Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive | Epic MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive — a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service. The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans. Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet, enabling fans to get the free music they’re going to find anyway while contributing at least something to copyright holder coffers. Evidence and rumors are mounting to support the idea that free music websites are unfeasible. MySpace Music — the on-demand, ad-supported music service not to be confused with the band pages on the site — is losing money and could soon add a subscription option. See Also:
Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Ven Editor’s note: Guest writer Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker that seeks to give consumers the information and tools once limited to real estate agents. Previously, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, which had a public offering in 2002 but is now part of Oracle. Below he shares the best questions from investors during a recent fund raising. For startups, Christmas comes in November. Redfin is one of the companies that just closed a round. VCs are good at asking questions. Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business. 1. 2. Good question. 3. For us, this meant explaining what Redfin made this summer on a single home purchase, with a per-transaction account of what we spent on marketing to get customers ($27), on local data ($153), on customer service ($2,906) and so on. We knew our margin before, but hadn’t broken the numbers down into their most easily handled form. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Way.
The Word of the Year and How to Translate It This week, “unfriend” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In multilingual circles, this quickly prompted many — including us — to ask the question, “How do you translate that?” According to major media outlets (including the Telegraph, MSNBC, and many others), the term originated with Facebook. So, we went straight to Facebook to see how these community translation veterans rendered this celebrated word into other languages. The response? Well, apparently the news outlets got it wrong — “unfriend” is not an official Facebook term. Locale/Translation ar_AR / ????? While we were glad to receive the translations for “remove connection,” our linguistic curiousity was piqued, and we had to ask, “So, if not at Facebook, where did ‘unfriend’ originate?” While it is unclear who first used 2009’s Word of the Year, people have been “friending” and “unfriending” each other since the advent of Livejournal.
Report from the 50th ATA conference « Musings from an overworked Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA, Random musings, Translation. trackback Opening Ceremony of the 50th ATA Conference I have finally worked my way through all the mail, bills, errands, etc. that piled up while I was traveling to Myrtle Beach and NYC. The view of Times Square from my hotel room The hotel bar As I’m sure you have read everywhere else, this year’s conference had a record 2,300+ attendees. Michael Wahlster presents the ins and outs of Twitter to a packed room The presentations were without a doubt top-notch this year. Amanda showing off her double microphones and conference badge My presentations were very well-received. Tuomas at the start of our presentation I was most excited about my second presentation of the conference, Making Portable Document Format Files Work For You, with Tuomas Kostiainen. Chair massages complements of Bodyworks and ATA The highlight of the conferences for me are the free chair massages that are available to attendees in the back of the Exhibit Hall.
CRM Provider Partners for Multilingual Customer Care In a February 2007 report on multicultural marketing, we highlighted the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) software in improving the quality of interactions with multilingual clients and prospects. Last month, machine translation supplier Language Weaver and newly-minted translation management system (TMS) provider Sajan announced multilingual support for RightNow Technologies' CRM solution at the latter's 2009 Summit. CRM software can do a lot to improve how well a company knows and treats its customers. At its simplest, it can automate responses to common queries, suggest responses to less usual ones, filter out spam, ask respondents about the appropriateness of the answer they receive, and route messages based on the skill set of individual customer service representatives. Language Weaver previewed its integration into the RightNow Agent Desktop through the TranslateNow button.
Buyers Join Forces to Tackle the Translation Quality Conundrum We've written extensively about translation quality from the buyer's perspective, arguing that companies purchasing translation services should assume a more proactive role in defining their requirements, developing their own metrics, and communicating with suppliers about how they intend to evaluate their performance. Last Friday, we convened approximately 30 delegates from the industry's largest buyer organizations for a Common Sense Advisory colloquium hosted by Google in Mountain View, California. In our earlier research on buyer-defined translation quality ("Buyer-Defined Translation Quality," Aug08), we revealed the findings of interviews with 28 companies that translate hundreds of millions of words into multiple languages each year, most of which spend in excess of US$1 million on translation services annually. The report answered the question, “What does translation quality mean?” from the perspective of large-scale buyers of translation services.
The Other Immigrants Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Acc By Nicholas Kolakowski | Posted 2009-11-13 Email Print Microsoft announced a broad range of new functionality for Bing, its search engine, on Nov. 11. Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Access by Nicholas Kolakowski Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs.