As a truly global company Siemens AG employs a workforce of 430,000 people, working on renowned products in about 190 countries. The global presence of Siemens implies that a large proportion of all employees communicate in languages different from their native tongue. Siemens has developed sophisticated localisation mechanisms and training programmes that focus on English as the unifying corporate language. In this context finnlabs supports Siemens in the field of e-learning. Finnlabs’ engagement at Siemens comprises the development of user centric translation services in order to increase quality, user acceptance and learning effect of a major training initiative by reducing language barriers that training users encounter.

The project that Siemens and finnlabs set up focused on two key aspects. First, finnlabs re-designed the deployed glossary mechanism which plays a key role in Siemens’ corporate knowledge management and training programmes. Definitions and concepts that are used uniformly in every subsidiary across the globe are centrally maintained. Web services give easy access to these definitions from e.g. the Siemens intranet and can be closely embedded in a multitude of training manuals and other educational material. finnlabs united all steps of the glossary content management in one intuitive web interface. Changes can be deployed in real time. Editors are not required to possess technical skills to roll-out changes. Definitions do not have to be hard-coded into training content anymore, which drastically reduces development and maintenance costs. Multiple roles and a clear access concept allow for content design and maintenance in multiple steps.

The second challenge was to reduce language based frictions in the training process. Unfortunately, the most direct approach would be prohibitively expensive: translating all documents into each of the many languages used within Siemens is simply out of reach. finnlabs provides technology driven language solutions that enable a larger set of employees to work confidently with materials in English or German, without being native speakers in either of the two languages. High quality translations of words within the training content are provided for in the user’s native language. Beside company and industry specific vocabulary very extensive general dictionaries are integrated, making sure that users receive support for more basic requests, as well. Employees do not have to leave the training environment but get help in place.

mm1 Consulting & Management is one of the leading consultancies in the telecommunication industry. It has a long history of successfully managing extensive product development projects for major European operators.

In a joint project with mm1, finnlabs designed and prototyped a media management client for Apple’s iPhone platform. The application syncs pictures and other media content between the handheld device and an online media application. The real power of the system lies in its intuitive user interface and its economic use of the handheld’s limited resources. An exceptional small footprint on required bandwidth allows rich services while minimising the strain on the data carrier networks.

PONS GmbH, Stuttgart, is a leading German dictionary publisher and a market leader in language learning products and services. Since 2000, PONS has trusted in finnlabs’ technologies for all their online dictionaries and additional web based language services.

The newest dictionary product launched by finnlabs is the multi-language dictionary platform PONS.eu. The renowned quality print content was enriched and integrated into a high-performance web application, designed to serve millions of queries a day. The system easily scales with demand, insuring PONS against future IT costs. Revenues from higher popularity of its services are not directly eaten up by exploding service costs.

PONS.eu encourages users to contribute their own content. Utilising the web’s crowd intelligence potential is a bold step forward that other established publishing houses are still not daring to take.

Technically, the system’s key feature is the combination of the strengths of different programming languages. Components requiring high-performance like the sophisticated dictionary search are written in Java, giving the system high speed and a low computing power footprint. Services with more extensive functionality but lower performance requirements were realised in Ruby, capitalising on its low development costs. For the seamless intergration of these two different programming languages finnlabs relies on JRuby. With PONS.eu finnlabs has established a reputation for running one of the first high-performance web services based on JRuby world-wide.

The portal Gute Zeiten Schlechte Zeiten caters for the fans of the German soap bearing the same name. Operated by RTL New Media the page’s focus lies on a broad but relatively young and media aware audience.

In its early days finnlabs (still under the old name SiN GmbH) produced a series of animated flash movies featuring school-related topics for the educational section of GZSZ. From the first delicate idea to the final product, finnlabs realised every step in the creative process: writing of the stories, developing the characters, storyboarding, drawing, animation and programming were all done in-house.