Asia Online – the world’s most significant literacy project (and internet investment opportunity)

We’ve all dreamt of going back in history, knowing what we know now. Imagine it was the start of the internet all over again – to be able to make all the right moves because you knew how the web would be monetized, the importance of search and how to leverage it, which business models would work, and which ones wouldn’t. Asia Online appears to have manufactured itself that exact scenario in Asia with its new self-learning statistical machine translation language technologies which it is focusing on Asian languages – as the knowledge-deprived populations of Southern Asian countries adopt the internet, Asia Online looks set to play a huge role by providing information in the language of choice for the dozens of previously information-disenfranchised population groups – groups which will make up roughly half of the internet user base within four years. Viewed from another angle Asia Online’s work is about information empowerment. “Our goal here is to eliminate information poverty”, says CEO Dion Wiggins.

The technology and how it can be used

From a big picture point of view, Asia Online’s self learning Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) could have some remarkable outcomes for the internet and mobile telephone worlds as web pages, blogs, instant messaging and virtually any form of written communication, including instantaneous translation of signposts in a foreign land, will become possible in the short to medium term future.

When we proposed that scenario (automated remote sign translation), Asia Online’s CEO was quick to point out they already had that running in the development area. As for automated, all-language blogs, he suggested the end result might look like Google’s existing Chatbot on Google Talk, “except with high quality translation.”

Asia Online’s tag line is “The World Speaks One language – YOURS” and that’s clearly where things are headed for the company. Everyone will be able to read all information in their own language, eliminating one of the greatest barriers to education and the common man becoming ‘well informed’. In the foreseeable future, a blog post will be equally accessible to a Tagalog speaker in the Phillipines or a Kymer speaker in Cambodia as it is presently to the world’s English speakers.

Beyond that, says Asia Online’s CEO Dion Wiggins, “I don’t want people to see AO as a technology company – we’re a content company that has an amazing technology.”

The background to Asia Online

Asia Online was formed in late 2006 by Dion Wiggins, Greg Binger and Bob Hayward and has achieved a number of world-first technology breakthroughs since then, some of which are in the process of being patented.

Asia Online’s Chief Scientist is Philipp Koehn (PhD), a global thought leader on the subject of statistical machine translation. A former MIT researcher, Koehn is currently teaching at the University of Edinburgh, and has a book titled “Statistical Machine Translation” scheduled for publication later this year.

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