Software That Will This Sentence Fix

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Users are enthusiastic. Tel Aviv corporate lawyer Nir Geva, for instance, spends much of his time behind his computer drawing up complex legal documents in English. Though his English is good he is not a native speaker. Yet he needs to sound authoritative and as professional as possible. Before he began using an early version of WhiteSmoke a year and a half ago, Geva says he spent hours on each document consulting the dictionary and thesaurus and proofreading his copy. "Now, in just one click the software does all the necessary checking, and more importantly, it improves the quality of my legal writing," Geva says.

Other early adopters came from elsewhere in the Israeli legal and high-tech community, where English is often the preferred language of communication. "With e-mailing crucial to my consulting business, the software has given me a lot more confidence with my English writing," says Vered Farber, CEO of Japan Knowledge, a Tel Aviv-based consulting firm for local companies looking to penetrate the Japanese market. Farber was so impressed with the software that she is working on a distribution deal for the Japanese market.

Aiming for Asian Markets

Perhaps the biggest surprise to WhiteSmoke's founders was their success in the U.S. Ovil-Brenner attributes it, in part, to Internet advertising on sites like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) and to easy downloads of the software, which costs $79 for a basic package and $250 for an "executive" version with specialized language modules for medical, legal, and creative writing. But she also says there's an increased focus in the U.S. on good writing skills—which could be a polite way of saying that Americans lack confidence in their ability to communicate and use WhiteSmoke as a quality check. Versions of the software are available that support both American and British English.

Now WhiteSmoke is turning its sights to the huge—and mostly non-native-English-speaking—markets of China and India. Ovil-Brenner says the company is studying several possible business models and will likely sell through distributors, given that software markets in both countries are still immature. WhiteSmoke will focus its marketing on the business sector, owing to the relatively high cost of the product. At the same time the company is beefing up its efforts in Europe and is negotiating a deal with AOL to offer a simplified version of the software program on ICQ. The latter could improve the quality of communication among global users of instant messaging.

The Internet is steadily becoming less Anglocentric, but English is likely to remain the dominant online and business language for the foreseeable future. To that end, Ovil-Brenner's vision is to see WhiteSmoke help billions of people understand each other better. So far, she's off to a fast start.

Sandler is a correspondent for BusinessWeek in Jerusalem .