eBay’s focus on international expansion continues: yesterday its PayPal division announced PassPort,
aimed at attracting more international sales, and today eBay is
announcing the acquisition of machine translation technology from a
company called AppTek.
From our understanding, eBay is acquiring the talent and the IP
from Virginia-headquartered AppTek, but another division of its business
focused on voice technology will continue on, possibly still under the
AppTek name. However, those specifics are still to be determined.
Eight people from AppTek’s 10-person team will join eBay,
including one co-founder. (The other will remain with AppTek to run the
remaining business unit.) In the near term, eBay will continue to serve
AppTek’s customers, largely government contracts, by licensing
the technology.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
AppTek was founded in 1990 by Mohammad Shihadah and Mudar Yaghi, and in more recent years had been developing hybrid machine translation software, which will help eBay improve upon its own in-house machine translation capabilities it began working on two years ago.
eBay says that today over 20% of its sales involve
cross-border trade, and that part of its business is growing more
quickly than its domestic business. That’s why it’s been building
technology to help buyers and sellers better communicate.
Currently, eBay is translating listing details, including
parts of the item description, in places like Russia, Brazil, Mexico,
and in some European countries. Originally, the company had experimented
with using third-party translation tools for this task (like Google’s),
but found that they were not as accurate for eBay’s specific,
commerce-related needs, which often involve translating descriptions
that aren’t written with proper grammar, or in complete sentences.
So instead, eBay has been developing its own translation
tools that can identify things that are more likely to appear on a
marketplace like theirs, where there’s no inventory catalog to refer to.
Its translation software today understands things like colors, brands,
and the different product domains (electronics, fashion, etc.) where a
product fits.
For eBay, this acquisition was about three main things,
the company tells us. One, AppTek had a number of the world’s experts in
hyper machine translation technology, and had offices in Aachen,
Germany, where nearby universities were leaders in this field. In
addition, explains Marc Delingat, Senior Director of Product and
Technology for Geographic Expansion and Cross Border Trade at eBay,
AppTek also has a lot of code and components that eBay can use, and they
have a lot language data.
“If you do machine learning, you need to have a lot of
data to train your algorithm. They have that for all the languages that
we were looking for, to cover the key trade corridors that we were
looking at,” says Delingat.
Plus, adds, Wendy Jones, Head of Global Dxpansion and
Cross Border Trade at eBay, even if eBay didn’t acquire a technology
maker like AppTek, they would have to build that technology for
themselves. “We decided to look at companies like AppTek that were out
there and would help us accelerate our plans…we went on a pretty
exhaustive search,” she says. Though the company had never experimented
with AppTek’s technology before, it was familiar with the company as a
member of Marc’s team knew people there.
In the near-term, the acquisition means eBay will be able
to more rapidly roll out more translation capabilities on its site, with
plans to do so for Europe later this year, Jones says.
Longer-term, the company wants to offer more services for
buyers and sellers, including a listing service that would help sellers
list in multiple languages, instead of turning to third-parties for
help. eBay’s also planning to develop instant messaging-like
communication tools between buyers and sellers that would translate
between languages in real time.
more details:tech crunch
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