Pingar launches into Chinese market

Following on from a company re-launch and the launch of its new application programming interface (API), Pingar continued its penetration into the Chinese market with the unveiling of its two Chinese language portals and its new Hong Kong office.

The announcement comes after two years' work to crack the market, said CEO and co-founder of the Microsoft start-up accelerator partner, Peter Wren-Hilton and followed on the heels of the company's Chinese language search technology launched in July last year at the Shanghai World Expo.

"You could say that two years' work came to fruition today.  So today's the first day we've actually been able to say to the world, 'This is what Pingar can offer'."

What this was, he said, was the Chinese release of the API.

What it does
An API  allows software programmes to ‘talk’ to each other to perform certain functions, and the English language version was presented in March at the Sydney Microsoft SharePoint Conference.  The Pingar API works on any platform and allows a company's existing software to work with Pingar's data analysis and search technology, to manage and review large amounts of documents, web-pages, emails, news –- in short, any kind of text.

And with the two Chinese language portals, one in traditional Chinese, used primarily in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and simplified Chinese, used in China, the open software aims to crack the Asian market. 

The Chinese release of the API includes tools that understand the meanings of different groupings and combinations of Chinese characters, which was not essential for the English API.  However in Chinese, no full stops are used. 

"In China, there is no such thing as a full stop, so you get lines and lines of characters.  The challenge for us was to identify how we could develop an algorithm that would recognise concepts and meanings form lines and lines of text," said Mr Wren-Hilton. 

This was achieved, he said, through the development of a component called segmentation, which took nine months and is "quite unique." All up, the Chinese release of the API took just over two years, said Mr Wren-Hilton and included signing a research memorandum of understanding in October with East China Normal University and talks with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Censorship not a problem
Mr Wren-Hilton said government censorship was not an issue, since the company believed most major government departments and companies would access the enterprise API, which would sit within their fire wall and thus have passed through censorship already.

"Therefore the only data they'd be looking at is data within their own organisations. They're not going out onto the web, so the target really is for governments and companies to interrogate internal data." 

Mr Wren-Hilton said the decision to target the Chinese market was threefold; traditional competitors from US markets were not welcome in China, due to political reasons, New Zealand's Free Trade agreements with China, and the scale of the market.

"It's such a huge market, which, in this particular area of technology, there hasn't been a lot of progress in China so we believe there is a huge opportunity for us to build quite a significant market quite quickly."

Last month, Tauranga- and Auckland-based Pingar had already raised over $3 million from a small number of private investors.  It also received more than $300,000 from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and $100,000 from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (now part of the Ministry of Science and Innovation).

Things to come
The new office in Cyberport, Hong Kong opened this week and is headed by Mark Lunt, a former chairman of gen-i.  Mr Lunt will build the Pingar team in the region and has international operations management experience to the company.

Pingar first demonstrated its Chinese language search technology in July at the Shanghai World Expo.  For the future, Pingar is planning to roll out French, German and Spanish APIs and portals, said Mr Wren-Hilton, with Japanese and Arabic following in time.  Pingar will also be releasing new components for the Chinese language API concurrently and expanding its development and research staff in New Zealand.

The English API has been picked up "far beyond our expectations," said Mr Wren-Hilton, and Pingar were following up with a number of potential partners, with results to be released soon.