Starks Worldwide Inc.
Proposed Angel Investment – Vocabrio Executive Summary
Starks Worldwide Inc. Products and Market Outlook
Starks Worldwide is focused on developing a cloud based app technology and method to disrupt the way people are currently using translation tools and learning languages online. The team behind the idea offers over 20 years’ business, design and development experience.
Progressive Web Application (PWA):“Vocabrio” (Current approved and registered .com name)
Industry: Language Translation, Travel and Education
Revenue Streams:Micropayment crowd funding by users and brands to receive pro translations from Vocabrio linguists. Plus, a potential freemium subscription with advanced features.
Summary:
The principals of Starks Worldwide are seeking Angel investment to advance its prototype demo into a fully functional MVP (Minimum Viable Product) developed as a progressive web application for Android and IOS. In addition, the MVP will include a fully configured cloud based backend on Amazon Cloud with a full-featured desktop site for users who want to only do translations.
Milestones:
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.com Name Registration with clean SEO. Limited marketing congestion.
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/Vocabrio Social Media channels registered for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google
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Trademark search completed and filed.
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Clickable Mobile Prototype completed.
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Roadmap with Gantt chart (Current MVP Launch date Aug 2018, pending investment close)
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Completed competitive analysis and market viability study.
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50% Design and UX completed.
Investment Terms and early company Valuation: (TBD)
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Seeking $500,000 - $1,000,000 angel investment for team of 5 people. (COO, Linguistics advisor Professor from Harvard University and Developers)
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Valuation at $2,000,000. Up to 25% ownership available for initial investment
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Equity tranches at 5% for each min $100k investment or 2.5% for each $50k
Translation Challenges and Investment Factors to consider
With approximately 200 language apps currently available on IOS and Android we are very aware of the size of the market. Vocabrio will be unique in the sense that it is not necessarily competing directly with other language apps, instead, our mission is to build a language database anyone can use.
Our goal is to evolve Vocabrio into a crowd-sourced linguistic GIG economy allowing people around the world to make money while helping with translations. The database value generated via Vocabrio can evolve into enormous value for companies such as Google or Microsoft in the future as potential acquirers of the data.
We want to declare that the best teachers of any given language aren’t toiling away in some classroom; they’re the day-to-day native speakers who understand the fluidity and organic-nature of their language.
Their focus isn’t on boring grammatical rules, but instead on real-world usage and situations.
The second component of this concept is a play on the functionality of the application—an electronic go-between the language learner and another party. By enabling crowd sourced translation mechanisms in the app, we will be able to create a trusted translation community for language pro’s and linguists around the world.
With that said, Vocabrio’s MVP will be focused on speed, accuracy and ease of use. By using open source Translation APIs and opening our app to translators in countries around the world we will be able to translate hundreds of languages in the right context and by doing so, construct the world’s first official Wikipedia of correct language use cases across millions of instances. As great as translation technology has become there is still a huge gap between unemotional language interpreted by a computer and how people sound when they say something with emotion.
What sets us apart from the competition?
3 Main functions and features that make Vocabrio unique:
1. The incredible ease-of-usewe are building into the design of the application. By simply tilting your phone away and towards the person you are talking to the interface will turn upside down to allow your party to easily talk with you without handing them your phone. We even have an option in the settings menu that will automatically share help screens in their own language, so they can talk to you correctly for best possible results.
2. Optional human translation functionality(Crowd sourced Monetization): Vocabrio will allow users to submit lines of text for real-time translation by human beings who are familiar with the requested language. The transactions will occur as micropayments and the "Vocabrio linguists" or “Vocabriolist” also have the ability to change their settings of how they want to receive translation request messages. Frequency, cost and time of day.
3. Built inLip sync technology for increased accuracy: If anyone has ever tried using a translation app in a loud environment they will know that the chance of success is very low. To date the moment the only workaround for this is for people to manually type the text into the app, which completely breaks the flow of conversation.
Vocabrio is going to change this by incorporating lip sync technology that enables the app to fill in the “hard-to-hear” words while observing the person's mouth with the front-facing camera. The only requirements for this to work are that the person keeps the phone at the right angle for their lips to be in shot during the sentence spoken.
Industry Market Factors
People around the world prefer communicating in their native tongue!That simple fact will drive the language industry to US$50 billion in revenue for 2018. To support this growth, language service and technology providers are extending their repertoire beyond basic translation, localization, and interpreting to embrace their clients' global content strategy. They are offering new services, building new tools, and linking their processes and technology with that of their customers to provide better, faster, and more reliable products and services. Integrating the Vocabrio Wiki Database with additional machine learning functionality to these services could greatly improve the above-mentioned efforts for everyone involved.
Duolingo is a great example of an application that initially launched to purely help people learn Spanish. Over the past five years their company has evolved into offering multiple languages with 15 million active users a day plus providing professional translation support to the CNN News Network which has become their main revenue stream.
The translations itself are not happening within the app but rather behind the scenes by professionals who have been approved by Duolingo. The company recently also announced that it has raised a $25 million Series E round led by Drive Capital. This brings Duolingo’s total funding to $108.3 million and the company says that its valuation in this last round was $700 million.
Company Qualifications
The founder and team of Starks Worldwide have experience in the Internet since its inception and have worked at early tech startups before YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where even ideas. Their knowledge, passion and experience in the digital market place with contacts in both technology and education afford the company accelerated traction. Additionally, the founder and principals of Stark Worldwide have a deep understanding of how to market via digital technologies with its own proprietary social media-marketing app for Twitter already developed. (flowly.io)
Contact Information:
Julian Stark (CEO / Founder / Vocabrio)
310.871.0940 contact@vocabrio.com