The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for global startups.
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Take Babelverse co-founder Mayel de Borniol. He calls himself a “glomad,” which means a world traveler with no fixed address. Officially he’s a French citizen, but he prefers not to even think of himself as a citizen of anywhere — not even a “citizen of the world.”
That goes a long way to explaining the origins of Babelverse, which aims to be the universal translator of sci-fi lore. But instead of relying on machine translation, it relies on a network of human translators around the world. de Borniol and co-founder Josef Dunne, who is originally from the United Kingdom, came up with the idea while they were both living and working in Greece. Because they faced language barriers while living and traveling abroad, they found themselves calling friends on the phone to translate. That made them realize that they could build a translation app based on people instead of algorithms.
Two founders from different countries who speak different languages is exactly the sort of post-geographic collaboration that we’d hope to see happen thanks to the web. But the company’s post-geographic tendencies have caused them some trouble. . . (READ MORE)
Article by: Klint Finley
Published by: techcrunch.com
