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A subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) markets the PlayStation (PS) family of products and develops, publishes, markets, and distributes software for the PS 1 console and the PS 2 computer entertainment system. Additionally, SCEA has developed and currently manages a global online gaming network for its PlayStation 2 console. In the five years since its introduction, Sony has shipped more than 100 million PlayStation 2 units worldwide.
www.us.playstation.com
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Every month, PlayStation 2's online network draws millions of users from across a wide range of demographics, bringing together players of varying ages and cultural backgrounds. Once in the system, users generate their own screen names, input titles for their games, and can communicate with fellow players via text messaging. All this text is potentially visible to the entire online community, creating the need for a way to monitor these lines of text and filter out anything vulgar or that wouldn't be considered family-friendly. "We want to work with teams that can help us protect our users from any of the normal Internet badness that you get on PCs," says Glen Van Datta, director of online technology, SCEA.
VENDOR OF CHOICE: TERAGRAM CORPORATION
Founded in 1997, Teragram Corporation has grown to be a leader in multilingual natural language processing technologies. "The name of the company reflects our mission," says Yves Schabes, president and co-founder of Teragram. "Gram reflects something written down. Tera refers to a large scale. Ergo, we are a provider of linguistic technology that works at an extremely large scale."
Teragram's customers include such Web giants as Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com; major publishing companies and news organizations like the New York Times, Elsevier, and Forbes.com; and major corporations like HP, Toshiba, and SCEA. Teragram's business is split into two separate but interrelated halves. "The company has two assets. One is our dictionaries that we write and maintain in more than 30 languages. The other half is writing software that uses those dictionaries at a very large scale, using a lot of patternmatching and trying to get at the meaning of the words," says Schabes.
www.teragram.com
THE PROBLEM IN DEPTH
PlayStation 2's online network gives its users the opportunity to play against others from across the country and...