Michael Smolens

CEO, Founder, dotSUB

Removing Language as a Barrier to Cross Cultural Communication Using the Crowd

The Tower of Babel has existed for thousands of years, preventing people and cultures, as they expanded across the oceans, to communicate their desires, fears, tell their stories, or get to know each other deeply and emotionally. This lack of understanding has been a major contributor to hatred, war, mass killings and a total lack of global co-operation to solve the ever more complex world issues.

As bandwidth penetration becomes ubiquitous, as its costs continue to decrease following Moore's law, and the costs and ease of use of shooting, editing, storing and distributing video move toward simple and free, video is rapidly becoming a new way of story telling and communicating. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth?
This talk will address the important role of language across all areas of human and technology evolution as AI and crowd sourcing become pervasive is everything.

Michael Smolens had for the first 32 years of his career set up manufacturing facilities doing business in and with high-risk countries including Haiti, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Jordan, Russia and Azerbaijan, creating in excess of 20,000 jobs and directly supporting the livelihood of more than 100,000 people.
During that time, he developed a practical understanding and appreciation for the profound differences of the world's cultures – and the major roadblock language presented to cross cultural understanding.
The idea of dotSUB was germinated after viewing the film “Fahrenheit 911.” Michael realized that if one documentary film in English ‘might’ have an impact on a very close US Presidential election, what would happen if all independent and documentary films, television programming and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages.

Since its alpha launch in 2007, he has tried to bring the concept of ‘language’ onto the radar screens of media, entertainment and all types and sizes of companies, organizations and users of video – who have traditionally been highly ‘English-centric’.

dotSUB™ is a revenue generating, global market leading, technology/media company, whose browser-based platform enables web video, in any digital format, to be viewed in multiple languages on any video enabled platform, player or device, soon to include mobile. The video can then be indexed, searched and monetized in any language, as well as be used to build global brand awareness and engage audiences across cultures.