Home Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer to Beat Fox, CNN to Breaking News Video

Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer to Beat Fox, CNN to Breaking News Video

Like Qwiki plus Newsy, powered by SETI@Home.

A South Korean startup called Shakr aims to use the processing power of its users’ distributed computers to create video news coverage of breaking events faster than international news giants can with human labor. Shakr unveiled its use of WegGL technology, which uses a computer’s powerful graphics processing card to extend the capabilities of Javascript in the browser, at TechCrunch’s startup event today in Beijing, China.

If you’re comfortable having a robot read the news to you and if the company can withstand intellectual property challenges, Shakr could be one of the most interesting new entrants into the robot reporting market. There are lots of robots trying to grow up to get jobs as journalists. Efforts like Shakr seek to arbitrage the gap between the surplus of text and image content available on almost any topic and the scarcity of video to fill the market demand. It’s smart.

Shakr is lead by David Lee, an entrepreneur we wrote about first for his work on video chat platform Tinychat. Lee says the new company has raised seed funding and has already secured a deal with Tatter Media, a large South Korean blog syndicate. Shakr will automatically produce video versions of that company’s bloggers text, in near real time. A consumer-facing app will also allow end users to create multi-media shows out of their home media assets.

“For writers the transition to video is lucrative but extremely expensive on the front-end,” Lee says. “We will help bloggers and small online news sites compete with the powerhouses of online content by turning out video even faster than the big boys do.”

The vision of leveraging excess processing power of distributed computers running programs behind the scenes is a seductive one. It’s the SETI@Home model and it’s something that many people are thinking about leveraging – it’s just a matter of finding compelling use cases for all that computing power.

Botnets like this are used to search for intelligent life outside our solar system, and they are used to send spam. They are used by supporters of parties to international conflicts to lend muscle to cyberwarfare campaigns, and now they will be used to produce near real-time, long-tail video news media.

A network of “little guys” all participating with the most powerful parts of their computers will enable Shakr to create news video automatically, faster than Fox News or CNN. That’s the company’s aim – but there’s no need to stop at news, either.

The vision of leveraging excess processing power of distributed computers running programs behind the scenes is a seductive one. It’s the SETI@Home model and it’s something that many people are thinking about leveraging – it’s just a matter of finding compelling use cases for all that computing power.

Botnets like this are used to search for intelligent life outside our solar system, and they are used to send spam. They are used by supporters of parties to international conflicts to lend muscle to cyberwarfare campaigns, and now they will be used to produce near real-time, long-tail video news media.

One year ago, also at a TechCrunch event, controversial startup Qwiki unveiled different technology that produced similar results. That company focused on reading Wikipedia entries out loud while images passed by, but has publishing platform ambitions just like Shakr does. Qwiki produced a brilliant and widely loved iPad app but hasn’t shipped anything else in some time.

As we wrote about Qwiki a year ago:

“Traditional multi-media content is too expensive to scale to serve the long-tail of would-be consumers. The days of broadcast, mass-media as ‘the only game in town’ are gone. If we’re all going to get multi-media satisfaction, for all our obscure interests, a lot of it is going to need to be created by robots. Not all of it, but a lot of it.”

Here at ReadWriteWeb we’ve also covered robots that turn sports box scores into narrative text news coverage and a system that extracts public emergency and other data to surface more news events than a human reporter could or would.

None of the robot reporter businesses have proven successful yet, as far as we know, but it certainly seems like a fascinating opportunity. I know I have more obscure interests than a human news crew is ever likely to invest in producing video content for manually – so give me the option to augment my human news with robots, please.

About ReadWrite’s Editorial Process

The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

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