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.

Since coming out of Beta at the end of 2010, 150 million words have been subtitled in 160 languages by the ViKi community. The site features 5,000-plus hours of content with over 1 billion videos viewed.

ViKi leverages the power of its translator community who provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies and the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.

The company is working on adding more premium content, including a new licensing deal with BBC Worldwide. ViKi also launched an international TV series this year on Netflix with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu.

Translators subtitle shows into their native languages under a Creative Commons license agreement. This includes revision history and user-generated edits. The more popular programs show remarkable translation times. As CEO and founder Razmig Hovaghimian explained in a recent interview, popular shows can have up to 10 different language translations in the first few hours after the content is uploaded. The number of translations can double in the first 24 hours and increase up to 40 translations in three to four days from submission. Normally, around 500 people contribute to any given translation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The company is working on adding more premium content, including a new licensing deal with BBC Worldwide. ViKi also launched an international sub-titled TV series on Netflix and is expanding its content on Hulu. The company has also just debuted an iPhone app with an Android app soon to follow.

In an interview with the LA Times Caroline Hacker, a spokeswoman for ViKi, said ViKi’s current model is to license videos from producers and then share advertising revenue with them. There are plans to expand into fee-based video on demand in the near future.

Crowd-sourcing translation services such as ViKi means that language is not necessarily the barrier it once used to be for content creators. While those of us in the English-speaking world may be relatively unused to sub-titled content, it’s fair to say that many countries are not.

According to a press release from Viki, Playful Kiss, a Korean drama, reached US cable-sized audiences after an exclusive 10-day US run on ViKi, and then via Hulu.  ViKi licensed the content for other regions and the series was subtitled in over 40 languages – 20 of which were completed in the first 24 hours. “ViKi helped Playful Kiss find its audience” said Song Byung Joon, CEO of Group 8, the production studio behind the series.  “We’ve partnered with ViKi on several series, and are extremely happy to see how our old and new shows are generating significant new revenues for us from new markets.”

The appeal for content providers is obvious – they can leverage their product into markets all around the world creating new revenue streams at little to no extra cost.

The video streaming market is a crowded one. Everyone from individual content producers through to the large aggregators such itunes and youtube are looking to find ways to capture the largest share of the viewing public. For now, it seems that Viki may have found an interesting point of differentiation for itself – the ability to watch any program in your own language.

Investors seem to think this is a profitable leverage point for the company. In October 2011, ViKi announced $20m in new funding from investors around the world including SK Planet, a South Korean IT convergence platform provider, BBC Worldwide, and Greylock Partners a leading Silicon Valley private equity firm.

The question for the future is can Viki sustain its translation based competitive advantage? The key will be its ability to convince the leading content providers around the globe that it has a lock on a large translation community that will be loyal to its platform. Then it seems a no-brainer for producers seeking to leverage existing and new content into new markets at very little cost.

However, if the platform is easily replicable what’s to stop content providers or distributors from crowd-sourcing the translation themselves?

But perhaps crowd-sourcing translations on properly licensed content can help battle the video pirates and illegal down loader? At the very least, consumers should be more comfortable to stream or download free, high quality translated content without infringing on a producer’s copyright.

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Here’s the full Q&A:

Q: What’s the story behind Rootmetrics? How did it get started?

A: RootMetrics began in 2008 and was founded by a team of folks with strong ties to and many years of experience in the mobile community. The goal of the company was to break the historical convention of mobile performance residing in a black box, where it was completely unavailable to the public or to mobile suppliers. RootMetrics continues to promote transparency by putting the consumer first. We measure mobile performance from a consumer’s point of view and ensure that everyone has access to the data. Put simply, by downloading and using our app, you are creating the most up-to-date, publicly available map of mobile service and carrier coverage.

Q: How do you help people find the best cellular carrier for their needs?

A: Through our smartphone apps and the maps that you can find on our website and at CNET, we arm consumers with the true picture of mobile performance based on millions of data points. Using these tools, anyone can review signal strength, data speeds and overall mobile performance at a broad regional level, or down to your own street level. Each view of our maps compares carrier data side-by-side, so that you can see how carriers stack up against each other at that location.

Q: What has the demand for your service been like and what do you for-see the demand will be in the future?

A: We’ve seen great demand for our service and have received numerous positive press reviews. As smartphone adoption and mobile technologies continue their steep trajectory of growth, we foresee increased need for our application. We know that consumers are increasingly frustrated with mobile performance and are confused by the conflicting carrier messages in the marketplace. Because we source our data directly from the consumer rather than the carrier, we can provide mobile performance clarity and deliver data that is objective and accurate.

Q: We noticed that you seem to have a lot of data for major US cities, but how do you plan to gather more data in rural areas?

A: Every day, consumers from all across the country send us new data points that add to our mapping of rural areas. The more that people across the country send us samples, the more representative our maps and reports become of the true consumer experience at any location. We will continue measuring mobile performance in major U.S. markets and also look forward to seeing the hyper-localized areas of the maps fill in as word of our application spreads.

Q: Are there any other services with similar functionality?

A: There are a few other services that offer some elements of our functionality, but we are the only app available for iPhone and Android that offers views of both signal strength and data performance and allows consumers to test their networks to add samples to our maps.

Q: Has tracking and publishing this data pressured companies to expand coverage in poorly served areas? Do you think it will in the future?

A: We are just beginning to see how carriers are responding to this data. Infrastructure changes and coverage expansions are often time consuming and expensive propositions, so we don’t expect changes to happen overnight. However, carriers are very interested in the data that we are reporting and are using it to identify challenges in the ways that consumers experience their networks so that they can make changes and improvements.

Q: Are we moving toward a future of “best” mobile coverage on all networks everywhere? When will we get there?

A: At this point, it’s hard to say. Some of the regulations in the US in the mobile industry make it a bit more difficult to do this quickly; however, with our data, everyone will be equipped to make the best choice of carrier no matter their location.

Q: Are you currently working on a WP7 or Blackberry app or have you decided to stick with Android and iPhone only? If no WP7 or Blackberry, why?

A: We are focused on the Android and iOS systems right now as they are the platforms showing the most significant growth and the strongest consumer adoption. However, should BlackBerry and Windows gain deeper consumer adoption in the near future, we will look into apps to support those platforms.

More about RootMetrics:

RootMetrics.com | Facebook | Twitter | Download App

Signed a new contract lately or in the market? Let us know how it’s working out…

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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.

Part of the social commerce challenge is nicely summed up by Scott Blanksteen of the AppStore HQ, a Seattle startup founded in 2009 with the purpose of helping users find the right mobile apps for their needs in the increasingly overcrowded app market.

“How do you cut through the noise? While there might be a couple of thousand Sudoku apps, and most of them are even free, you don’t want to download 400 or 500 just to find the right Sudoku,” he says, and points out that a lot of the traditional star reviews are useless.

“They literally pay people in China to write five-star reviews. And the one-star reviews? Those are from your competitors,” Blanksteen says.

AppStoreHQ CEO Scott Blanksteen

Enter AppStore HQ.  AppStore HQ tracks about 500 blogs and web sites focusing on apps to identify the good, the bad and the ugly of the app world. The reviews make the service different from a search engine. Additionally, by tapping into registered users’ activities, AppStore HQ can help users find apps they might like based on their online habits and their friends’ preferences.

“We combine what people are blogging about and talking about on social media with the filtering technology to give you personalized recommendations based on which apps you have liked and which you have disliked and come up with some suggestions for apps you might like,” Blanksteen says.

Finding Nemo

While AppStore HQ has figured out how to find the best apps and how to match those to their users, they are still trying to make it easier for users to find AppStore HQ–and that isn’t as easy as it might seem–even when it is your business to have people find the content that you want them to find.

One avenue are traditional search engines where AppStore HQ will show up in a search for apps. Once users are on the site, they can share the site with their friends or tweet about it, which AppStore HQ encourages.

“We don’t spend money on advertising, so we try to make sure we are findable on search engines. We definitely use social media marketing and play with Twitter so people are aware of us on Twitter,” Blanksteen says.

AppStore HQ also has its own Android app that can be downloaded and then shared via social media.

“We are partly relying on search engines and partly on viral referral,” Blanksteen says, explaining that the specific avenue users take to arrive at AppStore HQ partly depends on how experienced they are with using smart devices.

“At first, many use the iTunes store, the Android Market or the Windows Marketplace. Then they often start asking friends instead of searching, and friends share what they like,” Blanksteen says.

Currently, AppStore HQ does not collect any demographic information on their users, but Blanksteen’s experience and gut feeling is that the ways they find apps and use apps depend both on age and experience. Where younger and more experienced users typically find apps by peer-to-peer marketing, older and less experienced users more often turn to traditional search–either online or in the device marketplace.

Making money

“We don’t collect any demographic information right now, but I would love to. That would help us customize the site and target audiences,” Blanksteen says, noting that one of the major challenges right now is evaluating and implementing features they would like to add to the site.

Application reviews on AppStoreHQ.

It is all a matter of money. Registering with AppStore HQ is free for users, but the company charges developers in a way that is akin to the way search engines charge customers for showing up in search queries as sponsored results. AppStore HQ has a network of more than 100,000 registered developers, and also charge companies that want to connect with developers to advertise on the site. AppStore HQ also allows developers to showcase their apps by running promos on the AppStore HQ site.

“Developers of premium apps, those that cost money, want people to try them, but why would users pay when there are so many that are free? Developers can make those apps appear ‘free’ without changing the cost by using limited time coupons, free use for the first 500 who sign up, a coupon of the day that is free for 12 hours and so on. Developers pay to use that platform with us,” Blanksteen explains.

Is there a magic formula? Probably not, but when it comes to search and mobile applications, there is certainly room for good ideas and strategies. No one strategy will fit the needs of all application developers.  One thing is certain: Marketers are leaning more and more on our networks and investigating ways that these networks can be harnessed for their power of persuasion.

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• May 9, 2011 -- The Networked Consumer: Social Commerce Challenges (0)

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.

The problem with peer recommendations is that, in order for consumers to act on recommendations, they have to search for the recommended product.   This almost always means that a potential customer has to leave the site where they heard the recommendation.  In what marketers call the “conversion funnel” that is one barrier for a potential costumer to complete a purchase.  In the rare case that a customer does find something they want to buy on a social network site, then they are invariably redirected to a new site to complete the transaction, which is another opportunity for the customer to jump out of the funnel.

“Facebook is like a giant shopping mall with no stores,” says Jim Lively, one of the DIY Media founders.

According to Lively, the DIY Media business strategy is to make any digital content online for any digital medium available. DYI Media targets those who are downloading digital content for their Kindles, Sony e-readers and Nooks.  They are also targeting people online as well through games and music sharing.

In January 2011, the Seattle startup launched a portable storefront – a virtual ice cream truck for digital content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DYI Media started with music, out of the founders’ frustration with iTunes and the iTunes music store. For starters, iTunes has about 70 percent of the market, Lively says, pointing out that Apple no longer control that large of a market share in terms of devices. Furthermore, once consumers arrive at iTunes, they are bombarded with so much content that a lot of users never purchased what they came for.

“You want to buy it where you find it. With our portable storefront, your friend can put a link to the item there right in front of you,” Lively says, “You click on it to pull up the content, click on the songs you like and there is a tally on the side that reflects the changes you make – you add a song the total price goes up, you take away a song and the price goes down,”

Finally, the links can be shared. This is the social element that is a key part of DIY Media’s business model.

“If you share it with your 500 friends, it shows up in your update stream. If you post it on your friend’s wall, it is also visible to their 500 friends. By the time it’s been shared three times, 64 million people have seen it. That’s the power of Facebook,” Lively points out–and the power of word-of-mouth.  The most reliable and tested marketing strategy we know of, and it is literally under each of our noses.

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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.

“Our mission is to be the homepage for men and women age 13 to 30,” Savitt says, explaining that with Lockerz, users combine a social network and curation with commerce to recommend stuff they like.

According to Savitt, the Lockerz community has grown to more than 18 million members since it was launched in the beginning of 2010. With the acquisition of Plixi, the Twitter photo sharing service in January, Lockerz now has 31 million users.

The company’s business model is to reward people for being passionate, Savitt says. Members earn points or “PTZ,” as they are called on the site, for listening to music, watching videos, answering daily questions and recommending their favorite products to their friends.  Friends can help friends earn points by clicking on their friends’ content–all in hope of having the favor returned and earning more points for themselves. There are also additional PTZ available for sharing content outside the Lockerz network by inviting friends from Facebook, publishing Lockerz activities to outside social networks or uploading pictures from the Lockerz profile to Twitter. The PTZ can be used for discounts on products from retailers in the Lockerz network, or as currency in Lockerz auctions where users can win prizes they bid on.

Savitt explains that part of Lockerz’ business model is to build consumer loyalty and create a value for the partners that participate in the merchant program.

Similar practices by junk food and cereal manufacturers have been frowned upon when marketed to kids. In an article in The New York Times (April 20, 2011) Matt Richtel details how kids perceive the online activities sponsored by the junk food and sugary cereal manufacturers as games.  One concern about these sorts of campaigns is that, in reality young people are being used as pawns in marketing campaigns designed to hook’em young and develop brand loyalty.

“Critics argue that such tactics blur the line between marketing and entertainment, while the companies contend that they have clearly labeled their sites as advertising,” Ritchel says in a post on the NYT Bits blog April 21, 2011.

Along the same lines, Lockerz’ young members are marketing agents for brands in the Lockerz network– rewarded for advertising to their friends. It’s kinda like a huge Tupperware party online. There is nothing new under the sun, indeed.

photo courtesy Geekwire.com

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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?

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“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.

Another StartupDay speaker, Jan Miksovsky of “online family organizer” suite Cozi.com, struck a similar note. At one point Microsoft was venturing into the family organizing space, but the competitive threat dissipated because their product never shipped, perhaps because Microsoft only ships products that meet the company’s high standards, Miksovsky speculated. Cozi, in contrast, as a startup had the luxury of improving their service iteration by iteration, providing “incremental design goodness.”

“Designs that don’t ship are meaningless,” Miksovsky concluded.

Turning customers into evangelists

Building a startup is not like building a car, Tan said, a mere logistical and technological challenge. “What we’re really doing is throwing an amazing party.” To do so, you take care of every single detail to make sure that your guests have a great time. Or, as Tan puts it, the third step towards creating great products is to love your users.

Monica Harrington, Chief Marketing Officer at Seattle startup Intersect, and previously at Valve and Google-acquired Picnik, also stressed the need to build a customer-centric company. “You can’t be too obsessive about making users happy,” she said. If you listen to your customers, they can help you build the product and become evangelists. In fact, said Harrington, “they’ll often have better ideas than you.”

But before you can embrace your customers, you first have to embrace the idea of being an entrepreneur.

“All along I was waiting for someone to sign my permission slip to start a company,” said Tan, “but the only person who could sign it was me. Sign your own permission slip.”

Peter Luyckx is a contributing writer to Seattle Local Health Guide and to Flip the Media. Previously, he was the Managing Editor at Flip the Media, and a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @peterlux.

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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.

4.  What is your business model?
Primarily, we make money when we generate students and leads for teachers and schools. We collect fees in a variety of different ways:

If we sell a class for a large school (like Kaplan Test Prep or Shoreline Community College), we collect a percentage fee on that transaction. And if a teacher uses our TeachStreet Payments platform, we collect a transaction fee.

Starting this month, we will also charge listing fees and “featured” fees. Featured fees allow teachers to get extra promotion on the  homepage and in emails to students.

Some teachers opt for a paid Pro membership, which gives them additional marketing services and lower payment processing fees. Still other teachers pay us for other kinds of leads or transactions. For instance, some pay on a cost-per-lead or cost-per-click model, depending on their needs.

Finally, a minor percentage of our revenue is collected from contextual advertising (Amazon products or Google ads) on the site.

5.  What has been the biggest challenge for TeachStreet?
Probably getting the right team and work environment. Every startup struggles with this, as the team figures out how they want to work together and how they’ll address the inevitable problems and setbacks. As they say, “it’s a marathon.” So it’s great to have training partners and a support crew that you like spending time with every day. You want people who will challenge ideas and convention, but once you pick a plan, get on board and push behind that goal.

6.  How is TeachStreet evolving? Where do you hope the company will be in 5-10 years?

We’re growing every week and figuring out our business model as we go. We always intended to be in the marketplace space, operating in an eBay-like manner and helping to make happy customers. But it wasn’t until July 2009 that we processed our first student-to-teacher payment, and not until September 2009 that we collected our first Pro member fee. And even later than that when we introduced our first affiliate-based schools. So the revenue/business model has only been reality in the last 6 months or so. It’s been great, as traffic and conversion rates continue to climb, and we make more and more teachers happy by delivering students to them.

Our first goal is to get to profitability, which we’re aiming for in the next year. Then probably to just keep growing to become the first place that schools and teachers go to build their teaching businesses.

7.  What do you predict will be the next big thing in digital media?
On the consumption side, the iPad’s going to be huge. I think people are far underestimating the impact of a transition to tablet devices for media CONSUMPTION. And have you heard of this Twitter thing?

8.  What is your favorite gadget or application at the moment?
Favorite gadget’s my iPhone, by far. I truly love everything Apple (iMac at home, MacBook, iPhone). I have a Kindle, but the love doesn’t run as deep, and I’m sure I’ll transition to the Kindle App (on an iPad) very quickly.

Favorite apps are all-things Google. We run our company on Google Apps (mail, calendar, docs, spreadsheet, wiki) and business tools (Analytics, Webmaster Console, AdSense, AdWords, Website Optimizer).

9. What is unique about the Seattle startup community?
I think it’s very supportive and helpful, notwithstanding my $1,000 fee for consulting advice. Really, there’s an incredible network of resources and events, from Seattle 2.0, to Seattle Tech Startups, to Hops and Chops and more. As an example, I just had lunch today with two startup co-founders (Darien Brown and Jon Hickey — Jon’s an MCDM student) to discuss their startup, YongoPal). Their energy’s infectious!

10. What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Be prepared to learn, every day–there’s so much you don’t know. You need to be willing to not have the right answer and still make decisions, learn and adapt. And, be ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. Finally, pick something you really love. Because you’re going to be working at it longer than you think. You probably won’t make much money, and ultimately, you’ll probably fail (the first, second and/or third time).  So love it. And be sure to work with people who you like and who like you.

Mary Janisch is a second-year MCDM student and and a former managing editor of Microsoft Encarta.

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