For example, a company's lawyers in Paris could type in legal changes specific to France, then pass it along to a marketing director to make more revisions. The program stores frequently used translations, and staffers don't have to know how to code Web pages to use it. Woods, like his main competitor, 35-employee Idiom Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., is betting that companies will clamor for help managing international Web sites as Internet usage explodes abroad. Mass. Granted, Global, whose clients include GE Information Services, Cisco Systems, and Palm Computing, is targeting a still tiny market and hasn't turned a profit yet. Doug Erwin, a senior engineer at GE Information Services, says Ambassador has reduced the time it takes to update the Italian, French, and German versions of the company's TradeWeb site, geared to GE's small and midsize trading partners, from three weeks to several hours.
Woods certainly hopes so.
In the next year, he plans to double his staff, open offices in Europe and Asia, and go public. You wake up in the morning and you're on the top, but by the middle of the day you think it's over. Being able to take on those peaks and valleys and stay focused keeps me going. Sounds like an entrepreneur in any language. The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.