ReadWriteWeb

We at ReadWriteWeb believe that innovation is a global business (as we noted in an earlier post on the Global Innovation Graph). The "death of distance" - the notion that the Internet makes location irrelevant - may be an exaggeration. Face to face always matters, and that will happen where hubs of expertise and capital emerge. Silicon Valley will likely remain the uber-hub for a long time. But the Internet does dramatically make it possible for an entrepreneur to start from anywhere and assemble a dream team of experts, partners, and customers from anywhere else. Innovation is not just a Valley story or a US story: it is a global story. And we want to write more about this exciting story. In this post, we'll tell you a bit about how we are starting to do that.

We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures' announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.

Always wanted to play in a symphony? Here's your chance - without even leaving your living room. YouTube has just announced the "world's first collaborative online orchestra" - the YouTube Symphony Orchestra - a one-of-a-kind experiment that provides individual musicians with an opportunity to collaborate with other musicians all over the world.

But that's not all. If you play well enough, show some creativity, and exude passion, you may find yourself seated in the famed Carnegie Hall, performing live with other YouTube musicians.

A new tool for businesses dealing with the issue of multilingual communications was launched this week from a company called SDL. The SDL Automated Translation Solutions tool attempts to solve the language barrier problem by providing instant translations of web content, Microsoft Office documents, instant messages, and emails. It also allows for integration of automated translation into corporate intranet infrastructures and business applications. Has the global language barrier just been broken?

Popular mobile browser provider Opera released a demographic report about their users today that provides some valuable, if sometimes unsurprising, insights into just who is accessing the web on their mobile phones. The two primary take-aways: 88.1% of people using the mobile Web around the world are male and most people using Opera Mini are between the ages of 18-27

Those big conclusions may be relatively unsurprising but the study also includes a number of other tidbits that might be news to you, as they were to us. It's a really interesting snapshot of different cultural contexts and technology use patterns.