What are the key drivers that will promote rapid uptake of global messaging and translation services and how can that disrupt traditional patterns of communication and investment?

By Robert Levin, CEO of Transclick ®

Transclick’s network of “best of breed” translation servers will support not only Transclick’s proprietary messaging applications, but the applications of our strategic messaging partners networks’ as well. Click here to apply to become a Strategic Partner of Transclick ®.

In order to more rapidly globalize its network, exploit the “network effect” and accelerate an exponential rise in end-users predicted by Metcalfe’s Law, Transclick is going to market in indirect and direct sales through largest marketing alliances.

The Internet reached a level of critical mass in 1993, when there were roughly 2.5 million host computers on the network. By November 1997 the vast network contained an estimated 25 million host computers. With memory, speed of information flow and computing costs accelerating its rate of decent, the Internet as a network is growing exponentially. Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law have rendered less expensive several kinds of communication transactions. This has resulted in an acceleration of global outsourcing and the disintermediation, or cutting out, of many barriers to transmission of new ideas and communication management middlemen including human translators and simultaneous interpreters.

There is a convergence of language and communications technology trends emerging in the last few years with important new trends in the same fields over the next few years which will drive global sales of Transclick’s technology for collaboration, communication and distance education:

• Most text messages are “born digital” over fixed and wireless computer networks, i.e. in a form that can be sent at low cost over the internet or mobile text messaging networks.
• As 140 million or more non-English speakers join the global and mobile internet each year
• There is still a growing bottleneck to human communication: Less than 20,000 professional simultaneous interpreters and less than 250,000 certified translators on the planet can not translate and intermediate in real-time (or even rapid turn-around time) on billions of instant messages, emails and SMS messages “born digital” in over 30 foreign languages each month —it simply is not economically or logistically feasible.
• There is a rising shortage of human translators who are mostly trained for document translation, not for short digital messages that would be too expensive to translate by humans, even if it were logistically feasible.
• Once an idea or an email or instant message is translated and transmitted over the Internet, for example, there is zero cost for each additional transmission so ideas, once translated, can be disseminated quite freely and instantaneously.
• Mobile internet access is rising exponentially over the next five years in the non-English speaking world, just as fixed line internet access rose rapidly in the five years from 1993-1998.
• 27% of new mobile phone subscriptions are happening in one country every month: China.
• Demand for human translation is rising due to globalization but the demand for translation of documents “born digital” is outstripping the supply of qualified translators. The trend of Asians, Latin Americans and Europeans learning English is rising but those who learn English as a 2nd language still are not as comfortable writing in English as they are speaking in English.
• Even if a billion more people learn English, the English speaking population still needs to communicate with the 140 million going online who do not speak fluent English even as a 2nd language and 3.5 billion people who speak 3,900 other human languages on Earth may never learn English.
• Universal translation is one of 10 emerging technologies that will affect our lives and work 'in revolutionary ways' within a decade, Technology Review editorialized in January 2004.
• These trends are destined to accelerate in the 21st Century because digitization of data over mobile internet networks is increasing exponentially as Moore’s Law extends to the mobile internet—and there is a corresponding drop in bandwidth costs which will dramatically reduce text data transmission costs over global telephony networks.
• As 1.2 billion mobile phones are becoming globally networked, trans-Atlantic and trans-national text messaging is starting to increase exponentially.
• As this number grows to 2 billion smart-phones by 2010, Metcalfe’s Law of networks will apply to mobile phones that are interoperable for text messaging, and as most mobile phones will be able to roam across geographic borders, demand for real-time language translation of text messaging into the common lingua franca of the planet, “broken English” (used daily by over 1.5 billion non-native English speakers), will soar.
• As technology-driven quality improvements over the next few years result in useful and intelligible real-time language translation, with mass customization of linguistic data, the average quality of real-time translation will exceed the average quality of broken English. Transclick’s patents will become extraordinarily valuable.
• Transclick’s technology, which will be available to a global mass market in 2004, will be well positioned to capitalize on these mega-trends.

Metcalfe’s law is at work: the more people who send information over the global mobile and fixed-line internet network, your standard, your game, your messaging utility or your web service, the more valuable it becomes, and the more new users it will attract, increasing both its utility and the speed of its adoption by still more users. If you and I can fax only each other, to return to the fax example, a fax machine is of little value. But if we can fax nearly everyone else in the world, it becomes irresistible. The same is true of interoperable global real-time translation of email, SMS and instant messaging. Even if real-time language translation grows slowly, the value of the network effect of communicating across language barriers over the Internet or mobile phone networks still grows exponentially according to Metcalfe’s Law.

As stated earlier, Metcalfe's law states that the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system (N²). Since a fax machine cannot connect to itself, the actual calculation is

N(N−1), or N²−N.
First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web. This network effect valuation applies to other networks of collaboration or communication applications layered on top of these wireless and fixed line internet-based and telephony data communication networks.

It took almost a decade for radio to reach critical mass in the U.S.; television took almost 12 years from its introduction in 1949 to around the time of the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. Each of these communication technologies transformed economic, political and even influenced family structures once they reached critical mass. The mobile internet over wireless phones has risen to over 1.2 billion mobile phones from less than 10,000 in 1986. Web services are now being launched on at least 4% of these mobile phones and that may rise to 90% of two billion mobile phones by 2010. With “global phones” such as Blackberry now roaming on over 30 wireless carriers in over 100 nations, text messaging has now become global over these platforms. Transclick is leveraging this globalization of mobile messaging trend. When real-time translation of instant messaging and email translation achieves critical mass, it will create a global conversation that will change the course of history. The global stage is now set for a communications revolution that will catalyze unpredictable and profound political and economic change.

Push to Talk. Click to Translate: TransClick ®.

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