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| Your marketing message, their language |
May 8, 2006 |
By Peter Wolchak
Clay Tablet Technologies was launched less than a year ago, but the idea for the company began in the boardrooms of client firms and in horror stories founders Robinson Kelly and Ryan Coleman heard there.
The two were operating a successful professional services company, and they would often hear complaints about the time and expense involved in managing online content. When the discussion turned to multilingual Web sites, the stories became downright harrowing. “We watched a couple of clients manage Web sites with simple content management systems, and that worked fine. Then they said, ‘Okay, now we need to do the same thing but in five languages,’” Kelly said.
That’s when problems started. “We found that managing multiple languages for a Web site is an utter mess right now.”
That mess was a business opportunity, and the partners formed Clay Tablet (http://www.clay-tablet.com). Its products automate the management of multilingual content through a middleware solution that sits between an existing Web content management system and a translation service provider.
The Branham cut
Firms that help companies play in a global economy have good profit potential and that pushed Clay Tablet onto the Branham Up and Comers list, according to president and CEO Wayne Gudbranson.
“The promise here is very interesting. Clay Tablet offers a complete and transparent approach to accessing content, along with the ability to change content in a multilingual business environment.”
That market, Kelly said, is worth billions. “The translation services market today is worth about US$8.8 billion worldwide, but there is probably a follow-on, shadow market that is 10 times that value. That is people managing the content: cutting and pasting from one application into an e-mail, sending it off to translation and then managing it when it comes back.
“So we brought to market a suite of software that connects these processes. Our value proposition is about reducing the cost of translation and time to market, but specifically about removing the headaches involved in getting content from the authoring technology to the translation folks and back again.”
Will Clay Tablet be a success? Branham’s Gudbranson can’t guarantee anything, but he sees promise. “When you look at the bottom end of the Branham 250 list of companies by revenue, they’re hovering at the $2.5 million to $3 million range. If Clay Tablet can pull off its promise, it has a good chance of entering the 250 next year. That’s not the only metric of success, but it will be interesting to see how quickly they take off.”
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