Posted 01.01.2007
Tech startup of the month: Webxample llc
The niche is the multilingual market
By Eric PetersonINITIAL LIGHTBULB
After coming to Colorado from his native Venezuela in the mid-1980s, Ignacio Jimenez worked in his family’s import-export business and then founded TranslationLinks, a multilingual services firm, in 1993. With a global network of more than 1,000 translators, the company has established itself as a specialist in technical translation for companies like Sun Microsystems and AstraZeneca.
Emilio Navarro and Ignacio Jimenez
With the Internet growing increasingly important in the corporate world, Jimenez realized he needed to diversify his services to meet the market demand. “We needed technology to add to (translation) to reach other markets,” he explained. So he teamed with software engineer Emilio Navarro, whom he’d worked with throughout the 1990s, to spin off a separate tech-services firm in WebXample.
With Jimenez serving as CEO and Navarro as CTO, the five-employee WebXample has developed several products while also offering Web and software development services.
Said Navarro: “The niche we have focused on is the multilingual market.”
IN A NUTSHELL
WebXample’s flagship service is TranslationMail, a system that allows companies to translate e-mail into any language via an online portal, with a human-element assist from sister company TranslationLinks’ worldwide translator network. Because translators carry mobile technology, Jimenez said it usually takes only five to 10 minutes for a message sent by a client to be translated into the target language and sent to its final recipient.
The entire process is secure and seamless, Navarro added. “The recipient will never know it came from us,” he said. “The translator will never know who it is going to and where it is coming from, and the message is encrypted.”
TranslationMail’s pricing is based on the popularity of the language (Spanish is relatively inexpensive, Asian tongues are pricier) and the number of characters in the message. To this end, translators are well versed in abbreviating common words and phrases in both the source and target languages.
WebXample’s second key offering is customized online proficiency examinations, or OPEs, that allow an employer to test the language skills of potential employees during the hiring process. The multimedia tests include listening-comprehension sections, and a real-time interview component is in the works. The primary market for OPEs is medical, because mistranslated words can mean the difference between life and death in emergencies and surgeries. The educational market is also strong, said Navarro. “Interpreters don’t need certification here in Colorado, so hospitals can be liable for them,” he noted, making an OPE a good safeguard.
Beyond these two offerings, a new multilingual, multi-platform messaging system was slated for launch last fall. WebXample also offers Web development, localization and other services as a primary consultant or a third party.
THE MARKET
The corporate demand for multilingual technology services comes from a diverse set of industries, said Jimenez, and individuals have made use of TranslationMail for non-business communication. (One customer used it to woo someone on the other side of the world.) “We started using it for personal relations, anything,” he explained, “but lately we’ve been geared toward business.”
FINANCING
WebXample’s launch was financed out of “our own pockets and time,” said Navarro. The plan is to grow the company organically, he added, with a goal of opening an office in Lima, Peru, by fall.
Where: Denver
Founded: 2004
www.webxample.com
Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer's Colorado, Frommer's Montana & Wyoming, Frommer's Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver's Westword and The New York Daily News.
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