Y Combinator-backed Verbling is a platform that connects people online to practice speaking foreign languages together. Today, the startup introduced Verbling Courses, a new product that seeks to make students proficient as quickly as possible.

“Outside of the U.S., having a proficient level of business English is key to having success in the workplace,” said founder Jake Jolis in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “For many of our students, learning a second language is something they have to do — not something they are doing for fun, but something vital for long-term success. Our approach is to take them all the way there.”

Jolis founded Verbling in 2011 with two fellow classmates from Stanford. His cofounder, Mikael Bernstein, was studying abroad in Moscow and realized how much faster his Russian improved when he spoke it every day. When he returned to Stanford, Bernstein struggled to find local people to practice his Russian with. He and Jolis came up with the idea to use the Internet to fix this problem, and the two dropped out of Stanford to build Verbling.

They went through Y Combinator in summer 2011 with the first product, Verbling Friends. Verbling Friends is an online community where people can go anytime to find others to practice languages with via live video. Anyone in the world can log in, select the language they would like to practice, and instantly be connected to others with the same wish. It’s like a virtual meet up, but it’s centered around developing language abilities.

In December, the startup rolled out Verbling Classes, which is a platform for teachers to connect with students in virtual classrooms. Students book and teachers schedule sessions through a reservation system. It indexes each class by language and skill level, and nine students can participate in the video chat with the teacher. These chats are also live streamed to anyone else who would like to follow on their own, without interacting directly with fellow students and teachers. Jolis said people have taken 1.5 million classes on Verbling Classes, and it has paying users in 40 countries. Registered users take an average of 16 classes per week, paying for access on a monthly subscription basis.

“We started out with a student-to-student model and then added in teacher-to-student,”Jolis said. “We didn’t realize how fast Verbling Classes would take off, but we found that people really want to have on-demand, 24/7 access to language learning. Verbling Courses will add to that by further connecting teachers to the community, and giving students a structured curriculum to track their progress.”

Students start out on Verbling Courses by taking an initial language assessment. They then follow a curriculum that consists of topical lessons, videos, readings, exercises, and access to live office hour tutoring sessions with teachers. It also has quizzes and a final exam to collect data points showing success along the way. At first, Verbling is only offering English courses because Jolis said this is the biggest market with the highest demand, but more languages are soon to come.

Verbling is backed by $1 million from Y Combinator, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Start Fund, SV Angel, Learn Capital, Meck, Inspovtion, and ACE & Company. The team of eight is based in San Francisco.

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.

Advisory note: The excuses enumerated below work best when used sparingly. Excessive use may result in raised eyebrows or demotions.

The age-old “my dog ate my homework” excuse may not fly in this paperless startup age, but there are plenty of other excuses you can use when didn’t finish all your work. Especially if you’ve earned your MBA.

There’s an endless number of to-dos at a startup, but I am a big proponent of that elusive work-life balance, AKA sometimes skipping out of the office before 8PM to go get an acupuncture or meet friends for a Grouper.

The key to getting away with not getting everything done is to talk like a businessperson. MBA degrees are optional, but helpful. Pull out those banal MBA one-liners and you can circumnavigate your way through any missed deadline or incomplete spreadsheet. Whether you’re too busy or just a little lazy, here are ten surefire lines that will cover your butt and earn you some corporate cred to boot:

1. I didn’t have the bandwidth this week
2. We were trying to boil the ocean
3. I had to prioritize other deliverables
4. It wasn’t the right high-level strategy
5. It fell below the line this week
6. It’s really a time and distance problem
7. There were other low-hanging fruit to attend to
8. It’s just not quite in my wheelhouse
9. It didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel
10. The problem was that we were working in silos
11. It’s an issue of scalability

OK, that’s eleven. Bonus!

As my startup has grown from a team of five to one of 30, we’ve introduced a bit of a corporate structure and the corresponding vocabulary.

And while I’m still learning how to function in this bizarre managerial environment, I’ve already nailed the lingo. It seems talking the talk is most of the battle. A B-school grad even told me that a lot of what you learn in business school is how to speak with people across sectors. Sometimes a little hot air goes a long way.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.

photo credit: robives via photopin cc

A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next.

PHP was created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. In 1997, Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3. By 1999, they had built the Zend Engine, which is still the interpreter for PHP.

Update October 18: Andi Gutmans just gave us more details about where PHP is going in mobile.

Gutmans and Suraski continued their partnership with Zend Technologies, a commercial entity that creates add-on products and services for PHP developers, particularly developers in the enterprise.

Today, after multiple massive iterations to the codebase, 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP, says Gutmans. Wikipedia says 75 percent of websites use PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Photobucket are all built in PHP. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, runs on PHP and probably accounts for half of that 35 percent. Most of the other major content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, are also built in PHP.

No respect?

Still, the language can’t seem to get any respect and has been derided for years by programmers coding in C, Java, .NET, Python, or Ruby. In terms of trends, PHP as a search term has been dropping for years, and the mobile app revolution has led to the revival of Objective-C and Java.

So is the programming language that powers so much of the web disappearing gently into the night?

Not if Gutmans has anything to say about it. VentureBeat talked to him about PHP and the future, and he’s more bullish than ever, especially when it comes to the mobile-focused ace up his sleeve.

Riding the U.S.S. Enterprise

“All dynamic languages are gaining share from Java and .NET right now,” says Gutmans. “We’re getting a lot of benefit.”

Source: Wikipedia

Andi Gutmans

So the noise around trendier technologies like Ruby on Rails or Node.js doesn’t especially bother him. Mindshare is nice, of course, but market share is nicer. And market share is what Gutmans is focused on, especially in the enterprise.

“From a maturity point of view,” Gutmans told me, “I don’t think any other dynamic language right now has the full tool set. Our competition is Java and .NET … never with other dynamic languages.”

While he likes what Ruby on Rails is doing, and thinks there are some things there that PHP can learn and grow from, Gutmans points to PHP’s massive support in packaged solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

“We’re better off than we were eight years ago … today we’re the only ones who have really hit the mainstream enterprise,” says Gutmans. “We do believe that the momentum and the size of PHP will continue. We don’t see it slowing down right now.”

Gutmans speaks with the enthusiasm of a founder; of course, there are other companies catering to the PHP-related needs of the enterprise. But Zend remains one of the biggest and best-known, especially due to its provenance.

And he’s got a point: Two-thirds of developers in a recent study reported spending half their time in PHP. And in a recent study by Rails developer Marc Gayle, half of all developer job postings on Craigslist call for PHP developers. When I talked to Gayle, he surmised the reason might be PHP’s super-popular content management systems.

“I think that is skewing the results,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”

And a mysterious mobile story, coming soon

When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks.

But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools.

Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

What that looks like and how it will be distributed is still mysterious. But a strong mobile story, says Gutmans, will only help PHP continue to grow.

It’s hard to argue with that.

photo credit: Red Bonzai

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TouchType Ltd., which makes a clever keyboard app for Android phones, is on the verge of expansion.

The London-based company raised a $2.4 million round of funding led by Octopus Investments, it announced today.

TouchType’s app, SwiftKey X, replaces the default on-screen keyboard with a customized one that has better predictive capabilities about what you’re going to type next.

The underlying technology, which the company calls Fluency, is based on linguistic analysis of millions of web pages to provide more accurate and longer-range predictions than most software keyboards, and it’s this technology that the company is staking its future growth on.

“It’s not an app business, fundamentally it’s a language technology business,” says cofounder and chief technical officer Ben Medlock, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We wanted to approach this as a generic problem: How do we model the way people transfer their thoughts into their mobile devices? So we built the engine around that concept … so whatever platform you’re talking about, it’s fundamentally the same problem.”

As an Android app, it’s uncannily accurate, which has recently helped push it into the number one spot among paid apps in the Android Market. For instance, if you type “a” it might auto-suggest the word “are.” Select “are” and it will suggest “you,” followed by “looking,” then “for.” Pretty soon, you’ve typed an entire sentence with only a few keystrokes and your Twitter followers all know exactly what you’re looking for. (Hopefully the sentence is what you meant to say — but if you are excessively reliant on autocomplete, the onus is on you, not SwiftKey.) The company says its app has saved its customers more than 20 billion keystrokes to date.

“Android has been an incredible distribution network,” said co-founder and chief executive Jon Reynolds, because of the large number of consumer devices running the OS and also because almost every major phone manufacturer is now making Android devices.

SwiftKey also optionally analyzes your own linguistic tics, by looking at your emails and Twitter updates, to hone its predictions just for you.

The company plans on using the funds to continue enhancing the core linguistic technology, adapting it to new languages and perhaps job-specific functions (a version for doctors, another one for lawyers, perhaps). It also hopes to license this technology to the makers of phones and mobile operating systems. While only Android allows customers to replace the default keyboard by installing an app, other manufacturers might be interested in integrating the core TouchType technology into their products. TouchType also plans to expand its presence in the U.S. and Asia, a move that ought to help it forge relationships with potential OS companies and manufacturers.

TouchType has about 30 employees and has been generating revenue from sales of its apps since 2010. This is the company’s first institutional round, following a seed round of about $1.2 million in August, 2010.

Photo: TouchType founders Jon Reynolds, CEO, and Dr Ben Medlock, CTO. Photo courtesy TouchType.

Foursquare currently has more than 10 million members globally, and the application works on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. The company launched French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish translations in February 2011. According to the blog, the five new languages “represent some of our fastest growing areas internationally.”

At the bottom of the blog, Foursquare does something neat. It gives a shout-out to intern Mario Morales who worked on the language update. Personal touches like that in a company blog, and technology in general, make it feel like a small world after all.

The service works like this: For each desired language, clients create separate DNS, or domain name system sites, which assign new IP addresses. Then, websites, mobile apps and more are dropped into Smartling’s dashboard, which is an end-to-end web application. This enables translated content to populate the website directly. Think of it as a WordPress back-end for translators.

Smartling offers two types of translation: one for the enterprise and one for small and mid-sized companies. According to Smartling chief executive Jack Welde, enterprises generally like handholding and invest in professional translations, so Smartling partners with external translators, who access content in the dashboard. But those can be very expensive and lock out the little guys who make up a good percentage of content on the web.

For those smaller publishers, Smartling uses crowdsourcing.

“It is a great way to reduce the cost of ownership in translation,” said Welde, who estimates that professional translation can be 20 to 25 cents a word. Crowdsourcing can cost nearly nothing.

In essence, small and mid-size businesses approve groups or individuals who volunteer to translate sections of content. The idea isn’t new. In fact, Twitter announced its own crowdsourced translator in February and Facebook offers something similar. But Welde says Smartling has a hook. With Twitter and Facebook’s crowdsourcing, bits and pieces of text needing translating are mailed out to various translators. Sometimes, those bits and pieces will be missing some critical contextual details that are necessary to distinguish between two possible meanings of the same word.

Also, Smartling works for translating things like buttons. If your translated phrase is too long for the button, you can see that and adjust the text as needed.

Additionally, websites and apps placed in Smartling become living documents. “We automatically see updates to your site,” explained Welde. A trigger in Smartling then deploys the content to approved translators.

Smartling plans to use its funding to hire more developers, streamline network operations and focus on marketing. “We have to tell two parts of the story,” said Welde, “Whatever size you are, you will benefit from being multilingual. It’s not just for the big kids.”

Currently on the client roster are companies like Survey Monkey, Foursquare, Scribd and others. Being a SaaS company, Smartling only charges based on usage and not on method of translation. Pricing levels start at free, $99/month, $249/month and an undefined enterprise level.

Welde said the company is excited to partner with new investor, IDG Ventures, due to its international publishing experience.

Smartling was founded in 2009 and has 30 employees split between its New York and European offices. The company received a $4 million first round of financing in 2010. Investors to date include Venrock, First Round Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and IDG Ventures.