Ask Jeeves sets up in Japan
Ask Jeeves Japan will also launch a Japanese version of Ask Jeeves at Ask.com, giving Japan's more than 28 million Internet users access to a powerful natural-language question answering service designed to meet the specific needs and interests of Japanese users. With Ask Jeeves Japan, Ask Jeeves positions itself as a market leader in three major continents: Europe, Latin America and Asia, and the top three global Internet markets, the United States, UK and Japan.
Consistent with Ask Jeeves' global strategy of leveraging expert industry knowledge and local relevance, Ask Jeeves Japan is a strategic partnership with one of the market's most established and renowned corporations. Japan's advanced business-to-business market presents an enormous opportunity for Ask Jeeves' e-commerce and e-support solutions.
Forrester Research predicts that Japanese business-to-business trade will increase from $29 billion to $817 billion in the next four years. By partnering with TransCosmos, an established leader in the CRM and call center markets, Ask Jeeves Japan will gain immediate access to a highly qualified network of corporate customers. Ask Jeeves' industry-proven targeting, e-commerce and e-support solutions that have helped more than 115 corporations increase sales, decrease support costs and gain valuable customer information, will now help Japanese companies increase the returns on their online initiatives.
"We believe that the combination of Ask Jeeves' award-winning natural language technologies and human insight will soon become the standard for companies worldwide." "Through this partnership, Ask Jeeves Japan has the opportunity to bring Ask Jeeves' high-performance e-commerce and e-support solutions to a customer base of more than 600 leading Japanese companies," said George Lichter, president of Ask Jeeves International. "By combining Ask Jeeves' technology and expertise in answering people's questions with TransCosmos' established position and extensive customer base, we plan to deliver the highest quality services to the Japanese market together."
By creating a country and language-specific version of Ask.com, Ask Jeeves Japan will enable consumers to more easily find information, products and services, and will tap into more than $32 billion in e-commerce sales annually. "Complemented by TCI's understanding of the Japanese consumer, the easy-to-use, intuitive interface that more than 11 million unique visitors use in the United States will soon be made available to Japanese Internet users in their native language with locally relevant content," added Lichter. Japan is second only to the United States in number of Internet users per capita. "By extending the capabilities of our natural language question answering technologies to support Japanese, we are taking an important step in enriching our platform to operate in the global marketplace," said Claudio Pinkus, chief operating officer of Ask Jeeves International. "Using the same Unicode-enabled foundation that is now being fine-tuned for the Japanese language, we plan to offer other Asian language solutions in the near future." Ask Jeeves International and TransCosmos own equal stakes in Ask Jeeves Japan.
Ask Jeeves Japan is Ask Jeeves' third joint venture, following Ask Jeeves UK and Ask Jeeves en Espanol.