever. Just look around for flexible solutions.

That these cars are going to be less safe than today’s cars?

Maybe they are going to have less strong bodies, but accidents and injuries are going to be substantially fewer than today:

- The majority of the passive protection will be provided by pre-fabricated parts. A soft outer skin can hide strong door-beams, etc, so these car are not going to be considerably weaker than the present ones.

- Putting together the already existing active safety technologies, we can build crashless cars. If you are smart, you don’t have to be so strong. (A primary lesson of evolution.)

- Build in electronic speed limit. Not convinced? Read point 9.

8.) “The Amazons of the auto industry”

The remains of the big companies could act as retailers (like the Amazon for … everything else), and R&D facilities.

What about the remaining facilities, and the bigger part of factories themselves? Just sell them to the highest bidder. You get a small percentage of your investment back.

… and live in it

When everything is done, you will need to take some measures outside the auto industry.

9.) Regulate maximum speed at 80 miles electronically.

These cars may be not so well built together in terms of passanger safety as today’s models. But technology is quite advanced to secure fair safety, if the speed limits are held. Limit speed electronically, just a little bit above the legal limit as default. Lower limits can be set through wireless tools locally.

If you would like to go for a fast ride to closed race tracks, you can buy traditionals cars that go faster than this, but you have to pay a bigger price. (A sort of tax that may eventually go into rescue team and post-accident rehabilitation funds.) And you have a black box pre-installed in your car to curb arguments.

10.) Gas stations: refurbished to charging up electric cars. And to do much more else. [EMPOWERING 3]

We seem to forget about the gas stations. Around 100.000 of them in the US they employ roughly the same number of people as the auto industry itself. What happens to them in a future with less need for gas?

The majority of car owners will recharge their cars at home, but in some cases, they go to the electric stations, whenever they need a fast charge, a cheaper charge, or just small adjustments and maintenance or cleaning.

And – most important of all – some of them can become boutique factories describen in point 7. They are in a good spot, they are close to the customers, and they can become an universal car service point known once as garage.

Familiy legend has it, that my grandfather – a co-owner of the family-run garage - used to travel with his brother to Budapest from the small town in the south of Hungary, where he lived, to pick up the freshly delivered Renault or Mercedes truck under-body complete with engine, drivetrain, suspension, wheels and brakes. That was all. No seats, no bonnet, no doors, nothing at all. They would fasten a wooden plank to the under-body to be able to sit down, and off they went. They strode the 200 km on the naked skeleton of a truck, freezing even in summer at the neck-breaking 35 miles / hour speed.

At home, they started work. They have built one such skeleton into a delivery vehicle for the post office. Another one into a butcher’s wagon, with a smart cooling system using the exhaustion gas as energy source. And many others have been built to serve as buses for the local public transport, travelling until the 1950’s, when the new models of the centralized heavy industry of the communist state have finally substituted them.

manufactured bus from 1926

But that was not all they did. They functioned also as a dealership for a range of brands, they acted as a regular service and maintenance point, and they stored many cars for the night. Once there, they also filled them up with gas.

Returning from the benign family memory, this model is makes sense today again. We see everywhere a distancing from old-school mass production, and the coming of a personally tailored manufacture. This is also possible in the auto industry, especially if we want it to be possible. Most of the counter-arguments about the superiority of mass production has been washed away by the going down of the big 3, while we can see only advantages on the other side: healthier competition, better geographical spread of employment (you can set up a station/garage in any part of the country, you don’t have to move to the Rust Belt), customers better served.

11.) Building blocks to a greener future

The idea of having a lot of electric cars is fine, but the positive impact on the environment can be multiplied when the whole scene is re-engineered.

: Charging up at stations can help to build a new set of electricity providers with less cost.

How could charging be cheaper at stations than at home? It is easier to build some special wires with uneven electric loads to some 100.000 spots than to build them to every single house. Why cheaper? Because car stations/garages will convert current into charge whenever they get cheap current in big loads. And electricity is cheaper in windy times, isn’t it? I repeat: electricity is cheaper in windy times, and when the sun shines, and when there is an ebb-flow change in the oceans, right? (You think its utopia? Read the Scientific American feature article on the issue.)

The biggest hurdle in devising a renewable energy source system is more and more the storing, and not the producing of electricity. If periodically uneven output is not a problem, the whole system can be set up with lower costs. If stations/garages convert energy into battery charge at peak output times, they make the load of the system more even.

One more important thing: charging up should be fast. As fast as filling with fuel. Say: you have 2 minutes.

No way to do it? Then consider these possibilities:

- Replaceable batteries

- Filling in charged liquid

: Sharing cars

Time-sharing ownership and micro-rent are growing opportunities. They have not really taken off yet, but imagine: what would happen, if we had some 100.000 small entrepreneurs liberated from the business captivity of the major oil companies, thinking wildly about new and innovative ways to serve their motorist clients?

Auto type change – using a two-seater during the week, and taking a van for the weekend?

Vehicle type change – arriving by car, hopping on a scooter?

Taking a car just once a week for a 4 hours shopping rush?

Let a whole range of independent entrepreneurs / business innovators try out things, and watch carefully, what stucks. Anything is good that diminishes the number of per capita owned cars.

: Change of attitude towards the means of transport

The new way to produce them, the new materials brought in with 3D printing change our physical perception of cars. The more ephemeral relationship of using them, rather than owning, change our emotional liaison towards them.

Cars become more a suitable tool for changing place, and less an oversized, and expensive visit card (or, as many put it, a penis enlargement – and in some cases, replacement – tool) they tend to be today.

Maybe some day public transport takes off again. (And we know, that the GM was – at least – not fully innocent in its demise.)

Fix auto industry - EMPOWERING factor: 3

Tech Agenda 2009: Creating New Opportunities for Open & Participatory Government

Friday, December 12th, 2008

more info here

you can post questions here

Poor Alan Greenspan – his blunder at the congress hearing makes him look like the dumbest person on the planet. To trust that the Internet would make the financial markets safer and more transparent? What a naïve idea!

Why Alan Greenspan was right?

Actually, Alan Greenspan was right. The Internet has given us the possibility to make the world – and also this dark, muddy corner, called financial markets – safer, with more translucency and less shady secrets. And also filled with more trust.

This should be trust, not just faith. Trust needs proof and control. Trust means, I am not checking you all the time, because you have shown, that you can deliver good quality, or I just suppose it, until I do not experience the contrary. Faith is something else, it is without the power of proof. And it is more accurate to describe our present and past attitude – with the existence or the lack of it – to the major part of the financial services.

Especially with the coming of the 2.0 age, the Internet is an absolutely suitable playground to insure the health of the financial markets. But – as has been proven so lucidly by the present meltdown – something is missing.

Why Alan Greenspan was wrong?

Yes, on the other hand, he was deadly wrong. He believed, the Internet will be able to build up sufficient checks and balances against the incumbent – and most secretive – players of the market.

Maybe it can on the long run. Political blogging has changed the political discourse a lot, some secrets are uncovered, hybris is exposed much quicker, and with much more consequences than before, when it was enough to intimidate a handful of journalists and editors to cover up a story. Yet, it has taken more than 5 years to achieve something (the Trent Lott case happened in 2002).

It can coerce the established players to change their habits by orchestrating a revolution, smashing in bank portals, burning down the headquartets of financial institutions. We will not want this option.

There is the other, more organic way, the soft evolution where Internet users and bloggers and startups force out step-by-step more transparency. The downside is that it takes some 10 years. During this time our whole global financial system blows up. Three times.

Strengthening the regulatory structure, introducing strict rules, tons of new legislation, setting up new federal, state and international monitoring agencies, as suggested by so many people these times, would be nothing but counter-effective. It is the easy way, it would charm a lot of people, it doesn’t require much thinking. But if the interest of the financial service providers continue to contradict that much with that of the individual investors and other clients, this move does nothing more than slowing down the economy even more. Combined with the aging of the population in every industrialized nation and the deterioration dependency ratio, and our whole welfare system collapses in the coming ten years. Three times.

Is there a way out?

Paul Kedrosky is very close in his Newsweek article of October 27. He sais, we need something like a financial dashboard, that would interpret the numbers (and the opportunities and risks in behind), and we need to demand it from our personal-financial providers loudly. The problem is, they are not going to provide it. They are not (enough) willing to, and they actually can not do it. Maybe they will give us something look-alike or similar to it, but this will not help much.

Why?

1.) Incumbent financial providers are motivated the same old way: more transactions bring more money to them, and they are not much interested in the actual performance of our portfolio.

2.) They themselves do not have all the information to do it. Most of the information needed in advance, before making a decision to buy or sell a refined financial product, is only available after it: how it has actually delivered. But we – and our personal-financial providers – do not know, how these products have been developed, and the way how the financial institutions themselves have sized up their merits (opportunities vs. risks again) continues to stay in the dark.

3.) Therefore until we do not change the playground fundamentally, until we do not re-engineer the scene, the hit-and-run tactics, will be rewarded and the same old destructive practices will thrive forever.

Kedrosky suggests, we should have some access to the instant messaging between the traders. Exactly.That one too. But we need so much more.

Radical openness

Everybody wants to outsmart the market. There is nothing wrong about it, this is the main driving force of our economic system. On the financial markets, however, everybody wants to do this by using insider information. Few confess it, but the largest sex-appeal of most of the brokerage firms is their reach to behind-the-scene information. Or at least the pretense of having such information, and the willingness for giving these further. ‘Umm, we have information from our sources on the Street, what Warren Buffets next position is …’ Sounds familiar?

The trading of secrets is illegal even today. Not much would change with bringing in new regulations for the derivatives market.

What we need to do is wiping out secrets from the financial system. It should not be secrets upon which success and prosperity should be built, but rather on analyzing better the information at hand and on managing the resources in a more efficient way.

So, here is a primer, who to embrace the policy of radical openness:

1.) Obligate by legislation financial service providers to make ALL relevant information generally available in real-time, like:

- the IMs of brokers, financial institution leaders, analysts, etc. publicly available, as was suggested by Paul Kedrosky. Even better: send them to twitter.

- all information they give to the established rating firms, auditors

- all data they file to federal and state agencies, etc.

- minutes of board meetings. Even better: broadcast the meetings in real-time

 - all background analyses, studies, calculations they consider before coming to a decision.

2.) While legislation takes some time – measured rather in years, than months -, introduce this policy instantly at companies bailed out.

While there are some relative disadvantages of going open in the short run, it gives a longer term edge over the competition. The first ones to introduce will have some hard times, but they are having hard times anyway. If huge amounts of taxpayers’ money has been poured into financial institutions, full transparency is the least the citizens can expect in return for their contribution. Not just empty promises, that next time we will take care of your money better.

Otherwise, by introducing this policy at the same time at more major institutions distributes the short term relative disadvantages.

These steps would help to:

- Lower considerably the barriers of entry into the industry of analyzing and rating financial products. Empowering startups to proliferate in this field will – in turn – change the behaviour also the incumbent players. There are enough bright minds graduation from Stanford, Harvard, or the Delhi School of Economics, India, if you like, who would be eager to do this job.

- Reinstate trust and sincerity in the financial system. Funny words? Yes, and this one shows again, how ill our system really is in its present form.

- Gratify the sense of justice of the taxpayers, who see, that it is not just their life, what is changed by this meltdown, but also that of the main culprits.

Ceterum censeo

I believe, the policy of radical openness will come anyway (see the quiet evolution that the Internet inevitably brings about).

The only question is, how much are we waiting before we embrace it at last, and how much more damage should we suffer until its coming.

Yazix is a peer-to-peer translation-aid tool that helps translators work more efficiently. Yazix stores the translations of its users, and inserts the sentences into next translations where suitable. This can speed up translation work by up to 70%.

Starting with an initial angel investment of 200.000 USD, we would like to make yazix a robust system, and launch it for everyone.

I believe, that with the success of yazix we can change the way translation is done – and the way people interact through language barriers – for good.

Every day, in different parts of the world, thousands of translators are translating the same or very similar sentences at the same time.

This is unnecessary. No need to do the same thing twice.

We believe, that the memory of previous translations is a real asset in the translation industry.

We also believe, that this constantly growing bulk of human knowledge can be evaluated, indexed, stored, managed and served from one single point.

In contrast to the other players already on the market,

yazix is about database and collective wisdom

            as opposed to

sophisticated software solutions. 

phase one: translation-aid

the market

:: current market size: ~ 30 m USD

:: initial goal for market share: 30%

The current translation-aid market leader is SDL/TRADOS, followed by a long list of smaller companies and software solutions. The current translator-aid software help translators work by storing already translated sentences or phrases and offering them to use during the translation process, the same way we are doing. However, these software are more elaborated in many respect: they can be used directly in MSWord and other text editor applications.

By making it unnecessary to translate the same things twice, it is the experience with current software that one can accelerate the translation process by 10 – 70%.

A new player in this field is the Google with the Human Translation Center (still in test). For more about it, see the chapter opportunity.

the itch

Against all of the virtues of the incumbents of the market, they all concentrate on software solutions, and a software sales / licensing business model.

Consequently, the common feature of these programs today are:

- they are hard to install / hard to use,

- expensive for professional use (strongly limited demos exist),

- they come with an empty database,

- the size of the database is limited (although no one boasts of this fact).

This limits very much the access of translators to efficient translation-aid tools, no wonder, these providers reach only 1-2% of all the translators with broadband connection.

the scratch

Yazix is:

- intuitive, easy to use,

- the essential functions are free,

- builds a shared database, so every user is part of a ‘global agency’,

- will work with any language (fictional ones included) having an utf transcription,

- smaller languages and rare pairs can use a third, ‘bridge’ language to start with.

phase two: translation marketplace

the market

:: visible part of global outsource translation market size: more than 9.000 m USD

:: initial goal for market share: 1%

The translation market today is scattered, and not properly served, therefore it is quite hard to define its exact size. A big part of the potential market stays in the shadow today – the ratio between the visible and the invisible part can be up to 20 to 80% respectively.

 The primary providers – the translation agencies – are mostly outsourcing the actual work to a big number of freelance translators. It is only the biggest 3 players – Lionbridge, L-3 Communications and SDL – who have more, than 1.000 employees.

the itch

It is hard to be sure of the quality of the service. The big brands sell their reliability dearly, being cost effective brings about lot of risk.

Freelance translators and smaller offices – without efficient software tools and an objective marketplace – experience large entrance barrier, which limits competition.

In contrast to the increasing demand, the translation industry, unlike the other , web-worthy businesses, has not produced increasing effectiveness, and dropping prices in the last couple of years.

the scratch

Using yazix every translator evaluates the other translators by accepting, rejecting or altering the translations of the others. This series of automatic evaluation leads to the as-of-today best possible reputation system, that can give reliable information to clients about the quality of the translators they are about to hire.

Coupled with work-flow and checking functions (eg. team-work and proof-reading management), our marketplace, where clients could follow through the whole process – from posting a call for tender up to getting and paying the actual, checked translation  - would constitute a virtual translation agency. 

phase three: machine translation

the market

The machine translation industry is – after 50 years of development – still in its nascent phase. A good sign, that the statistical translation methods (relying on big databases of parallel text, ie. actual translations) are gaining momentum against the so far largely unsuccessful structuralist methods (dissecting the original text by lexica, grammar and style, finding basic structures of meaning, and then building up a new facade of the same meaning in the other language using the vocabulary and the rules of grammar and style of the destination language).

Plenty of players on the market, some forerunners are LanguageWeaver, Google Translate and Systran, all of them giving fairly good solutions for similar languages and agreeable ones for not similar, but important pairs, like English -> Mandarin, Arabic.

the itch

It is not yet part of our daily life. We are still not browsing the whole web in our native language.

Why building semantic web and better-and-better ways of building communities and exchange ideas, when the language barriers are shrinking us in smaller pockets, with the ration English language content of the whole Internet sinking way below 50% in the last years?

the scratch

With our – hopefully – huge and reliable database of parallel texts, yazix can become a key player in the machine translation industry, either by giving effective machine translation (and machine interpretation) itself, or by licensing its sentence and phrase database to other providers.

yazix … product development

phase zero (seed): working prototype, first users – completed

X      the working model is already up, currently under test by a limited number of ’friendly’ translators since february 2008

phase one (angel / venture): translation-aid – consolidation

X      consolidation and improve scalability

X      launch for everyone with premium features: group work, bigger % of hidden text, delay in making one’s translations available to the others, etc.

X      users at this phase start to build their reputation: a correlation of their uploaded texts (translated through yazix or previous translations), their work on evaluating existing database and the evaluation made by other users about the quality of their work

phase two (angel / venture): translation marketplace + phrases

X      through the marketplace clients can pick translators directly, omitting the third man – the translation agencies. clients get more speed, less cost, still a high reliability concerning the quality of translation they get

X      because of the database and the reputation-based marketplace most translators having an internet connection are going to feel compelled to use yazix at this stage – otherwise they would lose their competitiveness

X      in the background, we are starting to identify smaller units of text, the phrases, and modify the classification of the hit list with context, which two measures render our translation suggestions more precise, and get us closer to machine translation

phase three (venture / ipo / business): auto.trans. – machine translation

X      with the help of the users yazix would produce the largest parallel text database in the world – between most (if not all) – possible language pairs

X      this database would first make it possible to produce a serious machine translation application

X      the revenue from building services around this database can hardly be calculated today. from being the no. 1. web browsing point in the world (you can browse the whole web in your native language), to giving machine interpretation services through mobile or a voip application for a fee, etc. –, or just licensing our database to companies running these businesses, there is enough market edge visible on the horizon once the system is up and running

investment opportunity

If this is such a good business, why don’t the established market players do the same thing?

This would mean cannibalizing their established product. For a translation-aid software company this would break the sales, and annul the revenue for two years.

The biggest asset of a major translation agency lies in its translation memory database. It is more valuable than its brand name, goodwill or network. No agency will give away its database for free or for a fair price, especially not in order to give an advantage their human or machine competitors.

A new evolvement is, that Google announced the opening its Google Translation Center, with shared translation memory and translators workbench. We welcome very much this move, since this justifies the founding idea of yazix, and that this field cries for disruption and new solutions.

On the other hand, we are positive, that yazix is substantially better in key functions and usability, and this can conversed into a market advantage for yazix, that make up the market advantage of google in terms of publicity, goodwill and development provess.

This evolvement also strengthens the security for the investors that their investment returns, since now it is going to be easier to sell / license parts of yazix to competitors of google, like amazon, yahoo, microsoft, etc. who will not want to stay without a translation tool (and the possibility of good machine translation) in the competition.