mathiaskarlsson

Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered it’s launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.

Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.

People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

It’s a mobile and web app that lets users benefit from on-the-spot ‘real time’ interpretation, in any of the world’s spoken language.

Skilled amateurs and professional interpreters go on the platform and earn money for their time. Professional interpreters are much more expensive – but this democratises the process.

Competitors include Google Translate Conversation Mode – a feature available on Android, but only for a limited number of languages.

Eventually they want to be able to get to the point where they can do very live translation.

Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected.

According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll still be getting your devices first.

In case you’re new to this little shipping snafu, shipments of Sprint’s new EVO (along with those of their AT&T-based cousin, the One X) were prevented form entering the country thanks to an exclusion order handed down by the International Trade Commission. The entire convoluted story started last year, but here’s the tl;dr:

Back in July, HTC was found by ITC judge Carl Charneski to have infringed on one of Apple’s patents — specifically, it involved recognizing a particular structure within a set of data and binding it to a particular action. Sounds pretty dry, I know, but if your phone lets you directly a call a phone number by touching it in an email, you’ve seen the patent in action.

At the time, HTC stated that they were working on fixing the offending UI flourish, and part of the holdup for customers was apparently because the phones were being spot-checked for compliance.

With Sprint’s EVO shipments said to be on the move once more, now the question becomes whether or not shipments of AT&T’s One X are as well. I’ve reached out to AT&T for confirmation one way or the other, and I’ll be updating the post as I hear more.

The second Vimeo Festival + Awards is fast approaching, celebrating the most creative and original films that have premiered exclusively online. Now, Vimeo has announced the 2012 finalists in all categories, including Animation, Action Sports, Documentary, Music Videos, Advertising, Fashion, Experimental and more.

The event, which will take place on June 7-9, 2012 in New York City, gathers together the likes of Mike Figgis, Ted Hope and Lucy Walker to watch the winning films from this year’s submissions. Also featured at ceremony will be the premiere of Limbo, a new film by last year’s grand prize winner, Eliot Rausch. Rausch created the film using grant money from his award.

Check out a handful of this year’s finalists below:

From Jeremy Boxer, Director of the Vimeo Festival + Awards:

There has never been a better time to be creator. The Internet has created a leveled playing field, so that now everyone now can fundraise, shoot, edit, and distribute their projects. What’s next for online video? Well, that’s what we will be exploring at this year’s festival with the help of our awesome speakers. We have designed the festival to have something for everyone from any level of experience. Now that the barrier to entry has come crashing down perhaps we can find new creators with ideas yet to be seen and encourage so many others to start using their imagination so they too can start to create.

To get a better idea of what 2012 will be like, you can check out the recap from Vimeo’s first festival below:

➤ The Vimeo Festival + Awards in NYC

You’ve probably been overwhelmed by enough Instagram shots of this weekend’s annular solar eclipse to think you’ve seen it from every angle and through every filter. But you haven’t seen anything like the video above.

Photographer Cory Poole made the one-minute video by combining 700 still images through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope, according to his YouTube post. The telescope “has a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” Poole writes. Add in the dramatic, spacey soundtrack, and the video becomes even more of a winner.

What are the coolest annular solar eclipse photos and videos you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments.

More About: space, viral, viral videos, YouTube

“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review.

DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist.

The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will.

The twist is that users are encouraged to tag up pictures with a visual tag of what brand each item of clothing is. Alas, the site does not yet do visual recognition of the clothes. Maybe one day…

TagBrand doesn’t call this check-ins, but – wait for it – “brand-ins”. People can then comment or vote on the brands their friends are wearing. Clearly the opportunity here is to capture a fashion-obsessed audience and provide a platform for advertisers.

Thus, although Tagbrand is like DailyBooth if everyone on DailyBooth was obsessed with fashion, it’s this tagging element which looks pretty viral.

The product combines contains brands, polls and e-commerce. There’s a lot of virality built into the service – every tags has a Twitter or Facebook button on it.

But clearly the people who do this are obsessed with fashion. TagBrand gives them the tools to be obsessive. The polls certainly feature makes the experience more entertaining when you’re trying clothes out.

Now, clothing brands and retail stores are constantly chasing these people. This is one way of delivering them a highly targeted audience. Tagbrand’s business model is based on creating a special marketplace for them which is visible while browsing the brand’s tag on a photo. The stores provide Tagbrand with a price-list and its system attaches them to a “Recommended” block.

So while browsing their friends’ clothes, users see the real-world item beside the image and can purchase from there (click are on a CPC basis). Users also get delivered latest news on brands they such as new collections.

Admittedly they have older competition in the UK operation, WIWT.com, but Tagbrand’s visual tags are a slightly cuter way of doing it.

TagBrand has secured a $100,000 seed investment from Russian investor Glavstart, while founders Ivan Olenchenko and Alexandr Kobozev have been working on startup projects in Russia for a while now. (And we should add they did a pretty good pitch at a TechCrunch meetup in Moscow last year).

Q&A

Judges asked about extending the app into giving users the ability to upload their own home made brands, and that seemed to be on the cards according to the founders.

Currently in Russian and English, the app launches today in the US.

The Judges also had an issue about copyright and the images uploaded, which seems a fair point.

Right now 80% of usage of the product is on the iPhone app versus 20% on the web.

So far they’ve had 15,000 registered users in 2 months with no promotion/marketing just in the Russian market. With about $4.5 billion spent annually on advertising clothes, they reckon there’s plenty of money to be made out there. Da!

London soccer club Chelsea won its first Champions League title on Saturday, defeating German side Bayern Munich to become Europe’s best team. It was a nail-biting close final match that went down to a penalty shoot-out.

But on Twitter, it wasn’t even close — Chelsea was dominant.

The all-star London club gained 73% of team-specific Twitter mentions related to the match, while its star players were buzz magnets as well. The match’s five most-mentioned players — in order, Didier Drogba, John Terry, David Luiz, Ashley Cole and Petr Cech — all suit up for the Blues.

Chelsea’s coach even outpaced his Bayern counterpart by a rate of more than two mentions to one.

And Chelsea’s sponsor, Samsung, was mentioned nine times as often as T-Mobile, which sponsors Bayern.

This is all according to research by the marketing firm ExactTarget, which tracked and analyzed more than 1.1 million match day tweets to see how the Champions League final played out online. ExactTarget’s findings are summarized — in both German and English — in the infographic below.

Despite soccer’s worldwide appeal, nearly 69% of Champions League chatter took place in English. The chattiest countries? Great Britain, at almost 23%, the U.S. (9.9%), Brazil (9.4%), Germany (8.6%) and Indonesia (5.8%). The rest of the world together, meanwhile, produced just over 43% of Champions League tweets. Spanish was the second most popular language for tweeters, at 15.8%.

This celebratory tweet from Chelsea’s official Twitter account gathered the most match day retweets, with more than 7,000. Congratulatory posts from UEFA and Spanish power FC Barcelona also gathered more than 2,800 retweets apiece. Chelsea, meanwhile, used the weekend’s social media buzz to surge past 1 million Twitter followers.

For the full picture of how this weekend’s Champions League final played out on Twitter, check out the infographic below.

Did you follow the match? What role did Twitter play for you? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy toksuede, Flickr.

More About: infographics, sports, Twitter

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We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.

That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional coach potato experience.

Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls The Stevie Factor to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy.

When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices.

The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon.

You can visit the Stevie website here, download the iPhone app here, and download the Android app here. (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.)

Back in February we told you about Lady Gaga’s social network “Little Monsters”, which could turn the concept. of how celebrities interact with their fans on its ear.

The site, powered by Palo Alto based Backplane and still in private beta, skips social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing Gaga’s fans to interact with her directly.

When celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga joined Twitter, it was a major turning point for the product. A whole new userbase flooded the micro-sharing network, who foam at the mouth for every 140 character update from their favorite singer or movie star.

With her own social network, Gaga is making her fans feel even more special, as well as setting them up for opportunities to sell albums and schwag to them directly:

What’s more intimate than that experience? A mobile one of course. According to one of the designers at Backplane, a “Little Monsters” app is in the works:

Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Caleb Ogden (@calebogden) May 21, 2012

In response, Backplane’s CEO said that we might see Gaga on the iPhone mighty soon:

Soon! RT @calebogden: Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Matt Michelsen (@MCMichelsen) May 21, 2012

What does the app look like? Take a look at the screenshots that Caleb Ogden shared on Dribble today:

While Little Monsters might not take a huge bite out of Twitter’s usage, it surely will steal eyeballs when it comes to Gaga fanatics. If the musician is posting exclusive updates to her own social network, there’s simply no reason to look elsewhere for the content.

Backplane is a community platform, meaning that the Little Monsters model could be spun out an infinite number of times for other celebrities with massive appeal. Justin Bieber anyone?

Only a couple of weeks after launching its much-awaited iPad app, Spotify has now opened its song-filled doors to Australia and New Zealand. In a couple of blogs that look to be all but copy/pasted, the company runs down its services and the pricing points for each.

Free, Unlimited and Premium are all available. Unlimited will run $6.99 AUD and $7.49 NZD, while the Premium pricing is $11.99 and $12.99 respectively.

The company has been on a tear with new updates lately. We’ve gotten the Spotify+Apps combination, improved search and most recently an update for Playlist Radio. Unfortunately, the company’s implementation of its embeddable Play Button is a bit wanting, as it requires that you have Spotify installed in order to play back a track. But with improved social features and a ridiculous amount of funding underway, it seems Spotify is bent on world domination.

Bradley Mellon

Solar eclipse as seen from El Centro, California

Click here to view this gallery.

Over the weekend, an astounding astronomical phenominon occurred: an annular solar eclipse. This type of eclipse, which happens less than once a year, occurs when the Earth’s moon crosses paths with the sun to create the effect of a spectacular glowing ring. This is due to the size of the moon compared to the size of the sun.

Only people in a certain geographic area get to glimpse each of these rare phenomena. This time, people in Japan, California, Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona, and New Mexico were granted the best view.

We asked Mashable readers to submit their best picture of the solar eclipse. We received very inventive photo submissions from across the world.

Check out some of our favorite solar eclipse photos that you sent us, and let us know in the comments what you thought of the eclipse.

More About: photography, Solar eclipse, space

As we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon’s lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparel industry. One of the most unique premises I’ve seen thus far is StyleSaint, a startup which at first glance seems like a Pinterest for fashion, but with a unique real-life twist.

To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can chose from over 55K “tear sheet” images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you’ve got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the “Create Stylebooks” link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you’ve torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on “Create” to publish to the site.

In addition the resulting books are Facebookable, tweetable and embeddable, the embeddable stylebooks function as an overlay on embedded sites, preventing traffic re-direction. In addition to social sharing layer, users who want to drill deeper into the StyleSaint community can apply to be part of the StyleSaint Creative Collective, the group of passionate editors that scours the web looking for, linking to and tagging stunning, fashion-related images.

While the stylebook portion of the site is delightful as a content play, the most compelling thing about StyleSaint is that co-founders Brian Garrett and Allison Beal eventually want to use the collective data from the style booking activity to come up with its own line of clothing. “StyleSaint is the only company editorializing the phenomenon of image discovery and curation and combining it with a manufacturing, vertical eTailer ecommerce model,” Beal writes. ”It will definitely be the hardest part of our site.”

Hoping to come up with a new, wholesale product (5-10 SKUs) every couple of weeks, Beal tells me that all pre-production on the clothing line will take place in LA, as the company has teamed up with the same manufacturing partner who is responsible for producing the Mary-Kate & Ashley line, The Row, STQ, James Perse and Vince. Beal views the site’s competition as Modcloth, NastyGal & ASOS once the the eCommerce components come into play. The company wants to unveil the offering around fashion week next fall.

StyleSaint is currently seed funded by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst,  Crosscut Ventures and LA angel investors. Beal hopes to raise a Series A in the next couple months, to finance its commerce arm.

Judges Q&A

Q: How exactly do you use the stylebooks to build fashion?

A: We use them collaboratively, and build a meta-stylebook.

Q: Have you thought about changing the business model?  To pre-order or subscription?

A: Yes, we’ve thought that pre-order wasn’t for us, and many people do subscription better.

Q: You’ve talked a lot about inspiration, but I haven’t heard very much about your business model.

A: We’d like to think of ourselves as Net-A-Porter meets Zara. The “Shop” button is going to be right next to “Explore” and “Create” on the site.

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers’ lives easier (its first slogan: “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.”) Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple’s domain.

Today, about 50 percent of GitHub’s traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

GitHub released a similarly-targeted Mac client last year, which has since seen wide adoption. However, as popular as Apple has become, the majority of enterprise development still takes place in a Windows environment. As a result, GitHub has been looking to make its platform more appealing to corporate developers and enterprise, and its new Windows app intends to do just that.

Developing in private or open-source for Windows has lagged behind in terms of adoption among developers because they’ve lacked a full toolset for project collaboration, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner says, so, with its new Windows client, the startup just made it easier to get up and running using Git and GitHub on Windows machines.

GitHub for Windows is a native app that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8, and includes a complete installation of msysGit. The app syncs users’ code to the cloud and allows developers to clone their repositories right from the app or directly from GitHub.com with its new “Clone in Windows” button.

Of course, anyone who’s been following GitHub’s progress will notice that it took the team more than a few days to finally release its Windows client. As one might expect, the reason for this was, besides a need to tear down development hurdles for Windows developers, that the team wanted to create an app (and a toolset) they would actually use themselves. In order words, to build a Windows app by Windows developers — for Windows developers.

To do that, GitHub has been amassing a pretty serious team of developers who collectively — aside from having cache in the community — own quite a bit of experience developing on and for Windows. For starters, GitHub brought on Phil Haack and Paul Betts, both of whom left Microsoft to join GitHub to help ship the app.

Before GitHub, Haack led the development of both ASP.NET MVC and NuGet, among other things, during his four-plus year stint as a senior program manager at Microsoft. Paul Betts joined Github following a four-year run at Microsoft, where he worked on Vista, and created development tools, among other things.

GitHub for Windows also relied on help from Tim Clem, Cameron McEfee (the guy behind GitHub’s Octocats), and Adam Roben to get the startup’s new app ready for shipping.

Developing tools that are useful to Windows developers right out of the box is essential to the success of GitHub. Of course, most big companies are still hesitant to put their code in the cloud, and although the startup puts most of its focus on open source project hosting, it’s free. The company makes its money off of its private repositories, and so better tools for companies and corporate developers could mean a significant boost in revenue for GitHub.

Of course, it’s also for the love of a challenge.

For more, find GitHub’s announcement here.