ViKi.com, Singapore based startup, is making international TV and movies more accessible to world-wide audiences via crowd-sourced sub-titling - in approximately 160 languages. Yes, even Klingon.
ViKi acquires the rights to programs, uploads them to viki.com and then leverages the power of its translator community. These willing translators provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies to the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.
According to TechCrunch.com, ViKi is attracting around 8.5 million unique visitors with approximately 36 million visits per month, representing a four-fold increase over the past year.
Last week Hari Sreenivasan the Director of Digital Partnerships at PBS and at PBS NewsHour correspondent appeared at a special event hosted by Seattle’s KCTS 9 public television station. Held a stone’s throw from the Space Needle–Seattle’s iconic architectural monument to progress–at the small station’s studios, this was a special event for students in the University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program and was followed by an interview and event with station donors.
A video of highlights from the conversation with MCDM students and a complete transcript are available on the KCTS 9 website.
According to Sreenivasan, who is a proponent of the growing “slow news” movement, “The value of breaking news is going down faster than you can post it.” Read more…
The Occupy Seattle protests reached a milestone on Saturday afternoon with their estimated numbers reaching close to 3000. Saturday’s protest activities included the movement’s “Night of 500 Tents” where protestors set up tents in a direct challenge to the city’s stated commitment to evict campers from the park after 10:00pm. By 9:00pm there looked to be around one hundred tents set up in the center of the park.
On Thursday night, 10 protestors were arrested in the park when they refused to dismantel and leave a tent structure in the park. On Friday some of the protestors did move to City Hall Park, which the city had offered as an alternative to Westlake Park where protestors have been for nearly three weeks. The city has stated that the occupation was in violation of the park’s terms of use and for most of the previous week, occupiers have been in the park without a permit for demonstration activities.
Accompanied by a light contingent of bicycle police, city sanitation workers began arriving at the park around 8:00pm, but by 10:00pm the sanitation workers and police had disappeared, leaving the protesters alone in the park without incident. Numbers in the park remained high late into the evening with protestors at one end of the park dancing around a large drum circle while the protest’s biggest General Assembly to date met at the other end. A joyous and festive mood among protestors held steadily through the night. Read more…
Much has been written about Google’s attempts to tweak their vaunted search algorithm recently, but the results might take awhile to become apparent. Ostensibly, Google changed the page rank code that is buried within their super-secret search architecture in order to make results more meritorious. More merit in a user’s search would be measured by the usefulness in the top-most (un-sponsored) links and supposedly less prone to the technological gerrymandering that we have collectively come to know as S.E.O.. While this is potentially good news for end-users, it is very bad news for firms that have invested time, money and intellectual capitol into manipulating search results. In the years since S.E.O. became the Holy Grail of online marketing, one class of content developer has emerged as the bête noire of search: the content farm.
Content farms are essentially clearing houses for cheaply created or “linked-out” content that are tagged and curated around popular search terms. The growth of metadata tagging (which will only grow more sophisticated in HTML 5) within web pages and discrete assets (like video) embedded in pages has made the gaming of search results very successful for some marketing strategists and virtually transparent to the end-user. The implications for small changes in search algorithms have potentially deep consequences, but the stakes are rarely discussed in technology and MBA programs that have invested in strategies aimed at the status quo. These issues go to the heart of much of what we think about how the Web works and what value web searches actually have.
Within a decade, the ubiquity of content online has significantly eroded the publishing industry’s longstanding print-based revenue model. Newspaper, print book, and magazine sales have all experienced steady declines as people turn to the internet for its surfeit of free and instant information. Internet technology expert Clay Shirky frames the dilemma like this: “The core problem publishing solves —the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public— has stopped being a problem.”
Flip the Media is always looking for local tech disruptors to feature, so when a MCDM student approached us with a contact at RootMetrics, we couldn’t resist. RootMetrics is a Seattle based business that crowdsources data in order to offer a free, independent source of cellular carrier performance ratings. We threw a couple of our best questions at Julie Dey, the VP of Marketing for RootMetrics and found out it’s even better than we originally thought! If you’re in the market for a new network, we think you’ll agree, skipping the carrier’s marketing funnel and going straight to RootMetrics’ Carrier Coverage Map will save some big headaches.
Last night, popular Seattle-based music group Blue Scholars threw a thank you party/secret show for a throng of their fans who financially supported the creation of the group’s new album, Cinemetropolis. Contrary to far more traditional avenues that many musicians use to fund their albums such as record labels or scraping together personal finances, Blue Scholars opted for the relatively new and increasingly popular digital fundraising tool Kickstarter do the job and it greatly exceeded their expectations.
Over the course of a 45 day campaign, Blue Scholars aimed to raise $25,000 and yet garnered over $62,000 in personal donations from 2,243 loyal fans who wanted to help their favorite group put out a new album. It’s worth noting that these are not casual supporters of the group and there is a level of super fandom involved in order for something like this to work. But under the right conditions, this could be the future of bands further connecting with their audiences and raising capital in the process. One of the women at last night’s thank you party, Anna Meyer, says she donated $100 despite being out of work and wishing that she could have donated more. “I’d never heard of Kickstarter until of [Blue Scholars] and it seems really cool,” Meyer said amidst dancing at the party. “If I could have given more, I would have.” Read more…
On Tuesday, April 5, 2010 the MCDM and the World Affairs Council present Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.”
Morozov challenges the widespread belief that social media and the Internet are inherently tools of democracy and argues that these tools, while useful to help the oppressed organize rallies and unify their efforts, can also be abused by authoritarian leaders as tools of surveillance, repression and control.
It is hard to argue that social media and the Internet haven’t been instrumental in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, but the debate over who the use of social media for political change continues. On January 15, 2011, even before the recent political upheaval, Morozov wrote a blog post arguing with social media guru Clay Shirkey, about the role of social media in revolutions. Read more…
It was surreal to watch the Egyptian revolution unfold as I sat at my laptop in the Philippines during a recent business trip. It reminded me how a similar movement, known as People Power 2, brought down Philippine President Joseph Estrada in January 2001 (just a few months before my family moved to Manila).
What made that Philippine revolution unique was that citizens spontaneously organized the mass protest through mass text messaging—the Philippines was an early adopter country. It was spectacular by all accounts. Within hours 100,000 people had gathered at a popular shrine in a non-violent protest against the president. Within 24 hours, that number had tripled. By the third day, the crowd was reported to have swelled to two million.
A decade after People Power 2 – almost to the day – Tunisians ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, following weeks of demonstrations, fueled by high unemployment and then shared around the country and the world through photos, videos, and updates sent by mobile texts and posts to Facebook and Twitter. The BBC reported that organizing the protest network online worked in Tunisia, because more than a third of the country’s 10 million people are online. Nearly two million Tunisians use Facebook. Read more…
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