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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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.

Here’s the full Q&A:

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It is a jungle out there in mobile communications. The mobile application markets are particularly chaotic. How do you know which Sudoku app is right for you when there are literally thousands of Sudoku apps out there? Thousands on each mobile platform: iOS, Android, Windows Mobile 7. Thousands.

With every seemingly insurmountable online/mobile/content challenge that has emerged over the last two decades, smart entrepreneurs have recognized a corresponding opportunity. Google? Google emerged out of a need to sift through and evaluate the deluge of internet content developed during Web 1.0.

AppStoreHQ homepage

In mobile applications this is where market research, filtering technology and social networking come in. Instead of an anonymous algorithm, researchers are turning to your social networks for inspiration–finding out what works from people in your network that you trust. It seems like a natural and healthy progression. In an age when consumers are increasingly leery of advertising and have many channels to turn to in avoiding commercials, these consumers are also increasingly connected to each other.

This is the third article in a series exploring social network trends in online commerce and how some Seattle companies are navigating the landscape. Read more…

E-commerce in the (social) networked environment is different from e-commerce in the past. We are all familiar with being bombarded with commercial messages, through online video commercials, banner ads and pop up windows.   We have learned to avoid, deflect and tune out most of these marketing strategies.

Increasingly, If we are looking for something, we will shop around, consult user reviews and ask friends for advice. More and more these conversations are happening online and marketers are angling to be a part of these discussions. This is the second article in a series exploring social network trends in online commerce and how some Northwest companies are navigating and even changing the new landscape.

The ancient method of people making recommendations to each other for products and services using word of mouth is suddenly the hottest advertising strategy on the Internet. Facebook and other social media networks are giant marketing tools. But so far, most consumers have lacked a way to buy products or services without leaving the site. For the founders of aptly named DIY Media in Seattle, this conundrum seemed like a great business opportunity.

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Consumers are increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising, more likely to trust peers for product recommendations and completely networked – and as the digital natives move out of the dorms and into the business world, this trend is only going to get stronger. What is the impact of these networked consumers on the marketing landscape?

E-commerce grows up. Social is the new currency.  Established companies adapt to a new reality, and new companies have surfaced in the wake of social media – entirely to capitalize on social network marketing.

This is the first article in a series exploring social network trends in online commerce and how some Seattle companies are navigating the landscape.

It is interesting to note that some of the most successful new technologies don’t actually invent anything new: peer-to-peer advertising is in fact the oldest variety around. It precedes any mass medium. New technologies, however, make peer-to-peer recommendations more efficient, faster and with a broader footprint than the cave-man version.

According to Kathy Savitt, CEO of Seattle based Lockerz, 73 percent of “Generation Z,”–those born after 1992–purchase products based on recommendations from friends. Lockerz is a member-based web community that rewards users for listening to music, watching videos, answering questions and sharing photos. They base their whole business model on peer-to-peer social networking and “word of mouth” marketing strategies. Read more…

Last week, a new “information experience” startup – Qwiki – received a fair amount of publicity after closing it’s first round of funding totaling $8 million and announcing some upcoming features.

Qwiki provides rich media to consumers by scrubbing the web for content and assembling it into a short presentation with narration. Users can suggest content, but unlike Wikipedia, users can not actually edit the presentations.

Qwiki was first demoed last September at TechCrunch Disrupt where it was selected as the top disruptive technology (keynote). Recently, several large news outlets including ABC’s Good Morning America discussed whether or not Qwiki will be able to “flip” Google. With a new round funding and several internet moguls at their side including a co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin and Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube, it appears there’s nothing stopping them.

On Friday, MediaPost reported that later this year Qwiki will provide a service that allows people to merge their Facebook and LinkedIn data, along with other online content, into a nice little “Qwiki”.

I was a bit skeptical about Qwiki’s ability to auto-magically tell my story but after watching Robert Scoble’s Qwiki, I think this could be a possibility.

What are your thoughts?
Will you tell your story with a Qwiki?
Will you tell your client’s stories with a Qwiki?

Every day you go online, you encounter little annoyances, even things that infuriate you. An entrepreneur won’t just chafe at these irritations, said Posterous co-founder Garry Tan at last weekend’s StartupDay, but turn frustration into innovation—creating a new product isn’t just a labor of love, it’s also a labor of hate.

“You’ve got to connect with what you hate, what you can’t stand. You’re starting up a company because you want to fix it,” Tan said.

At Posterous, Tan set out to build a blogging platform that would skip the annoying step of having to create yet another login. Users can create posts by simply emailing text and photos to the service, which automatically uploads and formats the content.

Tan’s talk on the three steps of a “product-driven state of mind” was a highlight of StartupDay 2010, hosted by Seattle 2.0, an organization dedicated to providing resources for tech entrepreneurs and startups.

Hate the problem is the first step towards creating great products, according to Tan, but completely fixing the problem is not necessarily the best second step. It’s counterproductive to be too perfectionist at the beginning, Tan warned. More important than creating a perfect product is creating any product at all. The second step is to ship the solution, Tan argued, even an imperfect one, because “until you can interact with the product, it doesn’t exist.” And what doesn’t exist, you can’t improve. Read more…

From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the fifth in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet

1.  What is TeachStreet?
TeachStreet helps people find classes–local or online–in hundreds of lifelong learning topics. Classes run the gamut from Spanish, piano, yoga and SEO to dog training, wine appreciation and more. If you want to learn it, we’ve got teachers and schools for you.

As a marketplace (like eBay), we help teachers and schools get more students by providing them with easy-to-use tools and services to promote their classes. We offer tools so that independent teachers can set up their classes and collect payment. And we also work with large nationwide class providers (such as Kaplan Test Prep) to generate student referrals.

Essentially, we built TeachStreet to create a place for people to explore their passions and help them enrich their lives through learning.

2.  What are some interesting classes offered on TeachStreet?
Go in and search for the craziest things you can think of, and I bet we’ll have classes for you. Poker? Cat training? Hammered dulcimer? Swordfighting? All our learning categories are listed here.

3.  How large is the TeachStreet community?
We don’t disclose actual member numbers (teacher or student counts), but the website’s been live since April 21, 2008, and in just the last month we’ve had more than 170,000 visitors from more than 170 countries. The great majority of visitors are from the United States, since our local classes are currently restricted to the U.S. But online classes (added late in 2009) are starting to attract students worldwide. Read more…