Transcript for dotSUB at Video 2.0 Meet Up in NYC

This is pretty unique--demonstrations of technology companies and content producers and--again, the idea is to keep

as much interactivity as possible. It's not a lecture, it's not a presentation,

there's no homework at the end even though we're at a--in a lecture hall

so feel free to interact and ask any questions and interrupt people. Okay? Here's what we're going to do.

We have 5 startups presenting tonight. I don't know if NNBC's a startup ...

We're a startup within a larger organization. Let's put it that way. [spoken by someone off screen]

But the spirit--the entrepreneurial spirit.

Exactly. [spoken by someone off screen]

Okay, great.

I share an office with 3 other people if that helps. [Laugher] [Computer screen with RSVP for NY Video 2.0 Group January Meeting]

Probably have a bigger budget than most of the other guys but we'll see.

And each one is going to come up one at a time might be a couple. We have 5 companies tonight.

We're going to do them in the following order. First of all, We're going to have Michael Smolens from dotSUB.

Afterwards we're going to have Jeff Pulver. Probably most of you know Jeff. Jeff's here from his new startup Network2.

He also has promised us a promotion code for a discount to a conference that Jeff has called Video on the Net.

Anybody who's anybody knows this conference. It's out in San Jose in March

and we have a special discount code for New York Video 2.0 members. Jeff's going to announce that a little bit later.

We have Aaron Cohen from Bolt. We have David from YouareTV and that's it. Five companies tonight.

I'm John ____, the attorney for ...

... keep him in check ...

I'm Chris Brogan - I'm not an attorney. I'm a community developer--for Network2.

Excellent. Okay, anyone else here? Jeff, picking it up here.

Jeff Pulver

Jeff Pulver. Yeah. [Laughter]

[Narrator turning and walking across the room]

[Michael Smolens standing behind desk]

Today, basically what we’ve done is with the explosion in video and film content on the web, we’ve realized that it’s very important

because there’s 6.7 billion people on the planet earth and many more people don’t speak English than speak English

and all of this content that’s people spending millions of dollars to create is generally delivered in this Latin source language

and unless it’s a very expensive Hollywood film or a television show, very little content ever is made available in other languages.

So we’ve created a browser-based tool that is simply and … to use so that anyone on any browser, with no downloads

and no training—along—as soon as you have the permission of the rights’ holder and the videographer and the filmmaker

to subtitle that film from its original language into any other language on the fly at no cost. Took us about 2-1/2 years

to develop the technology. Laurie is one of our partners—our third partner who lives in Washington, D.C. who’s developed the

technology and I’ll quickly show you how it works. I’ll demo some of the films and videos that we’re doing. I’ll show you the

transcription. We’re going to use Jeff Pulver’s promo video for VON in March for our demo and then we’re going to invite you to

subtitle during the session to see how many of you … and speak a foreign language--to see if we can get the video in multiple

languages by the end here. So this is what it looks like. Whatever you would say and then you would type obbledygook. You hit

the submit changes button and in real time you will see that rendered as a subtitle on the video on the right hand screen.

Mis—misspellings, typing—--that could be in any language and any text. That’s how the technology works. It can be in any character

set and any file. So our first major program was done in the month of November for not-for-profit ... who was honoring

Muhammad Yunus for … won the Nobel Peace Prize. Visa International came up with a $25,000 grant. We hired professional

translators from 62 countries. These are the languages that this film was subtitled in in three weeks. Many of you never heard

and a lot of you would not know where the languages are from. Those are the languages and this is what the video looks like

when it is playing with our player which is a flat faced player. So this is in English.

There’s Esperanto.

[question in the background]

It can be. Yes.

There’s Farsi.

There’s Finnish.

There’s French.

There’s Ga.

There’s Galician. So you can scroll through in real time any video in all of the languages.

There’s Georgia and—it’s—it’s boxes because—flash does not support that character set. So some of the languages in the world—

There is German. So that’s how the technology works. We—we think that people should be able to watch all of the films

in all of the languages without registering in order to subtitle or to transcribe the film. You need to register with a username and

password. So what we’re doing is our technology allows people to upload films like this—just like YouTube or Google Video.

You put the name of the film and we have a permissioning page—who can do this film—anyone, any registered user, anybody

who what? Who can transcribe this film, who can translate this film and then you post a new film exactly like this in any video

format—flash … Quicktime real anything will convert it into our player and it then becomes ready for transcription. What does that

mean? So we’re going to take Jeff Pulver’s video which is the second one.

Okay.

[talking off screen]

So I’m going to show you how this works. We just uploaded it from YouTube and so we’re going to—hopefully this works.

[Spring 2007 Video on the Net is taking place San Jose]

So I just type in Spring—what I heard—Spring 2007 Video on the Net. I click the down—down arrow—I put the end time

right here. Go to the next line and then listen to what he had to say--

[The Marriott Hotel]

—at the Marriott Hotel. And you can do this in the source language that the video is made in and then I say Done.

So the video now is transcribed. It shows that it’s in English and so we’re playing it in progress.

[Spring 2007 Video on the Net]

And there it is subtitled with what you typed. That’s how you transcribe and time capture a video.

[Get some great people together]

So we’ve got—with Jeff we have another one of his videos which I’m going to invite you to subtitle afterward.

So you upload a video in any source language. Just convert it into our format. You can then transcribe it or have someone else transcribe

it and then we make it ready for translation. What does that look like? When it’s ready for translation, it looks like this.

We have—this is a music video that’s available, for example, in these languages. So when you want to translate this film,

the source language is in English. If you wanted to go into … you would hit ...

And you would see a transcript that would look like this. But if you didn’t happen to speak … if you didn’t happen to speak English,

And you only spoke, for example, Russian and you wanted to translate this from Russian into … you would go this way

and then you could translate it and the source language for your transcript would be in Russian.

So this expedientially increases the language pair possibilities for all videos to be

trans--translated on the web in real time. And as people are translating it, it can be translated in either wiki … translation

or people in Moscow can type in 3 lines in Russian. They get bored, they get tired and they’re done.

Someone else can come in and add to it, edit it, fix it IF the person who owns the rights chooses that. If not—pardon me?

Thirty seconds.

Rocketboom is someone that we’ve been doing a lot of work with and—Andy—everyday as of January 4 we’re creating a version

of Rocketboom as caption for the hearing impaired and available for subtitling and at their website they have been

gracious enough to put a translate tab right underneath the Rocketboom video player and when—so when you—

--you see it when it comes up, here it is right here [music playing] and that takes you to the dotSUB home page where then we’ve

uploaded, transcribed and right now it’s in early beta and just a very few people are aware of it and are translating it into multiple

languages. Ultimately all—we hope many, many video podcasts and videos will be able to facilitate so having a player to play videos

in all languages in the world on their page rather than the cumbersome thing of just in English and there are—

--we basically have 3 revenue and distribution ... one where most of the content it has no hopes of any revenue.

It’s a free to use and free to embed API that we want everybody to use to become ubiquitous. We’re going to be having a

licensing model and a revenue sharing model and for those companies that have corporate professional videos, Hollywood

or anybody that wants you to use professional translators, we have a relationships with networks and professional translators.

Thank you. [Applauding]