UPDATE

MBITA's new corporate sponsor A Way With Words (AWWW)/Tacitus Group offers a range of outsourced marketing services that help build value for your enterprise. From global strategy definition to corporate brand development to integrated public relations and advertising, AWWW can give your business the marketing expertise to thrive and succeed in the international marketplace. Founded in 1994, AWWW has grown rapidly to offer clients a full range of marketing services. They are experienced in a variety of industries, from Hospitality to Information Technology.

Even in a booming economy it doesn't always make sense to spend the time and money needed to hire, train and manage a marketing department. A Way With Words can provide any of your marketing and public relations needs at 50-to-75% less than the cost of a full-time marketing department without adding headcount and with staff working at 100% productivity (compared to an industry average of about 40%).



You get a team of seasoned marketing professionals - MBAs from top business schools, PR and Advertising executives from major agencies, and award-winning graphic designers. They take a "back-to-basics" approach - no extravagant marketing campaigns, just focused projects to build awareness, position your products and increase sales.

How do they provide a full range of marketing services at such a dramatic cost saving? AWWW's business model reflects an in-depth understanding of the new global economy. They serve as a virtual agency for an unlimited number of freelance marketing and strategy professionals - gifted people who don't want to work for big agencies. That's why they're called "creative e-lancers". Once clients' needs are identified they quickly build teams to deliver the best solutions at the most competitive price. Guaranteed. And unlike other consulting firms or PR agencies, they have minimal overheads, so you're not paying for extravagant offices or partners' expense account lunches.

AWWW's Tacitus unit provides strategic and tactical marketing, particularly for companies seeking business development in the international marketplace. Led by Dr. Tim Ashby, a former senior US Commerce Department official, the Tacitus core team of professionals average fifteen years of experience, have worked for major strategy firms such as Ernst & Young, Boston Consulting Group and Arthur Andersen, and are MBA graduates of Stanford, Harvard, Wharton and the University of Edinburgh. Each team member has global or industry vertical expertise in a variety of areas including Telecommunications, Travel/Tourism, Financial Services and Internet Commerce.

Tacitus offers the following services:

• Market sizing
• Segmentation analysis
• Positioning
• Channel Development
• Key messages and differentiation
• Brand identity
• Exporting and importing
• Financing exports
• Export transactions
• International corporate and product launches

AWWW/Tacitus' major clients include: Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Caldera, Cisco Systems, Lotus, Oracle WebTV Network, NASA, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Seagate, Reebok, Fujitsu and Bucci Sunglasses. AWWW/Tacitus is currently offering MBITA members a 10 percent discount on any marketing and strategy services.

A Way With Words/Tacitus
Elizabeth Bourget, President
5525 Scotts Valley Dr., Suite 18
Scotts Valley, CA 95066
PH 831/430-9719
FAX 831/439-0873
web: www.awaywwords.com
email: info@awaywwords.com

MBITA New Members:
McGibben International and Animated Speech Corporation

McGibben International

MBITA is pleased to announce the addition of its newest member, McGibben International.

The ABC news show, Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer, featured Baldi on their March 2001 broadcast (see http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/primetime.html). The show introduced Baldi and demonstrated how this educational paradigm and revolutionary technology is helping children with hearing loss obtain the gift of speech. The show generated over 400 email inquiries asking how to purchase Baldi and the educational modules based on him. However, Baldi currently resides within a complex research environment that restricts the scope of distribution of the technology and hampers Baldi's ability to help a large number of children. The goal of Animated Speech Corporation (the "Company") is to leverage this pent up demand and commercialize Baldi and its associated technologies. There is a significant need for language learning pedagogy and technology.

Baldi at work in the classroom

The Tucker-Maxon Oral School ("Tucker-Maxon"), has integrated Baldi into their classrooms and curriculum for the past 4 years to teach profoundly deaf children speech and other language skills. One of the most successful applications is a Vocabulary Wizard and Tutor, which the Company will evaluate, enhance and commercialize.

Based on the research and success at Tucker-Maxon, Baldi has also been used as a teaching tool for other groups of people, such as the autistic and dyslexic populations, where visible speech enhances the learning of reading, speech and other language skills. The following are representative examples of Baldi's use with these additional groups:

The technology

Many researchers consider the Company's talking head, dubbed "Baldi" by the kids who first used him, the most accurate talking head in the world. His facial animation simulates real speech and can be precisely controlled in real-time. When he reads or speaks, his facial movements and emotions finely mirror real speech and emotions. As documented in his book, Perceiving Talking Faces (MIT Press, 1998), both novices and expert lip readers have been able to speech read Baldi and his visible speech has been shown to contribute to speech perception and understanding.

Animated tutors can be programmed to be patient with learners and never become angry, tired or bored. Applications with animated tutors perceived as supportive and likeable will engage foreign language and ESL learners, reading impaired, autistic and other children with special needs in face-to-face computerized lessons.

The technology underlying Baldi enables him to:

Read (with text to speech synthesis or prerecorded speech) stories, lessons, Speak, give instructions and provide feedback, Recognize speech, and Engage in conversational dialog.

The company's products will be targeted to the reading, language and speech pathology markets. In partnership with content providers, the Company will build its own comprehensive portfolio of animated tutors, exercises, lessons stories and books. The Company's revolutionary approach will empower teachers, reading tutors, speech therapists and parents to customize any story or lesson to the student's exact requirements. Using the Company's authoring wizards, teachers and therapists can directly access and edit any content accessible through the Company's lesson player. Given our text-to-speech technology, our animated characters will be able to read the content and administer the lessons as edited. Teachers will be able to build or modify content to meet each student's needs, adjusting sentence and question structures, vocabulary, and story complexity as required.

The Company will also enable teachers and therapists to personalize the tutors through a library of characters .The Company's proprietary technology enables the Company to "morph" Baldi - change his wire frame and texture -- to look like any person or any another animated character. In addition to highly personalizing the tutors, this technology enables our highly accurate and controllable animated speech technology to morph into nearly any 3-dimensional character. We will build engaging characters with a wide variety of features such as gender, age, and ethnicity and make it possible to incorporate those animated agents into other products.

Benefits of The Company's Technology

There are many benefits that flow from the animated speech technology. The most important benefits from the standpoint of the business are:

Cost effective learning

Greatly reduced learning time for speech, language and pronunciation Extends the impact of teachers and therapists by enabling highly customized lessons for each child Super-additive" learning by using the face and the voice Guided, adaptive instruction quickly reaches the learning "sweet spot" Real time assessment of student progress enables teachers to fine tune learning program. Engaging, non judgmental "talking head" encourages interaction and learning Reduces the cost of adding facial animation to educational and other applications

Elimination of tedious manual speech animation methods for many types of applications Lowers the cost of building customized learning materials

The Company is concentrating on licensing and commercializing the Baldi technology through a highly focused plan that is designed to generate early revenue. When funding and cash flow increases and as the Company obtains more and more market feedback, the Company will move from phase-to-phase, adjusting the plan from time-to-time. The Company is currently working on the

For more information on Animated Speech Corporation, email massaro@fuzzy.ucsc.edu

Technology as a Key Resource for International Trade

By Andrea Peiro

The trend towards globalization and the recent opening of new foreign markets to U.S. goods and services are providing small and medium American enterprises with unprecedented opportunities to expand their operations and fuel growth.



Small businesses are though traditionally inhibited to develop operations away from the safe and sound U.S. soil. This is mostly due to the perception of high risk involved, and mostly to the fear that developing foreign operations would require substantial resources, both in terms of funding and I terms of human effort. Providing that it is true that developing remote operations requires a non-indifferent level of effort, it is also true that there are very many ways to reduce the cost, the risk and the business strength required to succeed.

Many of these ways make extensive use of modern Information Technologies to facilitate the task of establishing and running remote operations.

A first example is videoconferencing. This relatively old technology has today reached a very good level of maturity from multiple standpoints: very contained development and maintenance costs, high quality, high reliability and high flexibility. With a very limited investment any small business can install a videoconference system to connect daily with its office in Taiwan, at a small fraction of the cost of an airline ticket. After the September 11 tragedy, small and large businesses have rediscovered the power of videoconferencing, and are making it the new standard approach to remote business communications.

Another example of how technology facilitates the foreign expansion of small companies is the quick growth of business-to-business (b2b) global eCommerce, thanks to which American businesses can directly compete in foreign markets without necessarily having a physical presence abroad. B2b global eCommerce represents an outstanding opportunity for smaller businesses to dramatically expand their market with very limited investments. eCommerce has in fact the prerogative of smoothening the playing field by presenting the business players almost exclusively for their intrinsic operating characteristics: quality of their products, prices, capability to deliver, etc.

To help smaller business understand and adopt information technologies, including the ones to facilitate the extension into foreign markets, the federal government and the State of California have developed within the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) network an initiative called Technology Advisory Program (TAP). This new program is designed to provide small businesses with complimentary high-quality technology consulting services to help them improve their operations and increase their chances to succeed.

TAP has recently entered a partnership with MBITA to provide members and qualifying businesses with customized technology services to facilitate international trade operations. To learn more about the program you can do so online www.sbdctap.com. TAP can also be reached via email at info@sbdctap.com, or by phone at (408) 494-0212.

Andrea Peiro is the Director of the Technology Advisory program. He has spent years studying small businesses, how they operate, and how they use technology to succeed. Andrea is also the Managing Editor of the Small Business Technology Review. He can be reached at andrea@sbdctap.com.

GLOBAL eCommerce From The Small Business Perspective

Sponsors, Partners, & Affiliates