English is the de facto lingua franca of global business (pardon the Latin). If you want to do business globally, you have to be able to speak and write English. But most of the world's conversations occur in other languages. We want ReadWriteWeb to be a venue for conversations about innovation not just in English but in all major languages. We want to hear stories about innovation in those languages by people who live and work in those countries. We also want some of those stories to be translated back into English for a global audience - English serving as the hub, as it were.

Our Trailblazing Site in France

ReadWriteWeb France is blazing a trail that we want to follow into other countries. Web innovators in France can now read a selection of posts from ReadWriteWeb in French. Fabrice Epelboin and his team translate ReadWriteWeb posts into French, localize the stories, adding bits that make them relevant to France, and create new stories specific to France. Some of these stories are clearly important to readers outside of France, and we will be bringing these to our global audience. One example is Fabrice's crusade against the Hadopi law. The law is specific to France, but the issues are global, and other governments are working on similar issues that could have alarming outcomes. We hope that ReadWriteWeb becomes both a local and global voice on issues such as this.

5 Other Country Versions in the Pipeline

Versions of ReadWriteWeb are currently being created for:

• China
• Korea
• Spain
• Holland
• Brazil

In each country, we are working with an entrepreneur who is passionate about Web technology.

These countries are all large economies. We already know how many people from these countries read our content in English. Many more will read and engage if the content is in their local language.

Engagement is critical. Reading is easier than writing. Many people are comfortable reading a post in a foreign language: even if they don't understand everything, they at least get critical information that is not available in their native language. But writing a comment and engaging in a conversation is much harder in a foreign language.

Why We Naturally Take a Global View

Many people assume, looking at our content, that ReadWriteWeb is based in Silicon Valley. We are not. We do have writers in the Valley, and we congregate there frequently for major events. But ReadWriteWeb's founder and editor, Richard MacManus, is based in New Zealand. Our COO, Bernard Lunn, is based in New York but is a Brit who was born in Berlin and has lived and worked all around the world. We are a networked business, with no single location, using the online tools that we write about to run our business. So viewing anywhere in the world as a good place to report from and not regarding any place as "foreign" comes natural to us.

For the quarter ending this past June, we compared the findings of three research firms that reported on the money invested in Q2:

• July 21, MoneyTree (PricewaterhouseCoopers, with data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters): $3.7 billion, with 612 deals,
• July 18, VentureSource (DowJones): $5.27 billion, with 595 deals,
• July 14, ChubbyBrain (a New York City-based startup partnering with ReadWriteWeb): $5.329 billion, with 613 deals.

VentureSource and ChubbyBrain seem to agree on the top line number. But MoneyTree's number is what most people report, and that is about $1.5 billion different.

As the old saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up."

Disclosure: Our VC Funding Report

ReadWriteWeb has an interest in this. We sell a report for $299 that has details on the 240 deals done this quarter in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS space (not clean tech or bio tech), and this is powered by data from ChubbyBrain. So we are biased. But it also means that we are engaged and have been looking at this fairly deeply.

Who Cares?

We also think that accuracy matters, and we are trying to figure whom accuracy matters to. We see three main types of participants in the industry:

1. VCs. They need accurate data for their own fund-raising. They have to be able to benchmark their own funds relative to the broader market.
2. Entrepreneurs. Data on what funding deals are being made, and why, helps them figure out how much to raise, when, and from which VC.
3. The startup "community." This is a catch-all for everyone else, who tend to align to either VCs or entrepreneurs. Journalists, the non-aligned fourth estate, want reliable data to key off interesting stories.

Why does this matter? The startup community matters to the health of the overall economy. As the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA, the trade association of VCs) likes to point out:

"Originally, venture-backed companies have created companies that accounted for 10.4 million jobs and over $2.3 trillion in revenue (based on 2006 data)."

So a headline like "VC Investments Falling Off Cliff in the US" really impacts a lot of people. That is the kind of headline that most journalists/bloggers wrote in April 2009, based on data reported by those trusted sources.

We wrote a really boring headline:

"VC Investment in Internet Deals Did Not Fall Off a Cliff."

That's a lousy headline for generating page views. It's a story about "the dog that did not bark."

The point is that headlines drive business behavior to wild excesses on both the down-cycle bust and the up-cycle boom.

Just good reliable data would help.

Innovation Is Global, But It Keys Off US Data

At ReadWriteWeb, we love to track innovation from far-flung corners of the world, and we see the globalization of innovation as a critical trend.

So we want to be able to report on financing trends for early-stage Web technology startups across Europe and Asia, in addition to the US. And we expect any research process to be able to scale to that challenge.

But the reality today is that, globally, entrepreneurs and VCs key off US data. If they were to key off bad data, that would matter to everyone.

Why This Matters

Driving with one's eyes in the rear-view mirror is dangerous. We take action based on what authoritative sources tell us is happening today, and we base our assumptions on what that means will happen next and plan accordingly.

In reality, these sources tell us what has happened in the past, and they may not even tell us that accurately.

When we at ReadWriteWeb look at the macro picture, we favor a contrarian view simply because the reality we see today is often not what the headlines trumpet. When the markets were in the late stage of a boom, we were sounding the warning signals.

When the markets were melting, we began to see surprising signs of life in the early-stage Web technology world we live in.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, knowing what the crowd is thinking -- and what the headlines are trumpeting -- is valuable. Even more valuable are the underlying facts and trends that may be missing from those headlines. In the disconnect between the two often lies a lot of opportunity.

We hope to ignite a debate that leads to greater accuracy and transparency of these numbers.

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.

The contest is open to all musicians over age 14, regardless of instrument or skill. But it's not going to be easy. It's going to take some practice.

To begin, download the sheet music and start learning your part. The music? You get to pick your favorite classical piece to showcase your talent. And you'll also have the opportunity to perform a new piece - "The Internet Symphony" - by Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Grammy and Oscar winning composer of the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But you won't be practicing alone. YouTube will help you learn the music, rehearse, and upload your performance for the virtual symphony video. Along the way you'll gain insight from Tan Dun and the London Symphony Orchestra, and get tips from pianist Lang Lang. Rest assured, all of your hard work and practice will pay off, culminating in a unique YouTube concert composed of users from around the globe.

If you perform well enough, there may be more in store for you. Musicians who exhibit that certain je ne se quois will get the opportunity to perform at the renowned Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Submissions are open until January 28, 2009. The live performance in Carnegie Hall will be held in April 2009.

Now, would be a good time to start practicing.

Last month, a post by Marissa Mayer on the Google Blog pointed out the necessity of machine translation for the future of search, saying that the idea of machine-assisted translation is "an incredibly empowering idea" that could "change the way users experience the web and communicate with each other."

That same concept of empowering communications has been incorporated into the new SDL Automated Translations tool, too. The difference with SDL's tool is that instead of just focusing on translations for the web, it also translates documents, emails, chats, company intranet sites, and even internal business applications. Thanks to the tool's open nature, it can be incorporated into anything from customer-facing content on the web to an internal wiki or blog.

The quality of translations can be adjusted to fit your needs, too. For example, you may want your homepage to offer perfect translations of your text, but would rather have on-the-fly, instant translations for use in IM and email. For those quick translations, the tool simply gives users an approximate understanding of sentences and phrases by using something the company calls 'gist' translations.

Why This Is Big

According to Gilbane Group analyst Leonor Ciarlone, technology advancements and pure computing power have made machine translation not only viable, but also potentially game-changing. A global economy, the volume and velocity of content required to run a global business, and customer expectations is steadily shifting enterprise postures from "not an option" to "help me understand where MT fits."

In their group's Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report, they discovered that participants in the study, content management practitioners in multinational organizations, identified machine translation as one of the top three most valuable technologies for the future. Also of note is global communications company Language Weaver's prediction of a potential $67.5 billion market for digital translation, fueled by machine translation. That predication takes into account how new technologies now provide translation at dramatically lowered costs than before. This opens up new, untapped markets, asserts Language Weaver CEO Mark Tapling.

Markets and making money are obviously the focus for the companies involved in these ventures, but we're excited to see machine translation going beyond Google Translate and opening up the business world, too.

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.

• The United States has the world's highest percentage of Opera Mini users over the age of 48 (7%) and 20% of US web users are women.


• Mobile web users in India are 97% male and that country has the lowest percentage of under-18 mobile web users (5.6%)


• South Africa has the world's highest percentage of women mobile web users (25%) and Facebook is the top site accessed in Opera Mini in that country.

The study is full of interesting statistical observations like the above and is displayed in a very readable format.

While the mobile web and Opera Mini in particularly are very widely used around the world, they are also only a part of the emerging global mobile experience. We like to read about mobile social change activities, often based on SMS, over at MobileActive - a great place to learn about different ways people around the world are using their phones. danah boyd's recent blog post about the way that Palestinian girls receive cell phones as a gift from boyfriends to facilitate serendipitous communication and then struggle with expectations that they will not use it to communicate with other people is also a very interesting read.

Some people argue that a binary definition of gender is falsely limiting and inappropriate for an accurate observation of any cultural experience, but the vast majority of people in much of the world do self-identify as one gender tied specifically to their sex. In that context, it's unclear on what it means that men are 10X as likely to use the mobile web as women - but who would have been surprised if the study had concluded that men spent 10X as much time on the mobile web (including at the dinner table)?

Opera's study will no doubt be discussed in settings ranging from marketing to advocacy of social equity in technology. It's a good one to have in the back of your mind when thinking about the mobile web.