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

The killer app – providing content to 60% of the world’s population

By far the most significant of Asia Online’s technologies is its statistical machine translation platform which learns as it goes, continually providing better translations into the bargain. It can currently translate between 203 language pairings and has 500+ language pairings under development, with a view to having them available by the end of 2009

Why is this significant?

This illustration graphically represents where the world’s internet population currently resides – it is US and Euro-centric and predominantly English-based.

More than 85% of the world’s written knowledge is in non-Asian languages, with the vast majority in English. Of the 13.8% of the world’s knowledge written in Asian languages, almost all of it is in Chinese, Japanese or Korean – less than 0.03% of this knowledge is in other Asian languages.

Quite understandably, this represents a serious barrier to knowledge acquisition in Asian countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and India, which are some of the world’s most populous nations. There are just 10 million local-language web pages in Southeast Asia in total, with Indonesia having just one million local language pages, serving a country of 235 million people. It’s worth noting here that that Indonesia’s the internet userbase of 23M is larger than the entire population of Australia.

Due to its large number of developing nations, multiplicity of languages and the fact it has been largely ignored by seasoned content providers until now, Asia has a dearth of content in Asian languages. This content vacuum represents a significant opportunity. Beginning with Thai, Asia Online’s mission is to become the dominant Internet Portal in Asia.

Currently, Asia has half the internet penetration of the rest of the world – 15.3% of the population of Asia is connected, compared with 30.5% for the rest of the world. A technologically mature nation such as the United States is at almost 75% penetration, and approaching saturation point, with little room for growth.

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