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YouTube may be one of the biggest success stories of the Web 2.0 era, but if you are hearing impaired, the site is only of limited value. Starting today, however, Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube . Until now, only videos from a select number of YouTube's partners were captioned using the Google's automated speech-recognition software. Sponsor As Google notes, there will be over 700 million people who suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. As more and more content on the Web moves towards video , it's commendable to see that Google is working to make more of this content accessible to its users. Thanks to Google's translation technology, these captions can also be translated into over 50 different languages. It will surely take a while before this feature becomes available on all videos. After all, over 20 hours of video are now being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Whenever auto-captioning is available, however, you can simply click on the captions link underneath the video and turn the caption on. Google notes that its speech-recognition algorithms are obviously not perfect. If you spot a mistake in one of your own videos, however, you can easily download the captions and correct the error. Here are the current requirements for enabling auto-captioning on your YouTube 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: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers. Discuss
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YouTube Turns on Automatic Captioning for All Videos
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This morning, everyone is looking agog at the words of Google Europe boss John Herlihy, who's quoted in the Silicon Republic predicting the demise of the desktop computer. "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs," Herlihy said. Is this proclamation taking it one step too far or will we be keyboard-less and fancy free by the time 2013 rolls around? Sponsor The Silicon Republic writes that Herlihy's comments echoed "comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centering on the cloud, computing and connectivity." If, in fact, Herlihy is predicting the dominance of smartphones, and not just mobile technology, we have a few numbers for you. According to an October 2009 Forrester report on technology adoption in the U.S. information workforce, only 11% use smartphones, while 76% use desktops and 35% use laptops. And these numbers are looking at workers in the information industry, a sector we would expect to be on the razor's edge of mobile technology adoption. A January report on the mobile workforce indicates that just over 30% of companies report that at least one quarter of their employees work in the field for more than half of their time. According to the article in Enterprise Mobile Today reviewing this report, "in the next three years, more than half of employees will be using smartphones in the enterprise". At a recent event with our technologically savvy peers, we took an informal poll of everyone's work stations. Only one out of nearly 10 of us said we used a desktop computer. But are we working from our smartphones? No. Laptops and netbooks rule. We're thinking that if Google is predicting desktops to be irrelevant and including laptops and netbooks in this category, they might be undervaluing our keyboard addiction. When we look at the iPad, do we really see something we'll use to manage databases, code, write or otherwise really create information? Smartphones are obviously gaining speed with every day but they are far too limited to completely replace their keyboarded friends in three years time. But, if included in this definition of "mobile" are the ever-shrinking laptops, netbooks and tablets (with their accompanying keyboard docks) then we'd have to say we're nearing this future daily. Look around your local college campus and you'll see the next generation of computer users, each with a smartphone in their pocket and a laptop or netbook in their backpack. Look in some of the younger offices and you won't even see a desktop anymore, but instead desks with laptop docking stations. When we take into consideration, however, developing and third-world nations, where the only web is mobile web, the situation may be completely different. We think that we can be sure of one thing though - outside of very specific uses, the age of the 30-pound clunker humming away beneath your desk is indeed coming to an end. Discuss
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Can We Kick Our Keyboard Addiction by 2013?
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Monday evening I was made aware of a particularly interesting promotion that will be taking place over the course of two days before South by Southwest (SXSW). The event, or tour, is called The Startup Bus , and will challenge 12 participants to create as many tech startups as possible during a 48 hour bus ride from San Francisco to SXSW in Austin. The question this event raises in my head is whether these "beat-the-clock" entrepreneurship experiments are actually healthy for the broader startup culture. Sponsor This event isn't the first of its kind; in fact, it closely resembles the Startup Weekend event series, just on wheels and with fewer people. We also reported back in January on an Australian man who was attempting to create and launch a startup in a week with just $500. Going solo is a little different than collaborating with a large group of entrepreneurs with the guidance of experienced mentors, which has helped Startup Weekend produce several success stories from their events. It's unclear whether The Startup Bus will host a similar makeup of entrepreneurs and mentors, but what is clear is that they will face many challenges on the road to Austin. The participants will be crammed into a crowded bus for two days - not an ideal environment for constructive thought, at least not after the first day or so. A few years ago I took a two day bus ride of similar length from Madison, Wisconsin to my home in Phoenix, Arizona. I can attest that being on a bus (even a nice bus) for that long is not the most pleasant experience. I could have flown home, but I thought that a two-day bus ride with friends would be fun, and it was, but it was also exhausting. Sleeping, at least for me, was near impossible, and the claustrophobic nature of being packed elbow-to-elbow with 40-60 people (people I would even consider close friends) does not leave your brain in a great state, let alone foster the kind of critical thinking required by great entrepreneurs. Last week The Startup Bus announced some changes to their original plans, allowing for 40 spots on the bus, which could just be for mentors, investors and journalists on top of the 12 main participants. By more than doubling the number of people riding the bus, its uncertain if they will still be able to secure a motor coach with beds, something they had originally planned. Regardless of the amenities, however, sleeping on a bus doesn't come easy, beds or no beds. Issues have risen from collaboration events in the past surrounding intellectual property; when a group of people come together on an idea, who's to say who owns it? The Startup Bus is tackling this problem by having participants auction off ideas to the highest bidder at the end of the trip, an interesting solution to IP disputes. But enough about The Startup Bus, this article really isn't about them. This isn't meant to be critical of their experiment, or of the man in Australia, or any other startup "challenge" for that matter. In fact, The Startup Bus actually seems like a interesting experiment in entrepreneurship that could leave the participants with lessons they will carry with them into their futures. Additionally, these groups are providing a unique experience that can actually foster good ideas through collaboration of entrepreneurs, programmers and business people. The real question here is do these kinds of experiments ultimately benefit the overall startup community? Or do they give a false impression about the time, dedication and persistence that are required to start a successful company? Are people outside of the startup culture receiving the wrong impression about the seriousness and validity of startups? Granted, the conclusion of events like these marks only the beginning for a possible company or product, but does the haste in which these groups and ideas are thrown together speak to their overall quality? Eric Woodward of Nambu made his opinion on this matter clear Monday night in his Twitter status below. Is Woodward right to be critical of The Startup Bus? Or is he missing the broader point? I would argue that events like these do have a benefit, especially to those directly involved. The mentorship received by the participants at Startup Weekend is certainly enough to make it worthwhile, not to mention the potential created by having a large group of smart people all in one room. When smart people get together, good things happen. The Startup Bus could certainly replicate this experience, but the challenges of being on a bus will undoubtedly make things tricky. However, one could also argue that these benefits come at a price by creating a false sense of what starting a company requires, though I doubt any of these events or organizations are actually trying to belittle these ideals. I'll be interested to see what kinds of ideas manage to be built and launched by the Startup Bus participants when the group arrives at SXSW in a few weeks. This issue is bound to draw strong opinions on both sides, and that's not a bad thing. Please let us know how you feel about this issue in the comments below. Discuss
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The Startup Bus: Is This How Outsiders See Startup Culture?
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ReadItLater , the company behind the web browser add-ons and mobile applications that let busy web surfers mark articles for later reading, has just released a new service that will make it easier for you to finally catch up on your saved items. Before, as you browsed the web (either via desktop or mobile), you could use ReadItLater to accumulate a list of items you didn't have the time for at the moment. This was especially helpful for when you came across longer, thought-provoking articles - the kind you really wanted to sink your teeth into by devouring them word-for-word. Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you. Sponsor Digest: Imposing Order on the Chaos of Unread Items ReadItLater's creator Nate Weiner calls the new Digest "Read It Later with a brain." Instead of being presented with a simple list of headlines as you were before, the Digest organizes all your articles and groups them into topics. Its layout is somewhat reminiscent of Feedly , the popular start page made up of your Google Reader RSS feeds and Twitter posts. Like Feedly, which organizes topics by Google Reader folder names and tags, the Digest also employs a categorization system of sorts. The difference is, in ReadItLater's case, that filtering and organization is performed automatically with no extra effort required on your part.
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The question all along has been - "how will Twitter monetize?" and it looks like we have at least one answer today. According to an article in MediaPost , the release of a Twitter ad platform is "imminent" and we'll likely signs of it on our Twitter feeds within a month. According to the article, Anamitra Banerji told MediaPost after a meeting Monday, "We are working on an ad platform, but it's only in the test phase." Sponsor Banerji assured MediaPost that Twitter would make it "explicity clear" that a post was from an advertiser and not a regular users. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association recently released a guide for companies to use, suggesting they use #spon, #paid, and #samp hashtags to indicate their relationship to a product being tweeted about. Banerji said this was simply a good work around, but that Twitter would take a different approach. As opposed to someone tweeting about a product, these ads will be owned and operated by Twitter, much in the same way Google offers its AdSense advertising. Banerji did, however, offer a statement that separated the Twitter ad platform from others: "We don't think of ourselves as a Web site -- essentially it's a platform," Banerji said. "We don't really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us -- and that's if bad ads get identified in Twitter -- it's a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior." While the article says we should see signs in about a month, we can only wonder how long it will be. If you remember, Twitter announced their "hovercards" feature at the beginning of this month, but most of us are still waiting to see the feature pop up on our own pages. This one, however, looks like it might be around by the beginning of next month, according to GigaOm . They report that "one source in the media industry" says that Twitter may launch the ad network during South By Southwest Interactive, which begins in Austin on March 12. Discuss
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Twitter Sees Green: Ad Platform 'Imminent'
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