We sat down with Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures to talk about the trends he’s seeing in tech and the trends he’d like to focus on in the coming year. We also picked his brain about advice he would give to startups.
Fred Wilson Intro: The key words that we look for, that we invest around, are mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent and probably also immediacy. Immediacy is another time for the real-time web, things that are happening right here right now.
Matt Mireles thought of the idea for SpeakerText while working with video and audio as a journalist. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik)
SpeakerText has the potential to make video a lot more searchable, useful and navigable. Founder Matt Mireles demoed the video tool at January’s NY Tech Meetup with resounding applause and approval from the audience.
The tool syncs the video track with the transcript and allows you to navigate the video by clicking on different parts of the text.
Perhaps the most useful feature is that if anyone copies the transcript text from the video and pastes it into a blog post, it turns it into a link that goes directly to that moment in the video (a feature that got oos and ahhs at the meetup).
Right now the tool works with YouTube API, and it would be great to see the technology extended to other video platforms. So where does the transcript come from? It integrates with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for one hour of video transcription for $20. Considering most videos are a little over 3 minutes long, that’s not too bad of a price.
