Canada's Intertainment Media Inc. (TSX Venture: INT; Bulletin Board: ITMTF; DAX: I4T) subsidiary Ortsbo Inc. will acquire 25% of Lexifone Communications Ltd. for C$2 million in shares, including C$500,000 over the next two years, from Haifa's hiCenter incubator.
Lexifone provides live voice real time speech translation based on its proprietary generic software platform, which statistically optimizes voice data, in conjunction with its learning based linguistic and semantic translation. A Lexifone user calls a geographically local Lexifone number, selects the language and speaks into the phone in his or her native tongue. The speech is then repeated back over the phone in the chosen translation language. Lexifone will also offer direct connection applications to mobile, portable, VoIP and other Internet devices, making it easy and simple for users to engage in voice to voice translation.
Lexifone was founded in 2010 and is run by Dr. Ike Sagie, a former scientist and senior manager at IBM research laboratories and co-founder of Attunity Inc. (Bulletin Board: ATTUF). The company has raised $500,000 to date and has five employees. The company will use the proceeds from Intertainment for hiring and sales and marketing.
Ortsbo offers real-time conversational translation in over 50 languages through popular social media platforms. It currently has 40 million subscribers.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 4, 2011
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