July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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To the Thais in my village, the biggest news item while I lived there was the death of Michael Jackson. People expressed their deepest condolences, saved newspapers for posterity, and brought me bags full of mangoes to soothe the pain.

Comparing what people find interesting is a fascinating cross-cultural exercise. When we want to learn more about any given topic, many of us go first to Wikipedia, which is why a report detailing the most viewed articles in 2012, broken down by language, is a revealing glimpse into different mindsets, values, and ways of life around the world.

The English-speaking world is drawn to technology, entertainment, and death. Facebook is the most-viewed page with 32.6 million views, and more than 25 million people looked up “Deaths in 2012.” Half of the top 10 centered on blockbuster films, an English-Irish boy band, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Bad American television is apparently a significant point of interest to Europeans. Top pages in Spanish, German, French and Italian include How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Game of Thrones (although I consider Game of Thrones to be riveting television.) One Direction, the aforementioned English-Irish boy band, popped up on just about every European language list. I have yet to decide if my complete and total ignorance of this group is an embarrassing sign of age or a testament to maturity. Let’s go with the latter.

A majority of the highly viewed pages in Arabic are about historical, religious, and political figures, while the Russians are intrigued by Internet phenomena such as YouTube, social networks, and online porn. The Brazilians (and other Portuguese speakers) tend to look up information about sports, singers, and social networks.

The findings vary greatly across Asia by country. In Japan, the top three most popular pages are about actresses and female pop music groups. While the Chinese are primarily drawn to information about technology and business, they are also, it seems, intrigued by Japanese actresses. The Thais primarily use Wikipedia to look up geographical information, while the Vietnamese use the encyclopedia to learn about the birds and the bees. “List of sex positions” tops the most viewed pages, joined by “sex” and “genitals of women.” Naughty, naughty.

These findings were culled from the Wikimedia Toolserver, a collection of 13 servers that host the Wikimedia databases. View the full report.

More than 1.2 million donors contributed to this campaign, which ran in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. The foundation said that its most successful 24-hour period for donations brought in nearly $2.4 million. Last year, it took 46 days to complete.

This was the foundation’s ninth annual drive. The fundraiser takes place each year to keep Wikipedia and its sister projects alive and free. These funds pay for software upgrades, hiring editors, maintaining the infrastructure, and the ad-free user experience. The money also supports the foundation’s efforts to deliver information to people in the developing world, who often access Wikipedia articles from feature phones on less-than-strong mobile networks.

This financial support is, of course, vital to sustaining Wikimedia’s work. In a statement, the foundation not only thanked the donors but also the volunteer contributors that “are the heart of the world’s largest encyclopedia.” To highlight their efforts, the Wikimedia Foundation is now conducting a “thank you campaign” to showcase some of their stories. This campaign starts today and includes a Malaysian botanist, an electric engineer from South Africa, and a U.S. Air Force veteran-turned-fly fisherman. You can watch their videos here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Referred to as China’s Wikipedia, Hudong.com is a Chinese-language online encyclopedia. The company is reportedly raising a $50 million third round of funding, sources told Fortune.

Created in 2005, Hudong.com calls itself the world’s largest Chinese-language wiki with 6.4 million entries. Like Wikipedia, the site houses articles on various topics and accepts submissions from the public.

At the beginning of June, Hudong.com announced a partnership with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. The partnership helps Hudong.com gain better search capabilities and gives Microsoft the chance to develop its search engine technology in other countries, which it needs to compete with Google.

Part of Hudong.com’s funding is being raised by online private investment platform Xpert Financial. Tim Draper, of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, sits on Xpert’s board and sent an email urging people to invest in Hudong.com.

Hudong is China’s leading for-profit social knowledge platform – a wiki-enabled encyclopedia that monetizes its content through advertising. China is one of the largest and fastest growing internet and mobile markets in the world.

DFJ Dragon has invested in the Series A, B, and B-1 offerings, I have personally invested in the B and B-1 offerings—as have other leading venture capital firms—and we intend to participate in the Series C offering. I would urge you to consider this opportunity.

It appears, from the email that Fortune obtained, that Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s China fund, DFJ Dragon will be raising funds for Hudong.com as well.

Chinese money image via Flickr user Martin Kalfatovic

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Encyclopaedia Britannica, mortally wounded by the Web and Wikipedia, is ending the production of its print edition in favor of a strictly digital strategy, the company announced Tuesday.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. president Jorge Cauz told the New York Times.

First published in 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been printing hard copy reference volumes for nearly 250 years, though sales peaked in 1990, according to the Times.

The company is now currently selling its final 32-volume 2010 edition for $1,395, and supplies are limited. Moving forward, Encyclopaedia Britannica will only produce its rich reference guides for the Web and continue to create e-learning curriculum for educational institutions.

“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now,” Cauz said. “The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

And yet, Wikipedia is now synonymous with the term encyclopedia, offering all walks of people free access to a not-always accurate, but always current treasure trove of editable articles.

The extremely thorough Wikipedia article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, serves as the perfect example of why Wikipedia is coming out on top. Ironically, the page could very well become the only thing our children have to remember the once illustrious Britannica by, a point lamented by VentureBeat senior editor Heather Kelly.

But the Britannica will live on in more than spirit. The company told the Times that it has 500,000 customers who pay a $70 annual fee for online and mobile access to its content.

“Today’s announcement is not about our past, but our future — and the new ways we’re serving our customers,” Cauz said.

Photo credit: Bopuc/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Qwiki, an online Wikipedia-esque service that displays information and computer-generated voices, images and video, launched an online presentation creation tool for publishers today, at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The Qwiki editor takes content such as text, videos and photos, and lays it out in a neat presentation. It’s a drag-and-drop process that’s run in a web browser. The end result is a several-minute presentation, similar to the existing Qwiki articles, that a company can post to the web. Anyone on a device running the iPhone iOS operating system, Android or HTML5 can view the presentation.

Qwiki articles capture reader attention for an average of 6 minutes and 30 seconds on the web and 19 minutes on the iPad, Qwiki co-founder Doug Imbruce told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience on Wednesday. That’s well above the engagement level for many other websites, which usually only measure as high as 2 to 3 minutes. iPad users have downloaded Qwiki’s iPad app more than 500,000 times.

“As a result of this engagement, 800 companies have reached out to Qwiki and want to put their content into the Qwiki format,” Imbruce said. “We’re going to tap into that.”

The service feels like it’s from the future. Actors asking questions to a computer and getting large swaths of visual and spoken information back is common a sci-fi trope in movies like Wall-E, and that’s exactly what Qwiki does (though with less Sigourney Weaver). Users type something in Qwiki’s search bar and get a two- to three-minute clip of spoken information and a few pictures or videos.

Qwiki launched its private alpha at TechCrunch Disrupt, an industry conference, in September 2010 and raised $9.5 million from the likes of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in a short few months. The service got more than a hundred thousand requests to join the private alpha, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Qwiki has around 3 million topics in its database, ranging from geographic locations such San Francisco to actresses such as Natalie Portman (though being a math nerd, I went straight to pages with information on meromorphic functions and the Riemann-Zeta function). The information presented is surprisingly comprehensive without throwing out the overload of facts that might pop-up on some of the larger Wikipedia pages.

Qwiki was the darling of last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 competition for start-ups, winning a $50,000 prize and the Disrupt Cup. Qwiki was also the runner-up for best technological achievement at this year’s Crunchies awards — an academy award-style ceremony for start-ups and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.