LUDO-VIC

PROBLEMS ADDRESSED & PROPOSED SOLUTION 

We create multi-lingual  e-Learning solutions, based on 3D animations, to solve the daunting task of teaching basic concepts when the learner does not understand, or read, the national language(s), whatever they may be. These 3D animations combine the verbal and non-verbal, language and culture.
Our financing requirement is to include talking chatbots in order to enhance the “User eXperience”. This will contribute to the increase of the interaction with the learner, thus its interest in the solution, strengthening its implication and raising the success rate of this training. Generally speaking, it will enhance the uniqueness of the solution offered by LUDO-VIC, and therefore reinforce its competitiveness. 

Our innovation is based on producing a more powerful solution, which does away with the “wall of words” both in their written and oral forms. The elements which constitute the concept to be acquired are presented in the form of 3D animations which showcase two avatars: Ludo (male) and Vic (female), who were designed so as to not discriminate against any physical characteristics of any population on Earth, and to promote equality between the sexes. 

Using 3D animations allows to include the non-verbal, a very significant element of the communications process in transmitting a message. That is the reason why both characters have oversized heads, so that emotions that are expressed on their faces can be better visualized. These 3D animations also allow the combination of learning a language to learning the culture of its speakers, by transcribing situations from one language to the other. For example, your body language when introducing yourself in Japanese is definitely different than that in French…

At a minimum, the instructions for the course are pronounced in the learner’s mother tongue, and the avatars in the animations also speak that language ( except if the concept to be acquired is another language, in which case the avatars speak in that new language). 

Example from an animation explaining the « broken window theory » in social housing

FUND RAISING

We wish to raise 40 000€ in funds to introduce functionalities in Artificial Intelligence , such as  « Adaptive Learning » or oral chatbots.

Return on investment

In exchange for your investment, you will receive on a quaterly basis  2.1% of Ludo-Vic’s Revenues, over a period of 5 years. 

Details of financing needs

STRUCTURE

LUDO-VIC is a “Société par Actions Simplifiée” created in December 2016, with a capital of 50 500€. It is represented by  Jacques-Olivier ( aka Jack ) AMBERG who owns  70% of the shares, and his family the remainder.

                                                                                HISTORY 2016-2018

LUDO-VIC at first  targeted the social housing sector in France, given the prohibitive cost of incivilities. The federation regrouping all the social housing players ( https://www.union-habitat.org/ ) gave us a grant late 2017, and our second client was the social housing entity Emmaüs-Habitat; which asked us to develop a multilingal e-Learning course on the scourge of bedbugs.

Our first client was the “Conseil Régional d’Ile de France” ( Greater Paris Area Council ) which granted us in the fall of 2017 with 70 000€ de develop an e-Learning product that would teach basic Englisn for the Hotel-Restaurant-Tourism industry to students who had left school without any degree.  

In 2018, TOTAL ( the French Energy conglomerate ) took us into their Incubator and asked us to create a prototype to teach the safety rules for working at height in several languages ( English, French, Wolof, Peul, Yoruba and Ibo ).

We were also selected by the City of Paris to develop an eLearning content to teach Basic French to the migrant population residing in the North-East quarter of Paris, in order to facilitate their integration and their employability.

LUDO-VIC has the following mission statement :

« Whatever your mother tongue or your level of schooling, learn the basics of any concept : a new language, a behavior, safety procedures, etc… »

IMPACTS  ON THE ECONOMY

We will participate in local economic development by employing 10 people in the next three years, aiming at men and women, former migrants, who master their mother tongue  plus at least one other. Their goal will be to « train the trainers », targeting non-national-language-speakers in France and abroad. The number of jobs created as a result of the increased employability of the learners is difficult to quantify at this stage, but is a major goal for teaching the basics of the national language(s), starting with French in France.

We promote innovation through partnerships with several labs of the French « Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique » which are targeting new learning solutions : a robotics lab to create talking avatars ( orally interactive chabots ) and a linguistics lab which will explore the impact of emotions on the characters’ faces on empowering the message explaining the element of the concept.

We optimize the economic model by promoting « tariff equalization » between the users operating in government-funded local entities, and corporate clients. Thus nonprofit clients willl pay less than the corporate or individual ones, with an access to very similar content.

SOCIAL IMPACTS

Our first clients are already very representative of the social impacts resulting from the use of solutions developed by LUDO-VIC :

The Conseil Régional d’Ile de France ( the « Greater Paris » governmental entity ) has asked LUDO-VIC to create a strictly online course to teach the basics of English in the Tourism-Hotel-Restaurant industry, targeting young adults who have left the schooling system with no degree whatsoever. This population is however quite internet-savvy and owns generally both a PC and a smartphone. These adults represent a huge employment potential in a booming sector in the Greater Paris area.

The social landlord Emmaüs-Habitat has asked LUDO-VIC to create a course to educate its tenants on the scourge known as « bedbugs ». This course will be multilingual, given that 15% of tenants in the social housing sector are not French speakers, and 7% are illiterate.

The TOTAL Group  wants to develop courses to teach the basic safety rules & regulations in the petro-chemical sector, to be accessible in their refineries across the world, the largest of which is located in Saudi Arabia, with personnel originating from several South-East Asian countries.

The e-Learning courses developed for both latter clients are immediately exportable to other linguistic areas. They will participate in the employability of learners and their integration into the social fabric by the acquisition of local mores.

LUDO-VIC proposes the most universal way of educating learners to basic concepts.

RETRO PLANNING OF THE PROJECT

MARKET, CLIENTS & POSITIONING

Ludo-Vic differs from its competition by addressing orally, in the corresponding mother tongue,  the learner,  and by using 3D characters who explain, both in verbal and non-verbal mode, the elements of the notion to be acquired.  These 3D characters are acting out animations played in the mother tongue, according to the corresponding cultural gestures. It’s an online training process which will complement the « classroom » sessions taught by local educational players. Integrating 1st, 2nd & 3rd generation migrant populations in Europe 

Regarding the market for services to integrate  migrant populations, LUDO-VIC is positioned as a supplier of truly multi-lingual tools, aiming at local associations, often funded by local government entities, based in France, in Europe and in the countries which are a source of migrants.

In France, about 40,000 newcomers to the country per year have to undergo a form of basic training in French, for a total migrant population of 3.6 millions (in 2014).
In Europe, the number of migrants is approximately of 35 millions, growing by one million per year.
In the world, there are 250 million inter-country migrants, and 750 million intra-country

Our clients are public sector entities, either at a local, regional or national level, which subsidize civil society actors that are tasked with teaching the national language(s).

Preventing incivility in the social housing sector There are in France 4.8 million social housing  units,for a total of 11 million tenants, of which over 10% don’t speak French and around 7% are illiterate.

The cost of incivilities is outrageous, and LUDO-VIC could reduce it simply by training the tenants on the rules and regulations of “better living together”, which most probably were never presented to a large portion of the tenants because they could not understand French, and not for their lack of goodwill ! the “Union Sociale pour l’Habitat” , the federation regrouping the ca. 800 players in the social housing industry, awarded LUDO-VIC with some funding to create a first prototype.

Market for Professional training LUDO-VIC can create mutli-lingual training tools which run on a smartphone, all the while operating in an e-Learning environment, which allows management to obtain a “helicopter-vision” of the training process, and thus target some actions to enhance the results shown in the training. For instance, the Professional Cleaning Services sector represents ca. 500 000 employees in France, of which 40% have no degrees and 15% don’t speak French.

A common factor between these various markets is that they are trans-national. As there are ca. 400 languages spoken within the European Union, spread more or less evenly amongst the member countries. A training course created for security procedures in the professional cleaning services industry targeting non-French speaking employees is immediately exportable to Germany simply by adding German to the existing tens of languages already available in the training. 

 SALES STRATEGY

• An e-Learning training represents an operating cost of ca. 25€ per learner per year. Public pricing in either B2C or B2B modes will be computed by adding a margin on that operating cost.
• LUDO-VIC will develop a catalog of trainings pertaining to a variety of fields. Each of these trainings will be available in a number of languages that will grow in time. Ludo-Vic will create client-specific e-Learning clouds and will “train the trainers” at its clients.
• A “User Club” will be created to participate in the steering of future developments
• Communications & sales strategies will vary as a function of the targets :
• – “viral” for the development of our Customer base in the diasporas
• – “scalable”: the multilingual contents of each trainings are usable in other countries.

RESOURCES & PARTNERS

• • Resources: We will call upon researchers in linguistics for the Sorbonne University in Paris, and Artificial Intelligence researchers from the labs of the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique of the University of Paris-Jussieu.
  • Our Partners: We are incubated by Impulse Partners which have created a generic incubator service for both the social housing industry as for the main actors of the petrochemical industry in France. As for teaching basic French to non-French speaking communities in the North-Eastern quadrant of Paris, we work with local associations which were recommended to us by the Paris City Hall. 

DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL 

• The overall outlook for LUDO-VIC lies both in geographical and functional expansion, more particularly for safety procedures in large industrial sectors. 
• Our ambition is to become a major player for governmental entities in Europe which deal with problems arising from immigration, and for multinational groups which must insure the well-being and safety of their employees, be they direct or indirect. 

 Jacques-Olivier Amberg is the founder and president of LUDO-VIC. After having created an international executive seach company dedicated to the IT suppliers industry – company which he managed for 2 years, combined with a “business angel” actvity in Europe since 1995, J.O. Amberg has drawn the conclusion that “communicating in the other person’s tongue is paramount”. He became involved in the social and solidarity-oriented world in order to return to society what it had given him in the past in terms of opportunities in his international career. He is a member of the Mouvement des Entrepreneurs Sociaux and of the Groupement National des Initiatives et Acteurs Citoyens.   

Our first employees are :

Paul, a young PhD in English which has decided to quit the perfectly laid-out path ahead of him in the French Education System, to deal with people who are really interested in acquiring a new language!

Sofia, a Masters in Language Didactics with a long experience as an educator in the French language within several prominent international suppliers of such online services.

Victoria Amberg, (aka Vic of Ludo-Vic) is our « community manager ».

HISTORY

“Communicating in the other’s tongue”, that’s breaking the “wall of words”, both in their written and oral forms. The use of 3D animations allows to present each component of the overall message to be transmitted, in context.

It all began back in 2006, when Jack Amberg wanted to help his young daughter, Victoria, to learn the correct spelling of words in both English and French. She was in her final year of kindergarten in the British Section of an international school near Paris ( originally created to educate the children of NATO staff in the fifties) which boasts 14 language sections.
The result was a pictionary of about 800 words in 12 languages, the access to which was explained in the learner’s mother tongue. 

After having shown this development to numerous Ministries in France, the project finally took off in 2016-2017 given the acute problems facing France & Europe with the surge of migrants. 

In October 2017, Ludo-Vic was chosen by the “Greater Paris Area” to develop an online course to teach basic English for the Tourism industry, to young adults having left scool without any qualifications. 
In December 2017, a social landlord asked Ludo-Vic to create a course relative to bedbugs which have become a real problem in the Paris area.
In April 2018, the City of Paris agreed to allocate European Funds to a project presented by Ludo-Vic, teaching basic French to the former migrants living in Paris’ North-East quadrant, many of which do not speak French well enough in order to successfully integrate or get jobs. 
Finally, in May 2018, Ludo-Vic was selected with six other start-ups to integrate an Incubator programme set up by Total, Vinci, Eiffage, Air Liquide, Solvay et Oreno , targeting increased security in the petrochemical industry. 

As a “proof of concept” for the French Ministry of Education, an App for iPhones & iPads was developed which allowed to learn about numbers from 1 to 999 999 999 , in close to 120 languages. The explanatory videos in each of these languages can be seen on my  YouTube channel ( 12Ndemo ) , and it has its own Facebook page. This App was sold and downloaded around the world between 2012 et 2014, but the revenues generated did not cover the costs incurred to insure a satisfactory “User Experience” whatever the country of the buyer.

A last aside: as the project was initially named Vic’s Games, the interest shown by the French Home Office for a better French-sounding name resulted in Ludo-Vic ( Ludo = I play in latin), to keep the “serious game” touch to the solution. Moreover, Ludovic as a first name takes a number of forms such as Ludwig, Lodewijk, Louis, Ludovico, Luigi, Luis, Lewis, etc.. reinforcing the inherent character of LUDO-VIC as a “transcriber of situations”™ .

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