Kevin Rose’s podcast network powerhouse Revision3 announced their financial returns for 2008, and they paint a rosey picture for online video. It also helps fill in a little bit of the gaps I and the rest of us were left wondering about following the cancellation of several shows on the network earlier in October.

The revenue for the network as a whole was reported to have tripled in 2008, though the press release doesn’t have any hard numbers as to what the total dollar amount was. Oddly, and unlike most media networks, rather than talking specifically about viewership and download numbers, Rev3 highlighed the amount of watching going on by quantifying it in minutes of “viewer engagement.” 

It’s definitely a term that’s being used to obfuscate the amount of actual viewership taking place.  Given how they seem to sell their ads (pre-rolls, post-rolls, host-read ads and certain affiliate relationships), it might be a more telling and insightful number to report exactly how many episodes viewed there were, rather than saying simply that they had achieved 140 million minutes of engagement monthly.

“Despite today’s tumultuous economic climate, Revision3 is making huge strides, dramatically increasing both viewership and revenue,” said CEO Jim Louderback in a statement today. “Like everyone else, we’re being cautious in how we approach 2009, but we anticipate continued growth over the coming months.”

They highlighted quite a few of their 60 advertising partners, including the Air Force, EA, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, Dolby, Virgin America, Go Daddy, Zune, Dr. Pepper, Carmex, Adobe, Microsoft and Axe.

The ones that are most prevalently advertising on the network these days are GoDaddy, Netflix, Michelob and Becks beer, GoToMeeting, and GoToMyPC, as we mentioned last month. Most of these seem to be affiliate style relationships, which definitely leaves the network with a lot of head room to grow.

2009 will see the online video market’s battle of the business models.

Revision3 is definitely one of the horses I’ve been watching run the video network race since their start in the business, and I’ve always had an affinity to its founders and many of their on-air talent. They’ve done a good job of pulling together a combination of recognizable faces, interesting genres and engaging shows. Because they’ve approached the business as creatives focused on video rather than aggregators with a broad-stroke approach (like Wizzard Media), they’ve an uphill battle on two fronts.

The first difficult front is that of content and audience monetization. Their application of commercialization has been uneven so far, though it seems to have markedly improved since the hire of Jim Louderback as CEO. Since the majority of the team is so focused on the creative side rather than the monetization side, this is to be expected, to a certain extent.

The other side of the business that’s an uphill battle for Rev3 has been the high cost of doing business as compared to a lot of the other players in their business.  Aggregators like Wizzard don’t have to front the costs of production, only that of distribution. That’s why they’re able to sustain their business off the same type of advertisments that Rev3 may have a hard time breaking even with.

This isn’t to say that Wizzard has a superior business model.  I think that if you talk to the business side over at Wizzard, they’ll readily admit that on average, the shows being produced at Revision3 are superior to what they host - that’s to be expected. Wizzard hosts tens of thousands of producers, whereas Revision3 hosts tens of producers.

That’s why Revision3 has made moves to crowdsource some of their production, but at it’s heart Rev3 is still a production house (not an aggregator). During the tough economic times we’re now facing for the forseeable future, it’s going to be a battle of the business models to see which one is boud for success.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Revision3 Expands Partnership with Blip.tv for Content DistributionLayoffs Hit Revision3Revision3 Branded Miro Player, Now Available for DownloadWine Library TV Moving to Revision3Revision3 Signs Transpera to Power Mobile VideoThe Digg Reel - Best of Digg VideosRevision3 Revisions. New Design Revealed Today.

Source:Mashable!

Only a few short years ago, the “registration wall” was a thorn in the side of every web user: major newspapers forced users to sign up in order to access stories. BugMeNot, which served up login details for all these registration-only sites in an instant, was an invaluable timesaver.

Those registration walls have crumbled, but creator Stateless Systems has a new foe: overpriced goods. Launching tonight, BeatMyPrice is a stunningly simple “people-powered price comparison engine” - enter the item name, the price to beat and where you found it on the web, and BeatMyPrice will compare that to data entered by other visitors. If someone found it cheaper elsewhere, BeatMyPrice serves up that result. It’s a product search engine, essentially, with a people-powered twist.

And surprisingly, our attempts to spam the site with junk prices were unsuccessful: whatever algorithm the site uses to filter results seems resilient to the kind of vendors who would claim to sell an iPhone for $1 to get more clicks to their own store. And if they can keep this data clean, our BugMeNot heroes could be sitting on a wealth of user-generated pricing information within a matter of months.

See also: Bargain Hunting: 20+ Tools for Finding Coupons Online

Source:Mashable!

Google Reader today announced the completion of one of their 20% time projects - translation. Google reader is an essential tool in my daily life as a blogger and news consumer, and the ability to consume news from a wide variety and large quantity of sources is only made possible by this tool, so being able to pull in news from other languages will only add to the value for me.

When the announcement was made this evening, the feature had not yet propagated to my account, but as with most updates Google does to their apps, logging out and reloading was required to see the new features.

I must say that I’m rather impressed with how it works.  Google translation has recently replaced Babelfish as my go-to service for translation, not necessarily because it’s more accurate (it seems to be stronger on some languages, and weaker on others), but because of the longer list of translatable languages available.  

When I applied the translation option to a mixed language ego search feed I have set up in Reader, I actually had to carefully page through each item to try to find the article that was originally in Chinese. 

To enable it on any feed you currently have set up, simply click onto that feed so that you’re viewing it directly (not a category/folder view), and then click on the Feed Settings pull down. From there, simply “Translate into my language.”

Might this actually be significant?

Over the years, I’ve found myself in the odd position of having seen my content become very popular overseas, despite the fact that my content is most of the time very centric to the United States.  None the less, my personal politics and technology podcast I produced throughout 2007 was far more popular in China and the Middle East, and very recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of my Mashable articles recieve a second life as they make the rounds through the various Chinese news networks.

There’s an undeniable cultural divide between both of the geographic areas I mentioned above and most of the Western world. In terms of the Middle East, the cultural divide is said by many folks smarter than I am to be the cause of the very physical conflict between the US and the Middle Eastern fundamental Islamic culture. In terms of China and the West, there’s very real divides between what our perspectives on freedom are and what theirs are. This is currently being highlighted by Robert Scoble during his China tour, and Paul Glazowski talked a bit about this over the weekend.

So, not to gush too much over what is essentially a minor feature update, but the potential for this very minor feature is that it seamlessly puts content from a much more diverse selection of authors and publishers in the mix, and works to break down the cultural barriers little by little.

Put another way, when I was interviewed over a year ago by Bill Grady on You Are the Guest, we broached this very topic of what the biggest stumbling block there existed between American members of New Media and the burgeoning sectors of New Media in Iraq and Iran, it came down to language.  Now that the most widely used tool for reading blogs has the ability to render that stumbling block moot, the fences that existed between the East and the West might start to come down more quickly.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Reader Graduates, Launches International VersionsGoogle Translate Now Eats its Own Dog FoodGoogle Reader Gets Search!Google’s AJAX Translation Apps Make You Global, Fast.Microsoft Launches Online Translation ServiceGoogle’s Translation Engine Now LiveNew Google Reader for iPhone: Still Neat, Not Very Social

Yahoo Buzz has just added a bunch of new features that make the site more social and more connected with the new Yahoo universal profiles. It also makes it look even more like Digg, but with Yahoo’s mainstream user base.

If you’ve established a contact list on Yahoo, you’ll now see the stories that those people are buzzing up in a new “Y! Updates” section on the Buzz homepage. Additionally, Buzz votes are now a part of user profiles, allowing you to see what stories a user has Buzzed up or down, and also see cumulative stats like how many times someone has been the “first Buzzer” (the original person to submit the article) and the total number of comments they’ve left on the site.

Yahoo has also added a commenting system very similar to that of Digg, allowing you give thumbs up or down to individual comments, along with threaded replies. Clicking on user’s avatar or name lets you click through to their profiles, where you can then advance to see their full Yahoo profile.

These new features are interesting for a couple reasons. First, they show the potential of the Yahoo Open Strategy – users of Buzz essentially become users of Yahoo’s new universal profile, helping create a huge social network behind the scenes. Additionally, it is starting to become increasingly obvious that Yahoo Buzz is going to keep adding the same features as Digg, as it did when it launched its “Up & Coming” section a couple months back.

Yahoo Buzz looks like it might be a bright spot within the flailing Internet company, that just shut down its Yahoo Live experiment earlier this week.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Yahoo Buzz Is Bigger Than Digg, According To comScoreYahoo Buzz: Upcoming Competitor to Digg or Google?Yahoo Buzz Introduces Widgets and RSS Feeds to Take On DiggYahoo Buzz - Absolutely No Threat to DiggSneak Peek: Yahoo BuzzYahoo Buzz Looks More Like Digg Every Day; Adds “Up & Coming” SectionDigg Shouldn’t Compete with Yahoo Buzz

Source:Mashable!

This post is part of Mashable’s Startup Review series, which highlights great unsung startups. The series is made possible by Sun Startup Essentials.

Company Name

Forvo

20-Word Description

Forvo, the pronunciation guide. All the words in the world pronounced by native speakers.

CEO’s Pitch

We have created a database for word pronunciations. We have +45000 pronunciations in 75 languages in only 6 months. We hope Forvo becomes a useful tool to learn languages. All words in all languages is our goal. The recordings are 100% real, not text-to-voice applications.

Mashable’s Take

Having access to text-based translations is certainly helpful when navigating a place in the world whose natives speak a language different than your own, and which you aren’t very familiar with. But short of a learning course at a local college, Rosetta Stone, or in interactions with users on Mango or LiveMocha, any sources for spur-of-the-moment vocal references to words or short phrases are certainly few in number. That’s where Forvo enters the picture.

Forvo isn’t a translation database. It’s a guide toward more accurate vocalizations of words listed in certain languages, which might make it seem a bit unnecessary to some visitors. But vocal interpretations can be quite important. Many words simply aren’t phonetically written. There are nuances in word structure that the novice speaker might require knowledge of in order to interact with foreign associates more fluently. In those cases, Forvo can prove itself an important asset.

Just this week the site’s creators announced that it had reached 50,000 pronunciations, based on the contributions of thousands of users. In all, Forvo ranks 5,000 among its membership. This might seem small, but shows that participants, given a well-developed toolset, can be very prolific in tasks which require little time or effort (in a popular sense, anyway).

It might take some getting used to, yet Forvo is pretty engaging all the same. You can easily browse the place, and if you know what you’re searching for, you’ll find the corresponding word you’re looking for soon enough. Multiple pronunciations can be recorded and rated by users, mapped, as well as embedded in Web pages or downloaded.

Of course, it’s important to stress how small the database really is considering the sheer enormity of the global language base its creators wish to involve. But there’s enough variety so far to make it an interesting growth experiment. Along with Forvo’s claim to (eventual) fame, “All the words in the world. Pronounced,” it counts 106,850 words with 48,610 pronunciations in 193 languages. The last statistic doesn’t have much room to climb, but the first two are ripe for expansion. The framework is in place for that to happen. All Forvo needs is more people power. A whole lot of it.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Social network hi5 has launched a language translation tool fully compliant with the OpenSocial 0.8 standard. The tool will make it easy for developers to localize their applications, while the users will be able to communicate in their language of choice not only on hi5, but also when using third-party applications available on the hi5 Platform.

Developers who don’t have translators of their own can also leverage hi5’s community of professional and crowdsourced translators.

This is a good example of why it pays off to be a part of the OpenSocial posse; you create an internationalized application compliant with the standard and you can deploy it on any site that supports it. Of course, Facebook and its platform is now big enough to draw developers regardless of OpenSocial, but these things do make a difference in the long run.

“The availability of OpenSocial translation services on hi5 lets third-party developers easily create localized, in-language applications for millions of users around the world, increasing adoption and awareness for many companies,” said Akash Garg, CTO and co-founder of hi5. On the third-party app developer side of things, Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike said they’re “excited to know that hi5’s crowdsourcing service would expand iLike’s reach internationally, helping music spread among fans from different languages, geographies and cultures.”

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google’s AJAX Translation Apps Make You Global, Fast.Facebook’s Translation Application Now Available to DevelopersMicrosoft Launches Online Translation ServiceNetLog Opens On-The-Fly Translations to DevelopersGoogle Translate Now Eats its Own Dog FoodGoogle’s Translation Engine Now LiveJajah Babel Offers English to Mandarin Translations Just in Time for Olympics

While Disney devotes most of its resources to entertainment for the youth of the world to consume and grow zealous over, the people dishing dollars for the company’s attractions - from theme parks to movies to books to toys and, more recently, online destinations - are naturally the adults of the world. So, after having constructed a thoroughly glitzy network on the Web called DxD (short for Disney Xtreme Digital), it has deemed it appropriate to launch another space, Disney Family, designed for use by “moms and dads to share the pride of being a parent, and have a lot of fun while (they’re) at it!”

The differences between Disney Family and Xtreme Digital are stark. While XD has no pretensions of being reserved in terms of the sheer volume of stuff presented for users’ eyes and ears, Disney Family is more basic. Its layout and color wheel are far more gentle on the senses. It is clearly meant for generations of people responsible for the those who spend their hours of playtime in XD land.

Disney Family is, in short, a content network. It does hold social aspects, mind you. But a quick glance at where among the main menu of options the ‘community’ tab is listed shows what Disney is prioritizing on the site.

Not that its slight understatement of the community feature is a bad thing. Disney is after all good with delivering material - whatever material it might be. So it is naturally going to trumpet reading material wherever it can. Sections for Food, Parenting, Travel, and Entertainment are all filled with things that typical Disney-aware family would likely appreciate. And the way each section is structured makes for an easy time. Dare I say appreciable as well?

Even if the Disney Family community isn’t writ large upon the site’s front page, it is there among the links. And like other facets accessible across the broader network, it is elegantly designed. Nothing alpha or beta about it, really. Everything seems to work as it should, and it’s all very intuitive to browse and operate. The only quibble I can make at this moment is that the site is very slow to load. Whether an intense traffic surge is to blame or that Disney Family requires more work behind the stage, I’m not sure. But going about the network is definitely not something I would currently call a speedy experience.

Also, though the sign-up process is simple enough, it is a bit tedious. Unless you desire to have your inbox stuffed with daily and weekly newsletters of all sorts, you’ll be unchecking at least a half dozen boxes before you’ve agreed to Disney’s terms and hit the registration button. And for those who tend to scramble through sign-ups on the Web, Disney Family by default selects female gender before male. So, all the dads out there, watch where you click. Of course, you can change this if you mistakenly choose wrongly out of habit of ignoring such particularities.

In all, I approve of Disney Family. I would certainly wish the site performance to be greatly improved, and soon, but the design itself is commendable. If Disney’s promotion of the new venue is effective, it will presumably fare very well.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Disney Acquires Club Penguin in $700 Million DealDisney’s Online “Theme Park” Heads to the UKDisney Acquires iParenting MediaDisney to Launch Social Network for Nintendo GamersDisney Launches XD with Parental ControlsVirtual Visits To Where Dreams Come True (No, It’s Not Neverland)Bring It On…Line. ABC’s CheerCamp Rallies Support for Films.

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: MeGlobe

20-word Description: MeGlobe is a Web-based instant messaging application that provides real-time language translation.

CEO’s Pitch: Although technology has exponentially increased the rate of globalization, language barriers still keep us worlds apart. MeGlobe allows the global online community to communicate with each other and collaborate across language borders. Our free, Web-based instant messaging application lets you to type in your own language and instantly translates it into the language of whomever you are chatting with.

Users can also make contributions to the translations MeGlobe performs. These contributions are used to teach MeGlobe to become a better translator. Every correction from the community brings us closer to our goal of erasing language barriers.

Mashable’s Take: It goes without saying that the best way to communicate across linguistic barriers is to learn tongues of others (and vice versa). The ability to speak multiple languages, either for business or personal use, or both, can be of limitless value. But of course it is hardly realistic to think we can know all. So it is good news when something of MeGlobe’s design makes its way to the public stage.

First introduced as a limited public beta in early summer, MeGlobe is now open to anyone who wishes to use it. It is free, and in addition to its support for Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Russian, Dutch (Netherlands), Greek, Korean, Arabic, Swedish, Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified, it recognizes two French flavors, French standard and French Canadian, and four - yes, four - English labels, including American, UK, Australian, and Canadian.

The interface of MeGlobe may take some getting used to. Its features are heavy on gloss. Some visitors I imagine won’t enjoy this. But others will probably think little or nothing of its visual attributes. The powers below the surface are what will have one’s lasting attention. And what makes MeGlobe particularly interesting, as with other language-based learning/translation startups of recent construction, is that it is very much user driven.

Granted, it appears to be a very small operation at present. All MeGlobe rooms appeared vacant in my personal trial with the service. But if you know who it is you wish to speak with, it may well turn out to be a convenient meeting ground.

I should note that I came across a bug of some kind when using the service. When browsing its features in my Firefox 3 installation, my cursor would seem to occasionally disappear beneath the surface of the main window in MeGlobe. Even so, aspects of the site could still be triggered and would continue to function. Closing the tab for MeGlobe and returning to the website did fix the issue, of course, and I was unable to replicate the problem, so I imagine your experience will likely be a decent one, more or less.

As it is freely accessible, I would advise giving MeGlobe a try. It is certainly new and requires some more attention on the development side as well as its user recruitment efforts. But for starters it seems rather promising. And as the CEO’s note made clear, the service is open to user contributions, too, so if you wish to offer some expertise as a sort of community service, you can do so. We here at Mashable hope to see more languages added to the fold. As a social construct, MeGlobe could grow to relatively popular proportions. It really only needs the right balance of members and backend managers to facilitate expansion.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - In Google Inc.’s (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world’s main languages, with machine logic, not expert linguists, leading the way.

Google’s approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it forgoes language experts who program grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers. Instead, they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to discern patterns for future translations.

While the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation, said Franz Och, 35, a German who heads Google’s translation effort at its Mountain View headquarters south of San Francisco.

"Some people that are in machine translations for a long time and then see our Arabic-English output, then they say, that’s amazing, that’s a breakthrough," said Och. "And then other people who have never seen what machine translation was … they read through the sentence and they say, the first mistake here in line five — it doesn’t seem to work because there is a mistake there."

But for some tasks, a mostly correct translation may be good enough. Speaking over lunch this week in a Google cafeteria famed for offering free, healthy food, Och showed a translation of an Arabic Web news site into easily digestible English. Two Google workers speaking Russian at a nearby table said, however, that a translation of a news site from English into their native tongue was understandable but a bit awkward.

FEEDING THE MACHINE

Och, who speaks German, English and some Italian, feeds hundreds of millions of words from parallel texts such as Arabic and English into the computer, using United Nations and European Union documents as key sources. Languages without considerable translated texts, such as some African languages, face greater obstacles.

"The more data we feed into the system, the better it gets," said Och, who moved to the United States from Germany in 2002. The program applies statistical analysis, an approach he hopes will avoid diplomatic faux pas, such as when Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s translator miffed then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by calling him the German "Fuehrer." The word is verboten in that context because of its association with Adolf Hitler. "I would hope that the language model would say, well, Fuehrer Gerhard Schroeder is … very rare but Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schroeder is probably 100 times more frequent than Fuehrer and then it would make the right decision," Och said.

The center of Google’s effort looks surprisingly modest. Och shares a Spartan office with two others on his team, with little clutter other than a shelf of linguistic books above his desk. That’s because the muscle work is performed by machines.

So far, Google is offering its own statistical machine translations of Arabic, Chinese and Russian to and from English at http://www.google.com/language_tools. Third-party software gives access on the site to German and other languages, Och said. "So far, the focus is let’s make it really, really good," Och said. "As part of a general Google philosophy, once it’s really useful and it has impact, then there will be found ways how to make money out of it."

Miles Osborne, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, who spent a sabbatical last year working on the Google project, praises Google’s effort but sees limitations. "The best systems (e.g. Google) can be very good indeed for language pairs such as Arabic-English," he said. But he added software will not overtake humans in expert translations as it has in playing chess; software should be used for understanding rather than polishing documents. "It may also be useful when deciding whether to pay a human to do a good job: you could imagine looking at Japanese patent documents and seeing if they are relevant, for example," he said.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt also sees broad political consequences of a world with easy translations. "What happens when we have 100 languages in simultaneous translation? Google and other companies are working on statistical machine translation so that we can on demand translate everything all the time," he told a conference earlier this year. "Many, many societies have operated in language-defined communities where they really don’t understand and are not particularly sympathetic to other peoples’ views because of the barrier of language. We’re about to have that breakthrough and it is a huge thing."