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.

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Since we are a Digital Media program, I thought that I’d find a fun infographic that had something to do with the digital media world. So, I hied myself out to the regular sources, and lo! there was Google.

Actually, what caught my eye first was “ooooooh–pretty bright colors.” It’s probably a good thing that I was already in the right category…

Click the image to see the large-format version

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A few months ago, I was collaborating new media models with both journalists and developers at a Knight-Mozilla News Challenge event in Seattle called hacks/hackers. About halfway through our brainstorm, a brave Seattle Times journalist spoke up and asked:

“But wait, what about the elephant in the room?”

(blank stares)

“You know…monetization.”

(frustrated stares).

Oh, yeah, that.

Indeed, monetization is the question everyone is asking about regarding the future of journalism, and no one really seems to have an answer for yet either. How on earth are we as journalists supposed to earn money for our content when online advertising revenue is dropping and people are so used to getting news content for free?

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Are you ready to supercharge your company’s story telling strategy? Creating viral buzz for your startup, is easier than you think if you know the industry’s inside secrets. So clean off your whiteboard, grab a marker and get ready to go “backstage” to learn the Top 5 Buzz Tips from Seattle’s tech media elite.

On October 13^th, the MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest hosted the program, “Pitch, Don’t Spin – How to Create Buzz Around your Start-up” featuring a panel of five seasoned news experts: John Cook, Co-founder, GeekWire, Brier Dudley, Technology Columnist, Seattle Times, Leslie Helm, Editor, Seattle Business Magazine, Mike Davidson, Vice President, Social News, msnbc.com and CEO, Newsvine and Curt Woodward, Senior Editor, Xconomy.

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It’s Friday, which means that it’s time for another Viral Video of the Week. Hooray!

This week, I’ve selected a commercial video which has gone gangbusters. It was released only a month ago, and has seen more than ten million hits–and those are only the views on the primary YouTube upload. Wowzer.

Obviously, someone at Sony is doing something right. Not only are people watching this video, but they’re talking about it–arguing about it, even  (read the comments).  All this spells advertising gold.

Well played, Sony.

With the rise of online video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler, the almighty video view count has become increasingly more important as a way of ranking success. Success of not only the producer, but also those paid to promote or “syndicate” online videos. While some of us might be uploading videos we think will quickly become the next YouTube sensation, we shouldn’t be disappointed when we only get 100 views and others with similar videos have thousands – they’re likely paying for them.

Online video syndication services have been around for several years and are helping many businesses, advertising agencies and producers transition from paid television ads to paid online video ads. While many of these services provide legitimate ways of attracting consumers to the videos, others have developed ways of short-cutting the process to quickly increase view counts and other forms of engagement.

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Surprise surprise, it’s not all cake and roses for the hippest music streaming site around right now.

Last month, European digital music site Spotify arrived in the U.S. and has already made a large splash among early adopters. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Spotify allows users access to more than 15 million songs for free. Their ability to do this is supported mainly by audio and banner advertisements although the main goal is to get users to trade up for paid subscriptions. There’s a $5 per month computer-only version sans advertisements or a $10 per month package that can be used on mobile devices. If you are just tinkering around with it, there are a ton of upsides to Spotify.

Up until recently, the only drawbacks of the service seemed to be figuring out the interface or the pesky audio advertisements. However, over the last seven days, Spotify has come under fire for several reasons including a patent-infringement lawsuit filed against them several days ago and more recent news that they were caught using an indestructible cookie for the sake of tracking their users. I won’t be pedestrian and say that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, but it shouldn’t be shocking that Spotify has dirt on its shoes. It is a little surprising, however, that the dirt was discovered this early into its U.S. tenure.

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The second annual Integrated Marketing Communications Conference is taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 6-7, 2011.  Presenting the latest trends in global media and innovative marketing to industry leaders this conference is where South Africa’s leading communication voices are.

Over 200 people from various fields including public relations, digital media, marketing, advertising and communications are gathering in a Sandton hotel to figure out ways brands can develop an open ear to its consumers.  The opening keynote speaker was Vice President of Africa for InMobi, Isis N’yongo the world’s largest mobile advertising network spoke about the rapid growth of mobile technology on the African continent.  With 489 million mobile phone subscribers Africa is without a doubt a market segment that can no longer be ignored. “This continent has the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world.  If you combine this with the fact that more Africans access the Internet from mobiles than any other platform, it means the market for mobile advertising is set for strong levels of growth.”

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