Talking shop

2:08pm Thursday 27th March 2008

Planning the best moment to start a new business venture is never easy, but Sean and Nicole Hargrave have impeccable timing. Their company, Voxswap, has been launched just weeks before the birth of their third child, due on April 4.

Voxswap.com - a social network website for foreign language learners - grew out of Mr Hargrave's efforts to resuscitate his schoolboy German, alongside his professional belief that social networking sites are becoming too huge to be useful for people.

A freelance journalist specialising in new media, he said: "I did German as a subsidiary subject at university, but I didn't do anything with it. Since I work with computers, I was wondering what the best way was to improve my German on the web.

"It struck me that with such a global phenomenon like the Internet, where you interact with lots of people you will never meet, why not have people who can help you to progress in another language, while you help them with your own language?"

The couple, who live in Uffington, used a social network development company to develop a website allowing people to set up profiles stating which language they speak and which they are practising.

They can then browse fellow VoxSwap users so, for example, an English person learning German, can be matched with a German learning English.

The Voxswap site features internal e-mail, chat and forums to get people speaking to one another and allows users to personalise their profiles with video, pictures, tags and further information about themselves.

A virtual keyboard supports multiple languages and there is a built-in Google Translator service and news feeds allowing users to read stories in the language they are practising. Eventually, users will be able to talk and see each other using Skype.

"I am convinced social networking is here to stay, but it needs to have a point," he said.

"There's no benefit in creating long lists of so-called friends and business contacts you never actually meet or contact."

The website is free for users, and the couple aim to make money from advertising and sponsorship.

"We are talking to sponsors for our dictionary and phrase book section, which will have links for people to buy books and recordings.

"At the moment, we have probably got enough traffic for the site to pay for itself. We have 1,600 people already and people are spending about 12 minutes each on the site, which means we can put adverts in front of them."

As for the timing, he said the work was not too difficult for his eight-months pregnant wife, a TV producer.

"We are welcoming people to the site at the moment, so it's not as if she's having to drag cameras around. It's flexible hours, and I'm still carrying on as a freelance journalist."

"We've only been going six weeks, and it looks as if it will be self-supporting in a few months."

o Contact: www.voxswap.com

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