Amara/Universal Subtitles gets $1MM from Mozilla and the Knight Foundation to internationalize Web video

Amara, the free/open subtitling/dubbing project that used to be called Universal Subtitles, has just landed $1,000,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Amara is run by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a charitable nonprofit that produces technologies to increase and deepen the average person's ability to participate in the online world. Amara is a technology that lets people bridge linguistic barriers in the world of video. Here's TheNextWeb's Anna Heim on the announcement:

In other words, it is a great example of what crowdsourcing can achieve. According to its parent non-profit, Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the platform’s users have translated over 170,000 videos since its founding in 2010, including popular videos such as President Obama’s message to Sudan and KONY 2012.
However, it could expand into other territories, such as dubbing – hence its rebranding with a broader name, which may also help it capture the sense of community it is trying to create. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Mozilla was interested in supporting the platform, its executive director Mark Surman explains: “Mozilla’s global translation and localization communities have always been at the heart of who we are. For the first time, Amara lets us extend our community translation work to include video,” said Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla. “We are proud to support Amara as they build a crucial part of the open web.”

Knight Foundation and Mozilla invest $1m in crowdsourced video translation project Amara

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the board of directors for the Participatory Culture Foundation)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Amara/Universal Subtitles gets $1MM from Mozilla ….

One m-million dollars?
- WhyBother
  
  It took me a second to catch on too: AmE and BrE traditionally differ on the meaning of every -illion over million:
  
  see http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/how-many-is-a-billion
  
  Clearly, we have just increased the budget from $1 million to $1 trillion. If we can insert a similar typo on the actual check, we should have enough for a small moon.
- Robert
  
  In economics, M is thousand, and MM is million. However, I’m completely unaware of any Canadian/UK bias to using MM for million outside of economics.
  
  Cory has done this twice, so clearly something’s up.
http://germanwotd.com Amelia_G

More information, please! What and where is Amara?
selfsimilar

I love Amara as a user, but as a developer it’s got some serious shortcomings. It works with Vimeo, but not on iOS – however nowhere on the Amara site does it say what players/platforms combinations it’s compatible with. Their API is not very well documented, and their tech help doesn’t always answer easy and direct questions*. I only bring this up since Cory says he’s on the board and hopefully the extra money can help with some of the issues I’ve been having.

* - http://universalsubtitles.tenderapp.com/discussions/technical-support/32-ios
Guest

It’s to differentiate between M (thousand) and MM (thousand thousand). Cory got it right.