Udacity looks to expand internationally with crowdsourced captions

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:32:24 +0000

E-learning startup Udacity has partnered with Amara, formerly known as Universal Subtitles, to use crowdsourcing for closed captioning of its video assets. Volunteers can use Amara’s web-based captioning editor to add subtitles to more than 5000 Udacity videos, and Amara co-founder Nicholas Reville told me via email that he expects “thousands of volunteers join over the next month.”

Udacity made headlines just a few days ago when it raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures and others. The company’s free online classes have been attended by some 750,000 students since Udacity’s launch in January.

Closed captioning could not only help Udacity to make its content accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing students, but also be the first step towards an international expansion. Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun made this very point in a press release announcing the partnership, which quotes him saying:

“We hope that by engaging our users with Amara’s platform, we can make our content more accessible by adapting to our international population’s languages. That is ultimately the core purpose of Udacity. We want to democratize education by broadening access and delivery of high quality university learning and content.”

For Amara, the partnership with Udacity means that it is expanding its footprint in the e-learning space. The crowdsourced captioning platform has already partnered with Coursera, TED and Khan Academy. Reville told me that altogether, the platform has seen more than 68,000 volunteers subtitle more than 200,000 videos in more than 100 languages.

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How Robot Cars Could Be More Sustainable Cars

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 01:00:33 +0000

Looks like when Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said recently that he thought it was ridiculous that humans, not computers, drive cars, he wasn’t kidding. The Internets are abuzz this weekend with a report in The New York Times that Google has been quietly building self-driving robotic car technology, based on the work of Google engineer and Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun, who co-invented Google’s Street View mapping service.

While the project is being looked at as an example of just how far outside of its core business Google has been reaching, the prospect of self-driving, computerized cars is compelling because they could make driving more sustainable.

The more computerized a car is, the more optimized it can be for efficiency, sticking to the most direct routes, driving in the most efficient manner (avoiding lots of quick acceleration) and reducing fuel consumption. According to the Times report, self-driving cars could also mean fewer accidents, so car companies could end up building cars that require fewer materials, which would be lighter and more fuel efficient. Robotic cars could also facilitate more resource efficient car-sharing services — say, if a Zip Car you booked could just drive to you when you’re ready, instead of it sitting in a parking space.

Entrepreneurs, investors and big car companies alike have already been turning to software, networks and GPS navigation systems to make driving more efficient. For example, startup GreenRoad, which is backed by Richard Branson and Al Gore’s funds, sells driving services to public and private fleets that reduces fuel consumption and optimizes routes and driving habits based on driving data from a processor, a GPS unit and a cellular connection embedded in the vehicle. Startup the Virtual Vehicle Company has built a mobile app that captures data about how fast or slow a car is driving, along with other details about a person’s driving habits, and creates efficiency services around that driving data (see Car Data As The Next Platform for Innovation, GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

The big auto makers like Nissan are also embedding more IT and computerized services in their latest vehicles, like the recently-on-sale, all-electric LEAF. The LEAF has an AT&T connection, GPS navigation, and applications that show the driver where the nearest electric vehicle charger is and how many MPGs the car is getting at any one time. All of the hybrid and electric vehicles I’ve driven for our weekly Green Overdrive show have computerized systems that encourage and show the driver how to drive as efficiently as possible to save battery life and gas.

The idea of robotic cars that could enable more efficient sharing of cars is particularly interesting to me. Using networks, the web and software to share “stuff,”and rethink the idea of ownership will be one of the most important Internet-based cultural shifts of my generation. Spride Share, a startup that officially launched last month, is piggy backing on City Car share’s service to expand car sharing to personal vehicles.

Remember, too, that the next generation of electric vehicles and biofuel-based cars will take years to penetrate the mainstream, and in the meantime the shift to more sustainable transportation will rely on IT and more efficient internal combustion engines.

Yes, a lot of this robot car discussion is blue sky speculation. Google’s research is still a decade away from being able to be commercialized and Google might not even find a business case to commercialize it even then. Google has been endorsing robotic driving for years — back in 2006 at CES, Larry Page gave a keynote on the back of the Stanley robot car, which was developed by Thrun and his team.

Still, while robot cars sound ridiculous at first, our vehicles have been in the process of converting into more sophisticated computers for years. GPS navigation systems are now fully mainstream, taking a lot of human interaction out of navigating the road ways. The final step is minimizing human interaction in general. And if we can optimize that for more sustainable driving, it just makes sense.

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GigaOM » Sebastian Thrun

Udacity looks to expand internationally with crowdsourced captions

How Robot Cars Could Be More Sustainable Cars