Many people at CERN and in other multinational companies in Switzerland struggle to communicate with Swiss people.
Why? Because not everyone in Switzerland speaks English!
Did you ever try calling TPG? They routinely hang up on you if you don't speak French! And lots of people struggle to communicate with their landlord or with the Swiss administration for the same problem.
I want to build an "Uber for translation" app. Let's say you want to talk to your landlord but you only speak English and he only speaks French. With this app, you could instantly contact someone who speaks BOTH English and French and who could help you through the phone.
On the other hand, if you speak multiple languages, you could signup to help people who need language assistance.
The system could work with "credits", for example if I help someone to translate from German to English for 30min then I would "earn" 30min of translation in any language of my choice. Or it could be completely free and we let people self-regulate.
I fully believe we can have a workable prototype by the end of the weekend, potentially with some nice ads to stick around CERN.
Developers to make a quick prototype (I'm a dev myself).
People with good language and communication skills to express the idea in a way that is easy to understand.
Artists who could make it look good.
Mostly laptops to write code and smartphone to use for development purpose.
I started working on this idea at the beginning of the year, but didn't have enough time to develop/market it properly: http://saffron.ch/