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Posts Tagged ‘language’

What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp.

Here are all seven pairings:
Artist / Technologist
Cao Fei / Jeff Hammerbacher
Evan Roth / Joshua Schachter
Aaron Koblin / Matt Mullenweg
Monica Narula / Andrew Kortina
Ryan Trecartin / Hilary Mason
Tauba Auerbach / Ayah Bdeir
Marc Andre Robinson / David Karp

Schachter, for instance, is being paired with artist Evan Roth, who has created open-source software to analyze graffiti tags and has even created a Graffiti Markup Language (GML). Schachter, of course, pioneered the use of data free-form tags to categorize Delicious bookmarks years ago. Mulennweg is being paired with Aaron Koblin a digital artist who creates art based on the input of thousands of individuals. He is also the artist who created Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video using no cameras (embedded below)

The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here).

The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate which is put the program together.

I’m here at YouTube’s office in San Bruno, where the company is holding a press conference to discuss the launch of auto-captions. YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk kicked off the event by discussing some of YouTube’s goals through the years — one of which is accessibility.

Walk said that a few years ago, accessibility meant giving users more ways to access their content (for example, through their mobile phones). Now, the company is focusing more on making its content accessible to even more people. Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein then took the stage to walk through some of YouTube’s initiatives on this front.

Harrenstein walked us through YouTube’s past feature launches, including the launch of captions and subtitles. In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken.

This makes the videos accessible not just to deaf people, but also to viewers around the world, who can translate any video that’s in English to another language. However, Harrenstein took time to point out that the captioning isn’t perfect, showing how the words “SIM card” got transcribed to “salmon”.

Here are some of the details for uploading videos:

• While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center here.

Google researcher Mike Cohen then took the stage to talk about Google’s Speech Technology. The ultimate vision, he says, is to provide accurate captions for all videos in all languages. But that comes with many problems, including a massive vocabulary, issues with poor recordings and background noise, and accents. And every language comes with its own unique challenges.

YouTube hasn’t yet run all of its videos through the new transcription service, but video owners will be able to manually request that their older videos get transcribed more quickly through each video’s options screen.

Harrenstein, who is deaf, retook the stage to tell a personal story. When he was at MIT, he didn’t go to many of his lectures because he was unable to understand the lectures (which weren’t signed). Now, he can watch MIT lectures on YouTube, with captioning enabled.

Next, some students from the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, and their instructor Joey Baer, took the stage to thank YouTube for the launch. Check out their enthusiasm in the video below. Really, this is quite amazing.

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.

Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating “Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon” from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don’t speak the language. Google Translate works in more than 50 languages.

Schmidt also revealed that 60,000 Android phones are being sold each day now.

Location-based services continue their hot streak when it comes to funding, as Ambient Industries has received an extension to their seed round to build out their application Flook. Alongside this news, Flook is gaining a number of new features to expand it location-based discovery elements. The extension of the funding from Amadeus Capital Partners and Eden Ventures totals close to $1 million, we’re told. This is on top of the undisclosed amount they raised from the same investors in late 2008.

Flook is a location-based service that has both a web app and an iPhone app. It can probably best be described as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, as that’s pretty much how you use it. On the iPhone app, which launched a few weeks ago, users create “cards,” which contain a title, a picture, and a caption. You then tag the card in the correct category (“funny,” “art,” “food & drink,” etc) and when you upload it, Flook tags your location to it, so that others will find it. Users browse these cards on the main screen either by simply scrolling through cards near them or cards from people they follow on Flook. The cards you like the most, you can “collect” to view later.

Here’s a list of the newer features of the application being announced alongside the funding:

• Twitter: Cards can easily be tweeted, either from the web, or from your phone by enabling settings for those who want to use flook to interact with their other social networks.
• APIs: APIs are in closed beta as we are still installing the nuts and bolts, but we encourage companies with interesting applications and integration plans to contact us at info@flook.it.
• Flickr Import: This is a really cool way to auto-generate flook cards from geolocated flickr photos. Just tag your photo with one of our keywords (for example, flookfunny to make a funny card), and your photo’s title becomes your flook card’s title, with its description becoming the caption. At the moment this functionality is limited to a few people we really like – people with great content on the web that they want to share with their followers, enabling them to find their content when they’re out and about.
• New Content Partners: One of the first of our new partners is Ghost Signs (http://flook.it/community/ghostsigns/). Now, if you’re out and about in London you’ll easily be able to track down Sam’s great content – and use the back of the flook card to start a discussion on it. The Ghost Signs cards are examples of hand painted advertising on walls which are part of a wider collection held within the History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive. The archive opens for business on 19th March 2010. Flook helps Sam get the word out.
• Collection & Following on the Web: Hey, this is cool! We’ve increased the synergy of flook and its web-based interface. Now when someone emails you a flook card, and you follow the link to the web, you can collect that card for later, or follow its creator. This is a great way to make a great collection of stuff to do when you’re out and about with your iPhone.
• Translation: When not exploring our local area, we are feeding our imaginations by looking at the cards that flookers make all around the world. We have brave flookers starting communities in places as diverse as Taiwan, India, China and Australia. Up until now, we’ve been able to admire the photos, but I haven’t had a clue what people were flooking on about. But now you can just tap the card to bring up the HUD and hit the translate button to turn “G’day mate, this dunny is cactus” to “Hello my good man, I’m afraid this lavatory is inoperative”. Although this feature is in its infancy (you can’t translate comments yet), we think it has great potential. Soon, we think you’ll all be exploring Darkest Peru and Outer Mongolia with flook, and getting fantastic tips for places to visit from the locals rather than the same old same old from an expat guidebook author who probably doesn’t even speak the language.
• We love widgets! Now, if you have your own website, but love to flook, you can invite your people to follow you on flook with a handy widget that you place on your site.

Flook is an interesting way to find a variety of location-based information. It doesn’t emphasize the popular check-in model like Foursquare or Gowalla, or the game-heavy model like MyTown, and instead focuses on visual aspects. The new Flickr import ability seems like a great idea to extend this usage.

Two of Ambient Industries founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales, are perhaps best known for their work at Psion, where they contributed the code that would eventually become the Symbian OS.

See more of Flook in the video below or find the free app in the App Store here.

In the midst of massive headcount cuts, another AOL exec is departing the newly-independent company. Ralph Rivera, previously the Vice President of AOL Games and AOL Latino, where he was responsible for AOL’s portfolio of online casual games and helped expand its international reach, is leaving to become President of Major League Gaming, Online. MLG is a small but growing professional competitive video game league. Rivera will be tasked to lead digital strategy and online product development for the growing company.

Major League Gaming has shown strong growth in the past few years. The company claims 10 million unique visitors per month, more than double from a year ago, and 6 million video streams. The company has taken $46 Million in funding since inception and have recently landed Doritos and Hot Pockets as advertising partners.

Rivera believes MLG is at an “inflection point” and hopes to help it scale into a larger property. He joins a growing list of long-time executives to jump ship as AOL begins to purge 1/3 of its workforce. As the churn continues, many AOL vets are staring somewhere instead of building up the ‘New AOL’.

Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically).

In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before. To put that in perspective, in a single month Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.com. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost 7 million unique visitors from November to December to end the year at 594 million unique visitors. (In the U.S., Yahoo is a stronger No. 2 after Google, with 161 million uniques in December, compared to 173 million for Google, 138 million for Microsoft, and 112 Million for Facebook).

These numbers are different than the 350 million registered users Facebook itself counts, half of which come every day. ComScore estimates total traffic, which is larger than the number of reported registered users (you don’t have to be a Facebook member to visit a public page). And these are estimates, remember that. And they don’t include the 60 million people a month who log into other sites via Facebook Connect.

For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million uniques. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public. Passing Microsoft (No. 2) or Google (No. 1) in unique visitors will take a little longer. Microsoft’s sites ended the year with 727 million uniques worldwide (up 80 million), while Google’s attracted 899 million in December (up 123 million).

By other measures, Facebook is already larger than both Yahoo and Microsoft. Its pageviews grew 141 percent last year to 193 billion in December, nearly double Yahoo’s 100 billion (down 2 percent) and Microsoft’s 109 billion (up 54 percent). Google is still the largest pageview generator with 274 billion a month (up 35 percent). Yahoo has simply lost its zip. At least Microsoft and Google are still showing respectable growth for their size. But it is not too hard to imagine Facebook catching up to Google here as well (see chart below). Facebook also beats Yahoo in terms of total minutes spent on the site (116 million versus 101 million) and average minutes per visitor (247 minutes a month versus 170 for Yahoo).

I’ve never understood the attraction of CES.

Why in January – a month set aside for recovering from the excesses of the holiday season – thousands of people would fly to Las Vegas for a gigantic tradeshow. Why they’d even consider spending four days wandering around an aircraft hanger filled with vastly oversized television sets, or sitting through endless product launches that are being simulcast online anyway.

Why they’d subject themselves to three nights of well drinks at a succession of disappointing after-parties before passing out in overpriced, soulless hotel rooms that charge $10 a day for wifi. Frankly why they’d willingly submit themselves to any of those horrors when they could simulate the entire experience from home simply by wiring a thousand dollars to Steve Wynn, dropping a tab of acid and then heading to Best Buy with a hooker.

Still, there was a moment earlier this week when I thanked the gods that CES exists. And that was the moment when Heather Harde emailed Sarah and me, politely but firmly informing us that we were introducing this year’s Crunchies. CES clashes directly with the Crunchies, an overlap that at least meant fewer people would be in San Francisco to witness the inevitable train wreck of us standing on stage, trying to make jokes about Twitter.

Which is not to say that we didn’t do our best to write a non-trainwrecky introduction. On the contrary, the day before the ceremony we decamped to the lobby of the W Hotel for two whole hours where – fuelled by Champagne (Sarah) and cheeseburgers (me) – we brainstormed ideas. We are after all, professionals.

“How about this? ‘Hello and welcome the Crunchies. We want to start with a couple of jokes about Spotify, mainly because if we wait until the end they’ll probably be out of business’”.

“Meh. It’s only funny ‘cos it’s true.”

“Good point. Okay, how about a Bing joke? Are there any Bing jokes?”

“No. But I just got another email from Heather. She says she’s willing to dress up in a gorilla suit if we think it’ll be funny.”

“It may yet come to that. What else is funny?”

“People slipping on banana skins are funny.”

“People slipping on banana skins are funny.”

“Shall we do that?”

“No.”

Still at least by agreeing to open the show, our night’s work would be over after four minutes and we could head out to the auditorium to watch the award presentations. Like hundreds of thousands of other people, I’d cast my votes in the awards – although I’d completely forgotten for whom – and so was eagerly anticipating the results. More specifically I was looking forward to bitching when my preferred winners inevitably failed to even scrape in as runners up. (My inability to pick winners is just one of the many reasons why I made a terrible book publisher.)

Sure enough, barely ten minutes into the main event, I found myself gripping the arms of my chair and gnashing my teeth in frustration and despair as yet another of my votes turned out to be for nought. “The Nook as best gadget?! No one even has a Nook!”

Talking to friends after the after-party, I realised I wasn’t alone: almost everyone I ran into had a complaint about at least one of the results. But, then again, that’s how it was supposed to be. The whole point of the Crunchies is that they’re voted for by the public – the readers of TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – and as such they represent the wisdom of the crowd, not some cabal of Silicon Valley insiders – soi-disant experts, out of touch with what services and apps the real Internet users use. Vox populi, vox dei.

Sure.

Okay.

That kind of democra-fetishism might make sense for consumer awards like The Webbies – which, perversely, are awarded by a cabal of insiders – but it’s completely ludicrous for an event specifically aimed at industry professionals. Don’t get me wrong, there are some seriously smart and well-informed people who read TechCrunch – you, dear reader, are one of them. But for every one of you, there is your polar opposite: the kind of knuckle-dragging jizz-wit who  is – even as we speak – scrolling down to the comments to ask what, exactly, about this column is Not Safe For Work. And I have no reason to believe that the same ratio of smart to dumb isn’t true for GigaOm and Venture Beat. We wouldn’t trust these people to review a dive bar on Yelp so why on earth should we trust them to vote whether Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons are worthy Founders of the Year?

“But” – you might argue – “that’s the great thing about the masses; if you have enough people voting then the majority of intelligent people drive out the minority of idiots.”

Sure.

Okay.

Even accepting that the majority of our readers are smart and well-informed, there still remains an inevitable problem that occurs whenever huge numbers of people vote for something: the most popular nominee – as opposed to the best qualified – always wins. It could be total coincidence that Facebook has won the Overall Best Startup for three years running, but it isn’t. 2009 was, by any metric you care to use, the year of Twitter. And yet we’re supposed to believe that Facebook – a company that more than any other has been racing to mirror Twitter these past twelve months by buying Friendfeed, changing the language of its status messages and rapidly shifting from private to public – is a more worthy winner? Because of Facebook Connect? Oh please. Facebook won for one reason: it has between 15 to 20 times more users than Twitter and so is at the front of more people’s minds when they come to vote.

Worse still, public voting is such a flawed way to hand out industry awards that even sensible results are rendered all but meaningless. Consider Ron Conway: a more deserving winner of Best Angel it is impossible to imagine. Not only did Ron keep his investment head while all those around were losing theirs, but he is also a dedicated philanthropist and one of the nicest men you could wish to meet: if he hadn’t picked up the Best Angel gong, then the world would have been destroyed in a supernova of wrongness. And yet, as Heather pointed out as she handed over the award, Ron has invested in hundreds of companies – to the point where almost everyone in the theatre, and by extension, thousands of those who voted for the Crunchies had some kind of connection with him. As a result, it’s impossible to know whether Ron won on his obvious merit or simply because he has name recognition and popular appeal – and that kind of uncertainty does a worthy winner a huge disservice.

The same is true of Mark Pincus who picked up CEO of the year. There’s a powerful argument for Pincus winning the award: his response to Scamville and pledge to turn over a new leaf is, arguably, an example to us all. And yet there’s an equally powerful argument that Tony Hsieh was an even more logical winner this year, having built Zappos into one of the best respected ecommerce companies on the planet, before selling it to Amazon for $928m. But again public voting makes that debate irrelevant: thanks (ironically) to Scamville, Pincus has a ton more recent name recognition than Hsieh and so the award was his by a landslide. Hsieh didn’t even come in as runner up.

And what about Aaron Patzer as founder of the year? Mint is a cool company which enjoyed a decent enough $170 million exit. But, then again, if you want to talk about cool exists, the runners up – Stoppelman and Simmons from Yelp – just turned down half a billion from Google. The key difference between the two companies is that – thanks in large part to TechCrunch’s championing them since they won TC40 – Mint has an image as the cool newcomer, while Yelp is considered old hat. Meanwhile Elon Musk, the dude who built an electric car company for Christ’s sake, doesn’t fit into the narrative at all and so doesn’t even make the top two.

We at TechCrunch need to accept our part in all this ridiculousness. Look at all of the winners this year and you start to see a  pattern. Foursquare won best mobile app – an award they should rightfully share with MG; Animoto – Arrington’s favourite – won best design; Chrome OS and Google Wave – which we’ve covered endlessly, despite no one understanding the latter – shared the top spots in Best Technological Achievement. These were awards chosen by the public and yet they almost perfectly reflect the narrative that we have been subconsciously writing all year. You can argue it either way: that TechCrunch writers are freakishly good at spotting what’s popular, or that TechCrunch writers make things popular – but either way, it’s painfully obvious that Crunchies are won and lost based on a media profile we’ve helped to created, rather than any kind of objective merit.

So what? So if I were one of the winners this year I’d be rightfully proud of my success, but I hope I’d also be confident enough in my merits to lobby for next year’s awards to be judged differently. Specifically, I’d encourage the organisers – TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – to make a decision: are the Crunchies going to continue as a popularity contest, or are they going to become a true award for excellence? If the former, then fine – popularity is a perfectly legitimate metric, especially for an industry where fortunes are built on eyeballs and traction. But then at least the categories should be renamed. Replace “best…” with “most popular…”. Call a spade a spade.

If on the other hand, we really want the Crunchies to be our industry’s highest accolade then it’s time we took a leaf from the book of every other media industry and created a formal judging academy, made up of industry experts, succesful entrepreneurs, veteran investors and previous winners. Produce clear guidelines on how each award should be judged and publish those guidelines online for all to see. That way, even though everyone would still disagree passionately with the results, they could at least be confident that something resembling critical and expert thought had gone into the process.

Of course no system is perfect – and there’s every possibility that Mark Zuckerberg will still find himself on stage in 2011 picking up his fourth Crunchie. But at least next year he might look a bit less embarrassed when he does so.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Following the successful launches of Twitter in Spanish and Twitter in French, the service has announced native support for another new language today: Italian. This means that of the initial “FIGS” languages (that is French, Italian, German, and Spanish) that Twitter wanted to get done, only German remains. Given that Twitter is crowd-sourcing much of the work for these translations, the speed at which they’re adding new ones is impressive.

Prior to the Spanish and French roll-outs, Twitter was previously available in English and Japanese. As usual, Twitter has written the latest blog post on the matter in the native tongue, so we’ll (roughly) translate it below.

We’re excited because today with the launch of the Italian version of our site becomes even more a platform for global communication. As always, we wish to thank all the translators who have participated in the project and who have shown us their skills.

If you have not already discovered, here are some users who are particularly interesting Twitt in Italian:

You can follow the famous journalists like @beppesevergnini or @radiodeejay of radio Linus & C. Or even one of the most famous Italian singer, Laura Pausini (@officialpausini).”

Now that the conversations on Twitter are enriched with increasingly diverse viewpoints on a global level, the network information will continue to grow in every nook and crevice of the planet. More events will be shared more knowledge and awareness will spread and the millions of people that feed Twitter will affect millions of others with their tweet.

“And what better way to celebrate the launch of Twitter in Italy? A nice Tweetup-based pizza, friends, and tweet. Our friends @pizzatwit will be happy to organize a pizza party and if you want to meet lots of new friends and tweet all night, you should follow their account and help them to organize one of their famous Twitter Pizza Party! “

To use Twitter in Italian, go into your settings and select the language from the drop-down menu. Enjoy!

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yFrog, an image and video sharing site for Twitter, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching both BlackBerry and Android apps. Yfrog for Blackberry lets you Tweet text, images and video to Twitter, view tweets, search Yfrog, view followers and people you’re following, and view messages and mentions

The Android app is more feature-rich, and lets you Tweet text, images and videos, view Tweets, mentions and followers, and search Twitter. You can also download multiple files at the same time, and upload videos up to 15 minutes long with high quality video encoding. And, GPS location will be included with upload.

yFrog, which launched by ImageShack earlier this year, will face competition from the Twitter clients that have their photo sharing tool such as Seesmic’s BlackBerry and Android apps. yFrog also has an iPhone app that faces competition from Twitter image sharing rival TwitPic.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It’s time for our irregularly scheduled email of the week, where we share the absurdity of our inbox with our readers. Today’s winner is an executive at an ABC affiliate who asks us how they might use video streaming service Qik in their news operation.

I know online streaming video isn’t inherently obvious to everyone in the world, but it should be inherently obvious to a television station executive who’s title is Director of New Media & Operations. And even if it isn’t, Qik has a video, using cartoons, at the top of their home page showing how to use the service.

We’ve removed the name and location of the affiliate to protect this poor guy’s job. But please everyone, we’re not a Q&A service for every aspiring new media director who has no clue what his job is all about.

Here’s the email exchange:

From: Michael Arrington
Date: December 3, 2009 6:40:23 AM PST
To: [removed to protect the lazy]
Subject: Fwd: ABC News needs help

Dear [removed],

I’d start of by going to http://qik.com/ and then hitting “play” on the flash video at the top of the site, which describes how the service works using cartoons. Then, if you want to proceed, click the large “Sign Up!” button on the bottom right of that page.

Mike

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [removed]
Date: Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 6:19 PM
Subject: ABC News needs help
To: tips@techcrunch.com

Hello,

I’m the Director of Operation for ABC News in [removed]. Could someone contact me to discuss how we may be able to use Qik in our news operation.

Sincerely,

[removed]

Director of New Media & Operations

Past Winners Of The Email Of The Week Award:
No, Don’t Sue Facebook. Yes, Do Get A New Boyfriend
Email Of The Week: CarAndDriver Launches Bold Online Link Farm Strategy
Email Of The Week: Journalism School Language Police

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0