LISA: Ask Jeeves has a number of high-profile multinational corporate clients. Do you think your clients generally have a high awareness that language and culture are significant issues for globalizing their businesses, or is this something about which your organization is trying to educate clients?

George Lichter: Many of our clients are high-profile multinationals. They are fairly sophisticated, but there is no uniform approach amongst this group with respect to marketing or customer-support issues. Some operate on a centralized model with most information coming from one source, while others are more decentralized, allowing marketing and customer support to be handled at a local level. The decentralized ones have a fairly high sensitivity with respect to the language and culture, but they don’t have a very coordinated and centralized approach to content management. At the other end of the spectrum are companies that feel the high priority is to centralize and in general these people are less sensitive to the local culture and language issues.

We don’t believe it is our role as an enabler in a navigation system to try to educate—rather we try to work within the framework of our customer. One thing we find to be the same with all the customers right now, at this point in this industry, is that they all share high sensitivity to ROI analysis of their investments in online arenas. We help them in a subtle way to understand that there is a way to combine the two approaches—centralized content management and cultural and language sensitivity—by using the Jeeves system.

LISA: When you say you are “enablers”, what do you mean?

George Lichter: People throughout the world in any culture or language have questions in a variety of settings. Among these settings are consumer-facing sites where people can ask questions about, for example, where to buy music online, whether they can order vacation packages, or in some cases personal knowledge information (like who a certain country’s president is or what the distance between A and B is). That’s the consumer-facing world.

In the world of our corporate customers—usually large multinationals—they have their own customers with a different set of questions. Their customers—the end-users or end-purchaser of their goods and services—usually have questions which are directly related to the topic areas that company is involved in. For a company like Dell, customers are interested in hardware, computers, peripherals and things which are related to them—information about upgrades, purchases and customer support, and just plain information about how things work. But it’s all tightly bundled around a vertical topic.

In both these contexts—consumer-oriented or business-oriented—Jeeves provides a very simple and intuitive navigation device that connects consumers (either on our site or on our corporate consumers’ sites) with an easy way to get from the questions they have to the answers they need.

LISA: Your recent partnership with Lionbridge Technologies seems to be emblematic of Ask Jeeves’ globalization strategies to address multilingual capabilities. What is the exact thinking behind this partnership?

George Lichter: The first thing is that Ask.Jeeves does not believe it should be a body shop—that is, we should always have people on our payroll who do all the things that are part of the enabling process we offer to our customers. There are obvious operational issues which drive that kind of decision: we want to be scalable—we don’t always want the headcount and we want to be able to upsize for a particular job and downsize when the job is completed; we want to be able to take advantage of particular expertise when it comes to one task versus another. It is always hard to keep everything under one roof.

Localization is simply not our core competency, nor for that matter is it a competency that we necessarily expect of our corporate customers. So what Lionbridge or others who provide similar skills and services give us is the ability to be both scalable and they are able to be an extension of capability for the customer we serve with our enabling technologies.

LISA: Does Lionbridge have an understanding of what Jeeves is about with its natural language processing technology, etc?

George Lichter: I believe they do, yes. This partnership is fairly long in forming. It started with people within Ask Jeeves International and had a long history with various individuals at Lionbridge. We built on these early discussions and, as the relationship matured, we also involved Lionbridge in formal training exercises so that they not only became aware of our capabilities but also became competent in our tools. I do believe they understand what it is that makes Jeeves special and are able to work with our tools to make sure that magic is made useful to customers as well.

LISA: In terms of automatic language processing, Web-based machine translation systems are now widely available on the market. What are your thoughts on using automated language translation systems in Ask Jeeves? Some of your non-English speaking users may themselves be using such language assistance to access Ask Jeeves. Do you have any data on this?

George Lichter: We believe there are advantages to automatic language processing, but we are not focused on how they might apply to Jeeves. We are trying to solve different parts of the problem now and so automatic language processing is not something we’ve assessed in great enough detail to give answers on.

LISA: Would you feel comfortable even highlighting what these other parts of the problem might be—the other parts that you are looking in?

George Lichter: Let me re-highlight the process of what Jeeves is engaged in. Jeeves offers an intuitive, easy and simple way to connect people’s questions to the answers. In order to understand the questions they are asking we have to understand whatever language the person speaks or uses to input information. We spend a lot of time with natural language processing (NLP) and NLP technologies.

The next thing we need to do after we understand the question is to sort through the jumble of information that’s on the Web. Sometimes it’s quite daunting to select the best answer that the user might find as satisfactory from all that stuff (and that’s a technical term!).

We do that in several different ways. We do it—and this was our original entry into the sector—through the use of editors who use high powered tools to pre-select and review a site and connect that question to a site. We also use some automated technology that we acquired and have further developed, but it’s always aimed at connecting a question with an answer. In every case that’s not our answer—it’s someone else’s answer. When we are engaged in the content creation aspect of the problem, we’re into what we consider to be the highest value right now—given the amount of information on the Web work, we’re into helping people find the right answer. Machine Translation doesn’t fit neatly into any of the things we are concentrating on.

LISA: So you are more involved in the interpretation of content that is already there. Is that correct?

George Lichter: We have to be able to understand the question that someone asks. Maybe an example will be helpful. If a person asks “how hot is it in Paris?” We have to be able to understand that the person, giving the question in English, is reasonably asking something about temperature; we need to be able to translate the temperature into weather and the weather into a weather forecast, all the way down to what we call a template question; then we have to connect that question by use of either editors or automated technology to a site providing the information. So, it is an interpretive exercise after we understand what the question is. There may be other things the “hot” may relate to—someone may be looking for interesting night spots for jazz and we also have to display those kind of results as well in a descending order based on a statistical ranking that we have developed over time. Right now the actual translating of either the content that we end up pointing to or the question the person initially entered is not one of our jobs—we merely reduce it down to the template or pure form.

LISA: Can you name any of the tools, these high level tools of technologies you either purchase or use?

George Lichter: They are all proprietary and have internal names we use.

LISA: What is the biggest difference between Jeeves and search engines such as Google?

[At this point we each went online to test out Ask.Jeeves with the question “where can I find out about car radios?” We got our answers in two parts—knowledge-based rephrased questions and typical search engine answers]

George Lichter: Jeeves offers knowledge-based questions at the top with a full sentence. We believe that some people prefer to ask their questions in a full sentence and receive answers back in the question format. Those are the ones editors are trying to interpret from the template question and give direct answers to. But Jeeves also provides search engine type of answers where automated search engine goes out, spiders, indexes and then in our case, we rank on the basis of popularity. In other words, we processed the number of people who’ve gone to a particular site, the amount of time they spent there, the amount of clicks they were engaged in once on that site, etc. They are all ways to determine whether that site has provided a satisfactory answer to users.

Google does a similar thing, but they do it on the basis of the link analysis. The similarity between the two is they’re both automated, both produces lots of lots of results and sometimes they are really confusing to people. What search engines continually fail to do is discern what people really want to know. Search engines are just machines. Computers do a great job of spidering, indexing and listing but in the end people do a great job in judging—an interesting tie-in to the earlier question about MT. Machines still aren’t there yet. The need for the professional localizer and professional translator has not gone away. The need for the kind of editorial judgment that people or companies like Ask Jeeves provides has not yet gone away yet.

The interesting thing about the conclusion we have reached at Ask Jeeves is that we want to offer both kinds of results to our consumers. So, my answer explains the difference between what Jeeves has and what search engines have and why there’s need for both. In the end people just want answers. What computers make people do in general is think like computers. The beauty of the Ask Jeeves solution, in my opinion, is that we want computers to have to work like people instead of the other way around.

There’s a real choice that companies like Google and Goto are making. Some search engines are selling high-ranking answers to their top questions to people—the engines’ first answer isn’t necessarily the answer people want to know; rather it’s the answer the advertiser wants them to know. Jeeves is your butler. Jeeves represents trust and security—I couldn’t imagine having my butler being paid by other people to help me decide what milk to have in my refrigerator, what newspaper to order, or where to get my shoes shined. I want my butler to be my butler.

LISA: Last year Ask Jeeves announced a partnership with Trans Cosmos (TCI) in Japan to establish Ask Jeeves Japan. Could you tell us more about this joint venture?

George Lichter: The joint venture agreement was signed in August 2000 and the joint venture has been officially launched as Ask Jeeves Japan with its office in central Tokyo. Ask Jeeves Japan KK is moving forward to initially launch our business solution services—those are the services we sell to our corporate customers—first and then we will be launching our consumer-facing product, the one similar to Ask.com, in Japanese later in the year. We anticipate setting up our first corporate customer by the end of March. One of our expectations was that TCI would provide a good place for us to start in terms of accelerating the development of our business-solution client base with its large base of corporate customers .

LISA: Do you think Japan represents a good market for leveraging customer support services?

George Lichter: Yes, it does. I think there are certain similarities Japan has with other markets—consumers really want to understand, they want to research, they want to know about the products before they buy them. If you go to any electronics store in Japan, you see that there is perhaps even a greater level of detailed due diligence on the part of the consumer than there is elsewhere before making a purchase. There is a general thirst for information about a product in the purchase cycle and the customer support cycle. So, yes, the market there has those characteristics.

LISA: One extension would be seen if you look at the computer or the software market in Japan. It may not be core to manufacturers to set up a customer-support call center, so they would outsource that sort of service. Do you see Ask Jeeves stepping into that role with your technology and all the enabling support that you do provide? Do you see that as an incremental market?

George Lichter: Yes, and one of the reasons why we are so excited is that our partner is very excited about the prospect…Recall that TCI is one of the leading call center support companies in Japan, with many well-known brands on their customer list. They see the market as developing not just from calls, which are as expensive in Japan as they are in the US, if not more so. They also see the market developing in terms of finding either deeper answers to questions, or in terms of their customers wanting less expensive answers delivered to their customers. They see Ask Jeeves and its automated solution, with its repository of information about products, services and customer support, as a way of delivering along both those axes—the quality and depth of answer and more economical answers.

LISA: The Japanese economy seems to going through a hard time, as indicated in the recent announcement by the Japanese finance minister. How does this situation affect Jeeves’ entry into the Japanese market?

George Lichter: I hope the problems in both the US and Japan’s troubled economies are short term and that Ask Jeeves’ role in helping companies become better and more efficient will mean it can still thrive in these times of economic difficulty.

LISA: What is the rationale behind the company’s decision to enter the Japanese market—not the easiest market to enter?

George Lichter: There are three principal reasons why we thought Japanese market was the market we needed to participate in. First, it’s one of the largest Internet markets in the world and it’s very hard to overlook that kind of a market, especially as it is more mature in B-to-B aspects. Second, two of the strongest industry verticals we participate in for business solutions have been IT—consumer and other hardware support, and financial services. Our research showed these to be a very good fit for the Japanese market. Third, we are excited by our partner. Trans Cosmos is a great fit. We fit into their vision and they fit into our vision. They were very enthusiastic about putting together a company and building it. With all three items taken into account, we felt this was the right market at the right time.

LISA: What are the company’s strategies with Asian markets? Do you have plans to expand into China and Korea, for example?

George Lichter: Yes, two other Asian markets in the Pacific region that we have been looking at are China and Korea. They represent a lot of opportunities for us. We have had discussions with a number of potential partners in those markets. However, the markets in the region—Japan is not alone—have been experiencing a decent amount of volatility over the last half year or so and we want to make sure our timing is right before committing our resources to any of these other markets. We think Japan represents a market that we can really make a statement in. From that market we can expand into the others.

LISA: Will Ask Jeeves Japan provide its services in other languages than Japanese? Will you provide that capability in Japan?

George Lichter: All users can enter the Jeeves’ global network in whatever the language they will feel most comfortable in. We try to be as relevant as possible. The problem that all of us—everyone—faces is that the more obscure the entry point is from the locality, the harder it is to serve a good result. For example, if you are in Japan and you enter French and want to know a good place to buy a car radio in a certain small town in Japan, the odds of getting the result you want is small. If you ask a question of more general consequence such as what is the temperature in Tokyo and you enter it in French, you’ll be more likely to get an answer. There’s a sort of tipping point in the analysis. One of the things we are researching now in selecting content in Japan is whether we double-link it two languages, and that, we are researching now. We are providing multiple language search capabilities in Japan.

LISA: Is Lionbridge going to play a central role in building the Japanese site? What are the main points you are most concerned with for localizing your site into Japanese?

George Lichter: No, Lionbridge won’t be central in localizing the site—we don’t so much as localize our site as understand people’s questions. The site design and the translation of those few words there is fairly trivial. The greater amount of work is in localizing our tools so that editors who are in Japan can link people’s questions with the appropriate answer. And again, we are using local Japanese content to link to. The place where Lionbridge comes in very importantly is, for example, when a Japanese company wants to have us not only provide the navigation and technology for their site in Japanese but they may want to also provide other sites to their products and services in multiple languages. That’s where Lionbridge, acting as the outsource partner, can help that Japanese company put together their Web sites and connect content for French, German, English, etc.

LISA: Nike is one of the Ask Jeeves clients. When Nike Japan wants to implement Ask Jeeves to help its customers ask questions and have answers in Japanese how do you tie these with Ask Jeeves in Nike in the USA?

George Lichter: There are two parts to the answer. The first is the business answer that is it depends whether Nike make business decisions centrally in the USA or decentralizes them into different countries. If Nike US is a centralized operation and they decide they want French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese, they can order up all those languages through Ask Jeeves, and with our partnership with Lionbridge we can build those sites. If it’s a decentralized organization, it could have a country manager in Japan. The Japanese office could make its own decision to go ahead and have a Japanese site—much like the one for the US—constructed for Japan only. In this case Ask Jeeves Japan would contract directly with the local Nike country manager and would contract the site in Japanese based on the requirements the local company manager would put forward in a spec sheet.

LISA: That is, customers define their needs.

George Lichter: We will meet the customer wherever they want to be met, whether centralized or decentralized, or any combination.

LISA: Could you tell us the most uniquely Japanese aspect so far learnt in the process of establishing Ask Jeeves Japan?

George Lichter: The Japanese language uses different character sets and we have to be double-byte enabled, but I tend to think that the most uniquely Japanese aspect is the fact that typing in Japanese is more difficult than typing in English. So we have to take some special considerations of the user interface and how we require the user to enter their queries in order to make it easy as possible for them. Exactly how we do this your readers will see when they visit our site…These are things we are finding more highly relevant to the Japanese culture and market than we have experienced elsewhere.

LISA: How is Ask Jeeves Japan going to differentiate itself from the local competitors?

George Lichter: The same way we always do. That’s from the differentiation of the user experience. Ask Jeeves allows you to ask a question and get an answer in just two clicks and have a high probability that it will be useful because a human has judged the answer to be good, and that, in fact, it is the answer the user wanted to get all along. We are going to differentiate ourselves in this same way. For example, in the UK we launched in February and there were already established competitors well entrenched ahead of us, yet we made our way to the seventh most popular site in the UK. So, we think the same point of differentiation will work, whether we are in the UK or Argentina or in Japan.

LISA: A sound strategy and sticking to it. The origin of Jeeves as an archetypal butler may be lost in Asian markets. Do you expect this to be a hindrance for marketing in Asia?

George Lichter: We had the same question. Does the archetypal butler have any attraction as an icon in Asian markets? First when we did market research we asked “do you know who Jeeves is?” What we found was that people don’t know who Jeeves is but they know what the archetypal butler is. Then we started to ask how they know that. And we found there a point of association from a very surprising source—the American film industry. Over the number of decades, American films—one of our principle exports have made their ways to Japanese market—there have been representations of butlers in a number of high-profile films. The most recent one that comes to mind has been “Bat Man”. The butler there is Alfred. But Alfred is understood. What he represents is understood.

We also compared this icon and what the symbol might mean to some of the more indigenous local symbols. There was a monk that had similar brand attributes that we have with Jeeves. That’s Ikkyu-san… When we looked at the brand attributes they were very similar: thoughtful, reserved, intelligent, helpful, friendly—but then we looked at the issue of trying to get global brand built and we looked at the fact that people already understood through American and British television and film what the butler was, we said we were OK. Certainly there are other examples of brands that somehow stuck even though they certainly wouldn’t have begun to have relevance in the Japanese market. I give two very disparate examples—Mickey Mouse and the Colonel from Kentucky Fried Chicken. So we think there are pluses and minuses, but on balance, thanks to the movie industry, we think we can do OK here.

Jeeves is all about humanizing the online experience. If we find that anything we do doesn’t help the user do what they want then we are simply not going to continue with it. We all about meeting the user—whether a corporate customer or a consumer on the Web site—where she or he sits.

LISA: How important are the Asia-Pacific markets in general for your company on a long term basis?

George Lichter: Let me site some statistics. Various forecasts have indicated that Japan and China are going to represent 70% of the total Asia-Pacific market and a significant percentage of the overall Internet population. As non-English languages become more prevalent on the Internet, Jeeves needs to be relevant on those languages as well. The Internet was at one point primarily in the United States and primarily in English. We’ve seen some wonderfully graphic charts which show a graphical representation based on the size of the countries represent a portion of the Internet population over the period of time. In 1999, the US was represented as huge. In 2001 it was a lot smaller, Europe was larger, Asia was larger and you look to 2005 the United States has shrunk down to be a minority of the Internet population. Globalization as a rule is an imperative for all companies, but in the information age and in an environment such as the Internet, imperative is not strong enough a word—one cannot imagine a business model which does not take into account the Asia-Pacific region.